Was It Real Enough? A Decade Devoured by Gaming Addiction

A journal entry exploring my history of gaming and gambling addiction.

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Preface: Behavioral addictions, such as gaming or gambling, are often not taken as seriously as substance addictions. This may be because they are newer problems, especially gaming, and there are fewer personal accounts to show how destructive they can be.

Without hearing how someone’s life was consumed by one of these addictions, many people dismiss them as harmless or just “bad habits.”

So, here is my account. I hope it helps others understand how real and devastating gaming addiction can be.

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For over ten years, I was a gaming addict.

There’s still a stigma around gaming addiction, like it isn’t a “real” struggle.

So, let me share my experience with you. Every raw detail, from the moment I started gaming until I realized it was destroying my life.

Then, I’ll ask you: Was it a “real” addiction?

About thirteen years ago, in my early 20s, I broke up with my then-partner. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. It was something I was threatened into doing. I caved.

This hadn’t been a casual fling. I had planned on spending my life with my partner. We had planned the next ten years of our lives together, from marriage to kids to careers. Then, it was over.

While I’m not here to talk about that, you had to know where my mental state was when I started gaming.

After I broke up with my partner, I stopped talking to our mutual friends. I was already carrying undiagnosed mental health issues and unresolved childhood trauma. I had moved to a new city to be with my partner and start a new life, but I only got a taste of it before it was taken away.

I was alone again.

Most people might have coped with drinking or sex or any other number of vices, but not me. I had been terrified of becoming an addict since I was little. I came from a family of addicts, so I had always avoided alcohol and drugs. I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, and I knew I would likely be more susceptible to addiction.

Sex wasn’t an option for me, either. Without going into details, my particular trauma history makes me extremely touch-averse. I freeze. I dissociate. It’s even painful.

So, I coped by turning to games. Not consciously.

I was just lonely, and I didn’t want to exist in reality.

I started playing an MMO (massively multiplayer online game) before I broke up with my partner. I actually played it with them. But before we broke up, it was nothing more than a casual hobby for us to enjoy together.

After we broke up, it reminded me of my partner. The people we had met online reminded me of them, too. It didn’t matter that I was alone in real life. I could log in and talk to these friends. They were still there.

They needed me.

I thought they did.

Or rather, I wanted them to need me.

I played more. Real life hurt. Online life didn’t. I went out of my way to help others in-game. I gained more friends. In time, I became a guild lead of a few hundred people. They voted me in. It felt so good.

Online, I had become someone. People liked me. I had purpose. I was a leader, and I was good at it.

I didn’t just manage people; I led raids and player-versus-player events. There’s a certain sort of rush in commanding people to fight one another over an objective, especially in raids where hundreds of people are involved.

Even writing about it makes me want to do it again, but I know it isn’t good for me.

In real life, I was crumbling. I had no one. My social life was dead. My apartment was always dirty. I was always dirty. My body was falling apart. It was my last year of college, and my grades were slipping. I passed, but if it hadn’t been the last two semesters, I wouldn’t have.

And all throughout, I had trauma and conflict that kept trying to claw their way forward.

As things continued to fall apart in real life, I kept going online.

I couldn’t stop, even when I knew it was hurting me.

Every single waking hour not at school or work was spent online. I was gaming 10-20+ hours a day. Some days, I didn’t even sleep.

I had to stay needed by my guild. They were, to me, my friends. They were the only people left in my life. Being a guild leader and a gamer became my entire identity.

As soon as I graduated from college, I started working. Every single dime I got—and more—went into the game.

Not into guaranteed mechanics.

Into lootboxes and random mechanics. Spend $10… $100… $1000… even more… just for a chance at a small prize. A few stat points. A mount. A pet. Pixels, incremental strength, and reputation.

It was gambling, and I dropped an unfathomable amount of money into it.

The gambling was online and through a less familiar medium, but I realized that was another vice for me. Gaming was one. Gambling was another. But I refused to acknowledge that it was a real problem.

