My Video Game Addiction Story

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Let me share my journey with you of starting a business online to help with gaming addiction only to change it into playing video games and finally in December 2016 seeing what my life would be like for the first time since six years old without playing video games nearly every day! This is chapter 5 of my unforgettably honest autobiographical experience named Speaker Meeting 2017! Here are the previous chapters.

Chapter 1: Welcome at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/schmd2cm
Chapter 2: Sex at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/txgjjuij
Chapter 3: Alcohol at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/60ilq8m2
Chapter 4: Money #1 at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/8q8xb602
Chapter 4: Money #2 at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/60vj7bec
Chapter 5 is this post.
Chapter 6: Food # 1 at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/odangy6p

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The full text is available from the transcription below!

Welcome to Speaker Meeting 2017, the gaming part. Would you like to hear about my experiences going through with video game addiction, or maybe it's just excessive gameplay on video games, whatever you want to call it, I will launch into that right now. Video games is the addiction I would say I've spent the most of my time in, more time than alcohol, more time than anything else, because I've played 20 plus thousand hours of video games in my life already, that is a lot of time I've spent playing video games and the main thing I wanted to do when I got drunk was to play video games. The main thing that caused problems in my relationships consistently was video games and even gambling was some kind of a function of all the video games I played and the idea that I played games on my computer led gambling into just seeming like another game I could play on my computer. Even a lot of my unconscious eating was related to gaming and I consistently used video games to change or avoid my feelings.

I started my business in 2011, was called Gaming Addiction LLC. My first website for my business was GamingAddiction.net. So video game addiction is one of the things I can see in my life most clearly and most honestly, probably because I'd been involved in it so long. Since going back to middle school, I love playing video games and would play video games at every chance I got. And once I got into high school and my life started to, in my opinion, get into a place of more negative emotion and frustration, I turned to video games to avoid my feelings, to help me get "high" sort to speak, that high of beating a tough level. I remember having so much fun playing Turok on Nintendo 64, and that high of beating the game or figuring out that puzzle, getting through the level, it was so good. And the first person shooters, Duke Nukem and Quake, and playing all those 2D games, rolling through like Return of the Jedi, Empire Strikes Back, I remember dumping hours and hours into those and having so much fun.

Then in high school, I, senior year, finally got a gaming addiction that affected my school. Up until 12th grade, senior year of high school, I'd gotten all A's my entire time in school. The first thing that disrupted that was a game called World War Two Online. It was a game 10 or 20 years ahead of its time, a massively multiplayer online first person shooter where you could actually grab infantry, tanks, planes, and fight on a full scale battle of Europe World War Two. An absolutely amazing experience, maybe it was a half or a quarter size, but they went and modeled nearly all of France, Germany, some of Britain, an incredible effort for a video game. And that was the first game I got completely hooked in. Up until that point I played card games with my brother, I played Nintendo 64, and the year before that, junior year, I had had more of a normal high school life, I went out with girls, I played and had some fun playing sports with kids around the blocks. I would play some video games but it wasn't all of what I did, when World War Two Online came out the summer of senior year, before senior year started, I had my first complete video game addiction experience.

All I wanted to do was play World War 2 Online, and for the first time I didn't care about anything else. And maybe it was because I was going to college, I figured my grades didn't matter, I don't know what it was, I chose instead of being valedictorian, I figured I wanted to be the best World War Two Online player in the world and man I was good at that game. I played it a ridiculous amount. I would try and every waking hour I could get my hands on the computer, when I wasn't at school, I was trying to play World War Two Online. Things like waking up in the morning, having breakfast and playing the entire day until I went to bed on a weekend started to become a normal routine for me. I often would try and do my homework during the game, but often it just didn't get done, so I'd do my homework while I was in school, I skipped my reading and my grades suffered senior year, but I still managed to graduate and go to college. I also started reading a bunch of war books while I was playing the game, because the game was so realistic, if you were an infantry you had to literally ride on a truck or a tank, or fly on a plane and parachute out to get to the battlefield.

