I was six, maybe eight years old. Christmas morning, a PlayStation 1 under the tree — every child would be happy, I was no different. Despite that, I was almost intimidated by the thought of trying it for the first time. I only needed the first gaming session to become hooked and grow impatient for the second one.
That feeling lasted about twenty years.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about childhood gaming addiction: it doesn’t look like addiction. It looks like a kid who found something he loves. Children obsess easily; how does one distinguish between a healthy love and an unhealthy obsession?
I loved video games the way other kids loved football or music or drawing, or even video games themselves. The difference was that my love didn’t have an off switch — and for a long time, I didn’t need one. Games gave me something the rest of my life wasn’t giving me: a place where the relationship couldn’t go wrong. Other kids could ignore me, exclude me, say something that stuck with me for years. A video game never did any of that. It could provide me with harmless fun as long as I needed it to.
At my worst, I was playing six, eight hours a day. For a child, that’s a lot. Children are supposed to be developing their own personalities, not filling up 128 kBs memory cards. What’s worse: if my parents hadn’t physically stopped me, I would have done more. I’m certain of that.
When I became an adult the interest in video games faded away on its own. I believed the standard story: I was lonely because I played too many video games. It took therapy and a lot of honest thinking to understand that it was actually the other way around.
I played video games because I was lonely.
The evidence was always there. During the periods when my life was a little more social, my interest in gaming dropped without any conscious effort on my part. The need evaporated because something else was filling that space. When the social life contracted again, the games came back.
Video games weren’t the problem. They were the solution to a problem I didn’t know how to solve any other way.
I can’t point to the moment when the addiction ended. Sure, during all the years of my gaming life I also had extended stretches of reduced interest, but I don’t know the reason for all of them.
All I know is that somewhere in the years after I started working, after 2018, something shifted. The on/off cycles became more off than on. One day I realized I hadn’t played anything in months, and I didn’t particularly miss it. I tried playing again a few times, just for nostalgia, but it never lasted more than a couple of hours.
It was over, and I hadn’t noticed it ending.
What I felt wasn’t relief, exactly. It was closer to the feeling of finding an old photograph — recognition, distance, a complicated warmth. I don’t hate video games for what they took from me. They kept me company during years when other people mostly didn’t. For that, strangely, I’m grateful.
The honest accounting, though, is hard to look at.
Twenty years between the first controller and the last. Ten of those, I’d estimate, were genuine dependency — not a hobby, a refuge. Ten years of hours that could have become a language, a musical instrument, a sport, a version of myself I can’t even imagine because I never built him.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand: the video games didn’t create the problem. They revealed it. The real issue was a kind of mental fragility — a tendency to find an escape and disappear into it completely. If video games didn’t fill that role, something else would have. The lesson I actually learned from twenty years of gaming isn’t “video games are bad”. They’re not. You will find so many opinions online about the effect of video games on children, it’s insane how much people are willing to lie about something just to be a part of the conversation. I guess 15 minutes of fame really do a number on their minds. No, the reality is darker and more convoluted than that: face what you’re running from, because if you don’t, you’ll always find somewhere new to hide.