How many hours have you lost playing a competitive game? If this question bothers you, you’re not alone.
The games I’m referring to are: Counter-Strike, LoL, Valorant, etc… Basically, all free-to-play games with ranked queues.
Have you ever stopped to think about how many hours you’ve spent in these games?
When I asked myself this question, honestly, I didn’t want to know the answer because I knew it would be a huge amount of time spent playing.
You might think it’s fair since it’s leisure time, something you enjoy doing in your free time. However, I wasn’t having fun anymore playing these games. I realized that I was getting more stressed than entertained while playing, and I wasn’t enjoying it anymore.
I played almost every day, and when the gaming session ended, I felt a sense of anguish, a feeling that I should be doing something else. This feeling of needing to do something else didn’t necessarily have to be productive, but I wanted the time I spent on that activity to feel more worthwhile and less stressful.
For several days, I was stuck with that bad feeling, but I kept playing anyway because I wanted to gain a few more points in ranked queues and release a bit of dopamine in my brain after some victories. Understanding how dopamine works in the brain was also important to help me overcome this situation and motivate me through the process. It rewards us with a sense of pleasure after a win – but it also traps us in an addictive cycle of always wanting more.
The change I made
After some time in this “loop,” I decided to stop playing these games, but to do that, I had to change a bit. The strategy I adopted was that every time I played something, it had to be non-competitive, meaning no ranked queues. It had to be a game I was genuinely interested in, not just a filler. And it couldn’t be a service game either; it had to be a game with a beginning, middle, and end.
With this strategy, I started playing several other games, mainly offline single-player titles, and I realized that my enjoyment of gaming slowly started coming back. I also noticed that my days felt longer since I wasn’t spending countless hours on some online competitive game.