So often you had to spent 30 plus minutes just getting into the fight and you needed infantry to capture a town, so there'd often be all these tanks all over, you'd spend 30 minutes just to get shot on your truck and you'd have to spawn in again, get on another truck, you drive 30 more minutes, that truck would flip over, you'd be running in, you'd get shot by a tank before you even got into town. You'd get on another truck over and over again and finally when you went in and actually got to do some infantry combat and you captured a town, it was just this amazing high, because it was as close as I got in a video game to feeling like I actually cared about my life. That I didn't want the solider I was playing to just get slaughtered, like I had a real life and that fear running around all these tanks, firing infantry, firing in that fear knowing that it's going to take 30 minutes to get back in the fight as an infantry, and knowing that your side needed those infantry to capture those towns, it was so intense.

And then you'd get in the middle of the town and get behind the lines and the enemy infantry wouldn't be looking for you, the screen weight was just choppy, I'd be sitting there plugging, I killed like 16 guys one life just in the middle of a hot fight in town, and I just thought that was the best thing ever. And I learned how to play the tanks and infantry vehicles and the anti-tank guns, I could do, about everything well except fly. And I had one life, I killed 100 enemies in one life, the same guys probably lots of times, but I killed 100 enemies with a tank. I brought a tank to the front, emptied all of my ammo, went back, reloaded it and came back to the front and killed and we took the town. And that game became the only thing I wanted to do. In fact I went out with a girl, just a beautiful girl, senior year who had given me an amazing look at work, was the first girl who really looked me deep in the eye and what did I want to do? I wanted to go home and play World War Two Online.

So I literally ended up the date way early, she was really mad and I went home and found out that I'd got banned from the clan I was in which I was just devastated about. Apparently a bunch of guys, 30, 40, 50 years old playing the game didn't find a 17 year old kid who thought he was the very best at the game, and was pretty close to it, who they didn't like all of my antics in the clan. So I got home to realize that I had just canceled a date with an amazing girl to play a video game that now I got banned from my clan. And this is the typical thing that continued to happen over and over and over with video games in my life for the next 10 years, until I moved in with my wife. One video gaming problem to another.

Now I thought going to college and I thought just playing games, I didn't think that was a big deal, because I'm not hurting anyone and at the time I hadn't drank yet, so I hadn't built up all this shame about my life. I had the seeds, I had the foundations of all the things I've talked about before. I had the seeds ready to bring into harvest, but I didn't see gaming as a problem. I saw it as something purely fun and I saw it as something that would be automatically be managed by the rest of my life, for example with work, college, school. I would just make the amount of games I played reasonable. I wouldn't play more games than my life could handle. Well I went off to college and my life could handle way more video games than high school. I didn't have nearly as many classes, I could skip classes and I barely kept my scholarship freshmen year in college because I played so many video games. In fact I would get into two or three heavily at a time. I remember I played CounterStrike a lot, I was so proud I had something like a two five kill death ratio or something like that.

In recent years I felt really good about having a one five kill death ratio in Call of Duty, but back when I played CounterStrike all the time on PC, I had some, I was one of the top players on the server and I'd have something like a two or three kill death ratio. That means it'd take, I could usually take one or two people easily at a time one on one, it'd usually take anywhere from two to four people to come take me out once. So I had so much fun playing games like that. I continued to play World War Two online, I had one epic night where I was driving a tank in World War Two Online and freshmen year I cared nothing more of, in my life, than trying to get laid. My whole life revolved around getting laid, it never actually happened freshmen year.

And the best opportunity, well one of the best opportunities I had, I was driving a tank from the back of the line to the front in World War Two Online, because all the tanks at the front of the line were gone. So I was driving one from the back of the line to the front, a 30 plus minute in game drive just to get in on the action. And a girl called up, this was back before we had cell phones, before I had a cell phone, so I was in my room all the time gaming, so it was nice if I gave a girl my phone number, she could pretty consistently reach me there. So I picked up the phone, "Hello?" And the girl starts asking, "What are you doing?" It was Friday or Saturday night, I'm like, "Nothing, I'm playing a video game" or something. She's like, "Where's your roommate?" I'm like, "I don't know, why, do you know him?" I didn't even see what she was suggesting because I was distracted by the video game.

