My Brush with Game Addiction

I haven't posted here in a while. Since the last post, my life has changed drastically, and I thought you deserved to know why. So, today I bring you my story of internet addiction, mixed priorities, and the damage they can cause.

I joined Facebook last June, after months of my friends asking me to. I wasn't very into it, but it slowly grew on me. It was a fun way to connect, and it helped us organize events, so all was well. It also helped because it let me get back in touch with some friends who had been transferred to a different school.

A few weeks after getting on Facebook, a friends suggested I start playing a game called Farmville. Farmville is an app on Facebook, free to play, in which you manage a virtual farm to earn XP and coins, which can be used to buy more things for your farm. Simple enough. I took him up on the offer, and after a few days had established my self as a good farmer. In a few weeks, I had compiled an excel chart of all the crops you could "plant", and had worked out which were the best. Using this as a guide, I quickly pushed my way through many levels, eventually controlling a huge farm and holding the highest XP rating of any of my friends.

But at that point, things changed. Before, Farmville had been a fun diversion, a game. But now, it had become a competition -- I had to stay ahead of my friends. Given the size of my farm it could take almost 40 minutes to harvest and plant new crops. And given my schedule, I had to harvest them everyday to stay ahead of my friends -- which meant that I had less and less time to do my homework.

Soon, I was on an even stricter schedule, harvesting when I  got home from school, then again four hours later, then again in the morning before school. My time was disappearing. I was ignoring some assignments, only reading summaries when I should have read a whole chapter.

Predictably, my grades took a turn for the worse. For the first 2 years of high school, I had been straight A student. By the first report card in August, I was averaging B's. By the next, in early October, I was doing even worse. My papers would often come back with comments such as "where's the effort", and tests would have "I know you know this!" scribbled in red ink, just below a dismal grade.

More importantly, however, my social life collapsed. As a geek, it had always been tenuous, but by october I was actively opting to play Farmville instead of spending time with friends. I began to distance my self from them. I almost never left my house after school, and while I was in school I would spend whole classes thinking about what new strategies I could try on my farm. I started viewing my friends as distractions from my time online, instead of the other way around.

Finally, I fell too low. I stopped studying for tests. I stopped doing homework. I was devoted to Farmville.

And I blew my one good chance at the life I'd always dreamed of.

Thankfully, my friends stepped in. Although I don't think they knew how far I'd fallen, they pushed hard enough that I abandoned Farmville. After a week of "withdrawal", it was out of my system. I didn't need to play anymore.

And, almost instantly, things started working again. My grades went back up -- now averaging a solid A-. I started doing stuff with my friends again. Last weekend, I made a duct tape coat. I got my life back under control.

But I can never get those wasted months back. All the chances I blew, will stay blown. Nothing I do can change that. Because of my obsession, I have ruined my first chance at my dream life. And I will never forgive myself for that.

So I ask you, if you spend more time online that in the real world, If you favor dragons and farming to talking and playing, please, please remember: the game will always be there, but your friends won't. It has never mattered what level you are in a game, or how much fake money you have, or how big your stash is, or what your title online is. What matters are your friends and family. They are the ones who get hurt by your addiction, and they don't go away even if you kick the addiction. So please, please don't do what I did. Don't throw you life away. You friends care about you, and if you reach out, they will help you.