There are many responses so I’m probably repeating someone (sorry).
I was “addicted” to computer games (viz. Halo and Counter-Strike), and I’ve mentioned this here before but I calculated my time spent in front of the computer playing those games and it amounted to almost one full year of my life. Seriously thousands and thousands of hours (usually over four hours everyday, and eight or more each day of weekend). That’s long enough to have invested in the Screen. I would play so much that I would try to think and involuntarily my thoughts would be, like, interrupted by scenes of my playtime reoccurring in my head. I couldn’t even indulge in sexual fantasies without images of the games creeping into (or sometimes dominating) my thoughts.
In my case, and I think for a lot of people like me, it’s the desire to devote ourselves so completely to something as to make it meaningful, or as to force meaning upon the activity and, in turn, “get” meaning out of it (rather cyclical). Outside the games I wondered why I was wasting so many hours, but I would still think about them all the time and while playing was very invested. This phenomenon is common outside gaming, too, though, like pursuing an academic subject or a sport or Fluther (although I can’t say I’d understand the last one).
Tangential to the devotion is a kind of egoism that accompanies a high level of skill or knowledge of a particular game, and some people I knew would use their abilities to feel more important than those with lesser skill. Often it was the only thing they were good at. But in any event if it becomes such a substantial factor in the construction of an ego it can be very difficult to leave that part of yourself. There are times I feel entirely incapable or overwhelmed, and today I still return to a computer game to feel empowered and in control.
That egoism/sense of empowerment comes from the competitive nature that you see especially in the FPS genre. This was not the case with me, but I knew players who were also competitive soccer players or tennis players or golfers or whatever. It may relate to the devotion thing I mentioned earlier, or some people may just need to compete. I don’t know much about that though.
There was the social aspect. I played these games competitively and thus used Ventrilo to communicate with teammates via microphone, and we became good friends. Sometimes I’d get on just to talk to someone with whom I was comfortable. I admit I’m not a socially comfortable person and this acted as a kind of compromise or a halfway point to real human interaction, because we could speak without being face-to-face.
And then the obvious escapism deal, which I’m sure someone has already pointed out. It’s kind of the big, vague umbrella term encompassing a lot of what I just said, since even through a single medium, i.e. video games, escapism takes many forms. However, it’s not always effective as an escape when you’ve played for as long as I (and others) have. There’s a certain point it just stops working, like developing tolerance to a drug, and I could waste a whole day on a computer game knowing all along that I had work to do or that I wasn’t happy for some reason. Then it wasn’t so much an escape as a mechanical response to a negative situation (a declawed cat still tries to scratch, etc.).
Um, those are just some disjointed thoughts on something I know very well personally but have no idea how to articulate.
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