If I had not been playing the video game and had been laying in my bed, all I would have been thinking about was getting laid, I would have taken that as a sign. "Oh good, you want to come over, yes, please come over I'm not doing anything, I'll do whatever you want." But no since I was playing the video game I'm like, "Whatever, I don't need you to come over, I got my video game." And then she got, kind of felt rejected and then I hung up and I realized what I'd done, as soon as I hung up I'm like, "Nooo." And this was a beautiful girl I'd met out at the club, and here I was, I had the perfect opportunity and I threw it away playing video games. I called her back and she just laughed at me, she was hanging out with her friends by now and often, especially a situation like that, a beautiful girl having got rejected so blatantly like that and so callously, just like, "Whatever." Then she wasn't interested in me again after that.

So my freshmen year went along continually just with those same kind of things happening. Another girl who had came over and tried to mess around with me and it didn't work out, she persisted and tried to come over again. Well one night she made the mistake of calling while I was playing CounterStrike, and I was in the middle of a CounterStrike game and she asked me to go to a dance and I was quite rude to her because I was annoyed at the game and she was distracting from the game, making it worse and then I was dying even more often, so I was quite rude to her and then that went down hill from there as well. And I knew that as long as I could have, I had video games, I had kind of a constant companion.

So I picked up some new text games online, I played all these first person shooters, I often would skip class because I'd have stayed up till four in the morning playing video games the night before. My schedule was utter chaos because of video games, whereas my parents made me maintain some control and made me go to bed every night at 11 or 11:30, in college I was able to stay up as late as I wanted. So lots of times I didn't mean to stay up that late, I just couldn't stop playing the game when no one to tell me to stop, I'd just sit there and play till four or five in the morning and then so what if I had physical training the next day. I'd sometimes go to bed at like two in the morning and get up at 5:30 to go do army ROTCPT. And that was not fun, having stayed up and only got a few hours of sleep to do that.

And then I'd be so tired I'd go to sleep and skip engineering class and I was taking sophomore and junior level engineering classes because I could, I'd already had so much math in high school, I went straight into the higher level engineering classes. And in one of my classes second semester, I did pretty good first semester, but the gaming continued to take my life over the more time I had, and by second semester I actually got less than a 3.0, I barely passed three of my classes. I was failing three classes and I would've lost my scholarship and then had to of move home. I was failing three classes, going into the final exams and the one professor who I had for two classes told me that all you had to do was get a grade better than you got on the final exam and you'd get that grade.

So I held onto that, I studied really hard that last week, cut back on the video gaming a lot, I managed to pull a C off on the final exam in both of his classes, even though I had failed every single test he'd given before that. Now this wasn't because it was hard, in fact engineering was very easy for me. My friend who is an engineer now would get jealous at me in college because I'd sit there and I'd spend hardly any time on the homework, I'd just rip through all of it and get it out there and done. And he'd say, "That's not fair, I have to sit here and work for five hours to finish this problem, and you can just blast through this and do this in an hour." Well I often wouldn't even spend the hour to do it, I wouldn't read the book and I'd skip class. So it was very difficult, doing all three of those things, to pass a test. So I'd failed and this, I never failed anything in school before.

So video games and how much I was playing started to make it seem reasonable to start failing my classes in school. If you look at the data, women are now graduating college in amazing numbers compared to men and I would say video games are a huge part of that. So many of the guys I know got into video games very heavy in college and the video games for me, personally, have been the single most destructive factor on my schooling and my motivation to work as well. In high school I had got a job as a cashier where I met the girl that I went out with, and I realized I couldn't keep job and have time to play video games, so I just decided I would just drop the job, that I wanted to play video games much more than I wanted to have money. And that was very much going through college, the same thing.

