How would you go about getting your friends/business partners to play less video games? I run my site with my brother and he's logged over 250 days (6,000+ hours) of playing time on Runescape...its sad. Trying to get him as excited about online business as he is about online gaming but its a tough shot. If he would have put half of those hours into learning and online ventures, no doubt he'd be killing it.
He sounds a lot like me ten years ago.
I speak as a mostly-stabilized video game addict. When I was 16, I played Runescape every day instead of visiting my grandfather, who I was very, very close with, as he slowly passed away from jaw cancer over the course of six months. Out of three siblings, I was the only one to not write him a goodbye letter because writing it might mean missing a f***ing quest. Today, it is the biggest regret in my life. I am sure your brother is missing things in his life and once, if ever, he leaves gaming behind, he will likely have regrets also.
The only way to get out of addiction gaming (or probably most addictions) is to find the base motivation that makes someone more interested in the addiction than in other aspects of life. For some, it is the communities they find in MMORPGs that they cannot find in the offline world, for others, it is the competitive nature of gaming and being good at something and accomplishing things, and for others, it is the pure escapism. It can also be a mixture of all three.
As I mentioned in my other post on this thread, it is about finding balance and trying to figure how to gain the same sense of contentment and adventure that I previously found in gaming and instead finding it in business. I still struggle to find that balance sometimes, and have to work very hard to not go to gaming in challenging times and also not to reward myself with it when I have huge successes.
Here are two things that have successfully kept me from returning to binge gaming:
1. Delayed satisfaction
I came to a realization that throughout the history of gaming, it has only become more compelling and satisfying over time. Games 30 or 40 years from now (when I am in my 60s/70s) are almost guaranteed to be phenomenally better than they are now. I would rather work my a$$ off now and reward myself down the road when gaming is even better and my mind and body are unable to do real-life things than reward myself now with games that by future standards are boring and obsolete and waste my youth and fall behind to the point that I have to spend the rest of my life trying to catch up.
2. Replacing rewards
I have always known that my personal primary drive in life is internal recognition of accomplishment in competitive fields. I really don't give a shit about recognition from others and actually tend to hide my accomplishments from others. In high school, my entire sense of self-worth was in competitive sports (football special teams and soccer). It was my addiction, and for two years, I spent four hours a day, 260 days a year developing my skills, getting down to 5:50 mile times and working my way up to team captain status. But then I tore my PCL at 16 and that was over, so I turned to competitive gaming instead, spending 4 hours a day and 260 days a year developing my skills there. One addiction replaced the other. Today, I spend 4 hours a day and 260 days a year on my ecommerce business that did 80k revenue last year (not exactly Fastlane, but I love it and run it while also working a full-time job). I also spend the least-productive 30 minutes of my day playing World of Tanks because I really enjoying using it to recalibrate and potentially defusing before going to bed. I've found my balance and am at nearly total contentment in both areas.
The hardest "reward" to replace is probably community. Runescape is a very communal game (or at least, was when I played), so your brother could have some very strong connections with people that he only finds in that game. If that is the case, the likely best way to help him out of that world would be to find productive business people that he can develop strong friendships with.
I'm not an expert, but I can relate to him, so I'm happy to give you any insight I can that you think might be helpful.
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