Every time I won, I got a rush. I needed more, and it didn’t help that every time I won something, I lied to myself and said the guild was stronger for it.

Since there were player-versus-player mechanics, I thought of myself as a protector. I spent an absurd amount of money on gambling mechanics to get better gear, and better gear and notoriety meant more people tried to be my “friend.”

The cycle kept feeding itself.

Eventually, the guild outgrew the game we were playing. We decided to branch out and tried other games. It didn’t really matter to me what we played, as long as I was with them. We settled into another MMO with even more predatory gambling mechanics.

The guild got massive.

Depending on who you asked, I was either beloved or hated. As the guild grew, so did my fame in our slice of the internet. I was obsessed with the guild and carving out our digital space.

All because I needed them to love me.

I’ll admit it: I wasn’t always a nice person, either. Obsessive gaming addicts rarely are. I was singularly focused on growing the guild.

So, like any obsessive, validation-craving, and attention-hungry gaming addict, I became a streamer. I quickly gained a decent-sized following. At one point, I had what would be considered groupies, which is weird to think about in retrospect.

But everything caught up to me.

Guild loyalty isn’t love, and it tends to be fair-weathered. We stopped winning, and we got targeted. If you know anything about MMO culture, you know that eventually everyone teams up to game the system, and if you aren’t part of that team, it’s not very fun.

This was during the GamerGate Era, and I got targeted for other reasons, too. I started getting harassed, doxxed, and stalked (online and offline).

My mental health cracked.

By now, I was in my mid-late 20s. My real life was in shambles. A few years of gaming addiction had eaten me, and my finances were a mess. After I began getting stalked offline, I stopped going to work, and I lost my job, too. I had no one to intervene or help me.

I was not well.

As I cracked, I fell apart online as much as offline, and the guild began having issues. I started losing “friends.”

I was faced with the reality that they were never my friends. These people I had burned years of my life for thought of me as disposable, even when they knew I was going through something horrible.

Suddenly, online wasn’t a fun place to pretend anymore.

I won’t get into this debacle here, but after about a year of stalking, I wound up back in Georgia.

For a brief time after the move, I didn’t have access to a phone or wifi. I went from being online 10-20+ hours a day to not being online at all for a few months. Not even able to contact the “friends” I had remaining.

I was more alone than ever before.

I don’t remember this time well. I was dissociating often. It was the first time in years I had been forced to live in reality, and I wasn’t handling it well.

From what I understand now, I was in some form of withdrawal. Yes, withdrawal is a real thing for non-substance addictions, but it’s different.

Non-substance addictions still result in brain chemistry changes. Addictions like gambling and gaming tap into the same dopaminergic reward circuits in your brain as substance use. Most notably, it uses the same reward pathways as cocaine and has the same neurological patterns of reward, escape, and identity fulfillment.

So, when that is taken away abruptly, you go into withdrawal.

Withdrawal from these addictions isn’t going to cause tremors or vomiting, but there are still psychological and neurological symptoms, like irritability, depression, anxiety, restlessness, mood swings, sleep issues, dissociation, intrusive thoughts, identity collapse, and cravings.

Every single one applied to me during that time.

After a few months, I regained internet access and was able to contact my guild again, and I fell back into a gaming addict’s routine. My online hours were reduced, now 6-15+ hours a day instead of 10-20+, and I had learned to hide it better.

It was around this time that I began working at a casino as a gaming host. I still hadn’t truly acknowledged my gambling addiction, but being taught how to spot gambling addicts made it obvious. I clearly fit the signs I was taught to notice. I also realized I was getting a high just from watching other people gamble. I couldn’t just tongue-in-cheek call myself a gambler anymore.

I realized I had a real problem, and the job was only worsening it.

But I still couldn’t stop logging in.

There was a need for me to be online in the game, even if my guild had moved on without me.