So sophomore year, after freshmen year, nearly losing my scholarship, nearly failing out of my classes, I realized sophomore year I better cut back on my gaming. So I cut back on my gaming a lot sophomore year and I started just trying to play video games occasionally or with my friends. I realized that I was having a hard time dating because I was playing video games so much that I couldn't get much interest or go do any other social activities because I was gaming so much. You go to college, you hope to have all these social activities and opportunities to hang out, and I was playing video games so much I wasn't going out and doing anything. So sophomore year I committed to going out, doing more things and hanging out with my friends more. Sophomore year is the first time I had a good group of friends I hung out with a lot and I still talk to most of them to this day. We would go out to eat a lot, we'd hang out, we'd sit around, we'd play Madden a lot, we played Madden 2004, but us playing Madden a lot was nothing compared to the amount of video games I played by myself.

So we'd play a few games of Madden everyday and that was way less than I normally play on my own. Well give it some time, by the end of the sophomore year, I had got my friends into playing video games with us. They already played some video games on their own, and I'd started drinking more, so I'd gotten my friends into playing a good bit of video games with me, and then I started gambling online as well and that made for a recipe, by junior year in college, for me to be real lonely. I started drinking, gambling, and playing video games. Those were the main things I did and I switched my major to criminal justice, and that helped, my classes were way easier then. And I had more genuine interest in my classes as well so I studied more. I used to think a great night of studying was to start drinking, gamble, read the book a little bit and answer a few study questions, play some video games and go to bed.

So my life, video games was a key foundation of my life and going into senior year, I continued the same thing. I switched over to World of Warcraft to play with my friends, and then as I graduated college and my other addictions started really beating me down, especially drinking and the gambling. I set out to try and kick the gambling, and my thought was, "Well I'll just intentionally the gambling habit with the video games." Because I like playing video games and I was having so much, I thought, drinking. So what I intentionally did, I made a decision to drink and play video games instead of drinking and gambling. So I started drinking and playing this game called Rise of Nations a lot, and I played some World War Two Online as well.

Finally in December 2006, about five and a half years of playing World War Two Online on and off, I was in the High Command on the Axis side, I had the ability to move the units around, I was like a Colonel or something so I had all the privileges and I would lead my, the entire Axis side, and amazing things would happen when I would lead. Because, I would have, instead of having everyone spread out, I would do a real Blitzkrieg tactic, I would ask the entire Axis side to all spawn in at an empty town and just rush, one town at a time. So we would have hundreds of people spawn in at once and just mob, just overrun a town completely. So often when I would command, we would just smash the entire enemy lines apart, we would, and if we hit a town and they threw up some good resistance, I would just immediately call the whole Axis side, everyone go respawn at this town and we're going to do the same thing.

So it usually, after two or three towns, they would have a, the Allies would have a slower time switching spawns, because they wouldn't have a commander kind of getting them all out, they would have to each figure it out themselves. So by the second or third town, we'd usually smash through enemy lines, we'd often take five or ten towns. The lines would be stagnant lots of times for days or weeks, I'd get the reigns and we'd smash the whole lines apart and everything would go crazy, it was a lot of fun. And then one of the few people higher ranked than me would want to come on and take over and mess everything up. So one night this happened and I threw a temper tantrum, I moved all of the units on the Axis side into the training ground, and I did it all within two or three minutes. I did it rapidly, I'd planned it out ahead of time and this eliminated the Axis side from being able to spawn within a thousand miles or kilometers or so of the front, so no one could go fight on the Axis side. The Allies then just rolled forward and took everything with no resistance.

Meanwhile, the admins of the game had to be called up at midnight or one in the morning to come manually reset the game and to go put the units all back in the right places, because when you move the units, they couldn't be moved again for 30 minutes or an hour. So after I moved them, no one could move them back for a while. I forced a stop on the entire game and then they banned me for 10 years for doing that, which seems pretty harsh, but I also said a lot of nasty things on my way out as well. So in getting banned from World War Two Online, my gaming actually got a little bit healthier because I was really addicted to that game. Then I started, I got an Xbox after that in 2007, I started playing Halo and trying to play a little bit with my friends.

