Wars against yourself- Mind Vs Inner Mind

I was big time game addict, playing games like Microsoft's Age of Empires, the Need For Speed Series and countless other first person/third person shooter games for hours upon hours, barely taking breaks for food and the mandatory loo visits. Sleep was something that like now, was a luxury. Which was most often sacrificed for the greater cause- of playing and replaying games. Why are games so addictive? Is it just the storylines, the graphics, the music, the action or something much more darker? Something that is mostly taboo to speak about?

Games offer us an opportunity to do things that we cannot dream of doing in real life. Be it chasing some elusive spy across the globe, gunning down mercenaries and hit-men in the process or driving down a city road in a sports car at eye-blurring speeds and wanting to go even faster..... Do you see a pattern yet?

Our real lives are complicated enough, but we prefer these synthetic challenges to the ones in real life. Why? Because games often have limited 'Big Pictures'. They have their own limits that are obvious even to the frenzied brain of a game addict. Real life on the other hand has horizons that keep on stretching. If a person were to insist on knowing the full big picture before doing anything concrete, rest assured that he or she will not be able to do anything at all. The other thing that is so seductive about games is the concept of save-games. You can mess up really badly and still come back from the previous point and kick the villain's butt. An option that is sadly missing in real-life where you are but given one shot at everything. You very rarely get a second shot at anything and even if you do, all the conditions are not the same.... What then is the uniting factor amongst all game addicts? Not the game addiction itself. That's just the symptom. The disease lies elsewhere. Surveys have indicated time and again that most game addicts are intelligent people, mostly those with a low attention span. The instant high that the gaming atmosphere provides can never be challenged by the rigors of real-life where your results are much delayed. One needs to study for three months or more to be able to ace a semester examination but all it takes is a few dozen hours of unblinking concentration in front of a PC or a PlayStation to become a hero. Game addicts sign off their real identities and embrace their on-screen aliases. If these games were not bad enough, you were offered the massive online role playing games where all your opponents are real people instead of some poorly designed so called 'artificially intelligent' bot. This was the ultimate manna from heaven for all those poor souls who were already disconnected from the real life. This was a place where all such souls could congregate and prove to each other who was really the best. In the end, would it really matter? Would any of them have actually achieved even an iota of 'real' profit? These people tend to be totally disconnected from the real world and they stoutly defend their own, not even being able to understand that it doesn't even exist. Movies like the Matrix are great. They help you to think in different dimensions, but the truth of the matter is that this is the reality there is. One without save-games. If you screw up, you do it for real. There are no retakes. If you hurt a person, you risk distancing yourself for life. How do I know so much about the psyches of these poor addicts? Only because I myself was one of them.

Quitting gaming is not easy. I have uninstalled games from my PC unlimited number of times and have gone back and installed them all over again. The worst part of game addiction is that game addicts do not even get a fraction of the attention that a substance addict or an alcoholic gets. Why? For one, people can easily identify a substance abuser or a chronic alcoholic pretty easily, but its much, much tougher to identify a game addict. You may be studying with or working with addicts around you, but you might not even have observed.

The convoluted path to success in real life is the number one reason why intelligent people with low attention spans get caught in the web of gaming. It starts rather innocuously, with people thinking that they can play games for sometime to relax after a hard day at work or at school/college. The time they spend on games will gradually increase, and the biggest mistake that people do is when they think that gaming is a form or relaxation. It gives no relaxation. It too is a task like any other for the brain, so playing a lot of games can actually be exhausting. This then hampers the other activities. A person might have intended to study or work after gaming for a while, but he may not be able to do so as he is totally exhausted after playing! All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy! This is what happens.

The way out? Ad-hoc solutions like uninstalling games do not work. The same strategies that worked wonders while gaming can be used to quit gaming. Divide and conquer. Strategic withdrawals may mean that you lose minor battles, but you will succeed in the wars. That's the key. Give your Inner-mind something limited to chew on, not something like a computer game. Allow it to vent its ire in a positive manner. Write a blog, paint a picture, record a song, almost anything that calls upon your creativity. Just allow your inner-mind to take full control for that period and see the change. You will find yourself actually relaxed. And enthused to take on the challenges that you are expected to take on in real-life, not in some virtual cage for frustrated souls.