They had elected a new leader when I suddenly disappeared without warning for several months. They offered lead back when I returned, but I couldn’t take it again. My name had been tarnished due to my public mental breakdown online, and I kept trying to punish myself. Like it was somehow my fault. I told them I didn’t deserve to be around them anymore.

This self-deprecation was also largely influenced by what was happening in real life. It should be obvious by now that my addiction was fed and fueled by my offline trauma, both from childhood and things happening in adulthood.

It was never going to end until I felt safe and got help. But I didn’t know that. I was just trying to survive.

Back in game, I didn’t play with my guild anymore. I had spent years with them, but now I was telling myself I didn’t deserve anyone. So, I kept to myself and let people abuse me, online and offline.

Online, I’d play a private listening ear to people who’d harass and insult me in public. In private, I comforted one guy whose grandmother died and whose parents abused him. In public, he called me stupid and psychotic and told me to kill myself. Since he led the biggest guild, he told them to do the same.

These weren’t kids, either. They were men, mostly older than me at the time, in their 30s, 40s, or beyond. Online gamers who commit the worst offenses aren’t some angsty teenage stereotype. Most of them are adults.

But I didn’t stop my self-flagellation by being people’s scapegoat. I let some people literally treat me like a dog. And despite the pain of it for me, some of this was sexual. I became one man’s dominatrix and another man’s pet, with all that that entailed.

I was no longer going online to make friends and be needed.

I was going online for punishment. And I still logged in every day.

Because it was still better than being in real life. Especially then.

And for some reason, I felt I deserved everything they did to me.

Almost ten years of my life had been lost to gaming at this point. In those ten years, I don’t have memories of fun adventures, parties, events, or romances. I have memories of my 20s and some of my early 30s, alone in front of a computer, being used by people who didn’t care about me.

I wasn’t planning for the future because I couldn’t see one for myself. I didn’t eat right. I didn’t take care of my body. I didn’t save money. I was just wasting time until I died. I hoped that my self-neglect would end me, or maybe one day I’d end myself.

After a couple more years, I got my own apartment again, and over time, feeling safer, I gamed less. I met my boyfriend around then, too. By the time we were serious, I didn’t want to game anymore. He made me feel safe and loved, and real life began to fill the void that gaming had once occupied. He didn’t “cure” me, but he supported me. I actually wanted a future again.

I quickly learned the gambling urges weren’t going away just because I stopped gaming. I no longer had a game to gamble in, so I found myself gambling online or buying lottery tickets.

I’m lucky that I recognized the habit early and nipped it after I quit gaming. But the urges made me realize that my gaming addiction had spawned a gambling addiction. I believe that’s where a lot of gaming addicts wind up finding themselves: addicted to both.

Many of the games on which people get addicted have those kinds of gambling mechanics to intentionally prey upon the vulnerable. These mechanics aren’t cards or dice or slots, so people dismiss them as not being valid.

But when you dump tens of thousands of dollars on the chance of getting a few more stat points or mounts, how can that not be a gambling addiction?

I once calculated how much I had spent on the game’s gambling mechanics over the years.

It was enough to buy a small house.

The shame of that realization was overwhelming, yet it still wasn’t enough to stop gaming. But it did help me slow my gambling.

I don’t game or gamble anymore. I haven’t for a few years now.

I still get urges, but I keep myself away from temptation. I know I’m still vulnerable. Thirteen years later, the only things that changed are my boyfriend and finally getting help for my trauma.

But otherwise, I’m still alone. I’m still hurting. And I’m trying to figure out who I am without masks or crutches.

I’ve redirected all of my gaming energy into writing. Before gaming, writing was what I spent most of my time doing. Gaming was a coping mechanism. Writing is, too. The only difference is that gaming was harmful. Writing is therapeutic. Through gaming, I destroyed myself. Through writing, I heal.

So, back to my original question: Was it a real addiction?

Was my life destroyed enough?

By all clinical definitions, this was addiction.

I wish it weren’t an addiction, though. I spent my entire life trying not to become an addict.

But I became one anyway. And it devoured me.

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