And then when my girlfriend dumped me in 2007 because one night she came over and I was drinking and playing Rise of Nations and she was desperately pleading with me to hang out with her, to pay attention to her, and I said, "No, I'll hang out with you after I finish this game of Rise of Nations." Which seemed perfectly reasonable to me, it was a four on four game, there were eight people including me invested in the outcome of the game, I can't just leave. I hated people who left the game, I can't just leave the game and hang out with my girlfriend just because she got here earlier than I told her to. And not long after that she dumped me and then I continued just playing more and more video games. I got more into Xbox after that, maybe I associated Rise of Nations with her or something, I don't know, but I moved it slowly by 2008, I had started playing Xbox with my friends, and you'll see this goes on for quite a while.

So I thought it would be nice to actually play with some of my friends because up until this point, I'd done very little gaming with any of my friends. I'd mostly done gaming with just random people I knew online and back then they didn't have voice chat in most games, it was kind of hard to make connections. Well in 2008 with voice chat and Xbox, I started to make some life long friends, a lot of the friends I have still now, and friends I've done business with online, we go back to 2008 or 2009. And this is where I started playing Xbox a whole lot and this is where when I became a police officer, I'd be working these lonely night shifts, this is where my life really got scary because I would get up, I didn't usually drink alcohol in the morning.

Well when I worked a night shift, the morning for me was five in the afternoon, because my schedule is basically switched from five in the morning. So morning to me was basically five in the afternoon, my friends would've just got off work and wanted to go to the bar, my same friends from college. So I'd go to the bar with them, I'd come home about 10, 11, midnight and I'd be looking at what am I going to do, as an alcoholic, what am I going to do? I've already been drinking, well I have to keep drinking all night. So what I would do is, I would drink and play Xbox all night, I'd play from about midnight to 10 in the morning and drink the whole way and often I'd get bored and watch a movie at some point. But I played a ridiculous amount of video games in 2008 and 2009 and 2010.

My video gaming and drinking and life style got so out of hand that they sat me down, and we all decided it'd be best if I quit and I moved home with my parents and man, absent of the drinking and all the other unhealthy behaviors that were not allowed at home, the video games took off. I was averaging, I was just talking with my friend about this last night, when I played I lived with my parents, I played video games every night from every night from about 11 to anywhere from five to seven in the morning. So I'd say I averaged at night, I would play five or six hours on average of video games every night. And I often would get in anywhere from three to five hours in the day depending on what's going on. So I was probably playing an average of eight plus hours of video games, seven days a week, which this is not uncommon, I've talked to lots of my friends that've been through times like this. So I was probably playing 50 to 60 hours of video games every week without all the other distractions, my gaming took off. And I made some great friends, I was online everyday.

I had a girlfriend that it came down to, "Am I going to get to Modern Warfare Two, on Xbox with my friends every night, or am I going to break up with her." And I was going, I had to break up with her in order to do that, because she wanted me to sleep over every night, which, she wanted to go to bed at nine or 10 at night, and I didn't even start gaming until 11, usually after I watch some TV with my mom. And some nights I'd start gaming at like seven, but that basically cut all the gaming with my friends out, I chose over her and the girl after her, the same thing, I didn't have time to have a regular relationship, I wanted to play video games with my friends every night. So I played video games with my friends almost every night in 2008, 2009, 2010. I played a ridiculous amount of video games.

And then I went to graduate school where it was also very conducive to playing video games, but I regulated it a bit more and I realized I needed to prioritize dating over the video games and that, thankfully, I did good in graduate school, I got almost all A's in my classes in graduate school and then I was managing my video gaming, I was managing my drinking decently, after living at home with my parents, everything was reasonably controlled because I didn't want to mess it all up.

Well then when I moved in with my wife, the first thing I saw, I had an amazing honesty with her, I told her that drinking and video games were two of three most important things in my life and she was the third one and I told her I'd get rid of the other two to be a good man for her. And that was an amazing honesty, I'd never even thought or tried to do that with another girl and with my wife I wanted to do it right away. And when I moved in with my wife, it only took a month or two of living together before my lifestyle was unbearable for her. My getting drunk and playing video games, which I tried to regulate, I tried to manage it, but it just didn't work. She had a five day a week job where she had to get up early and she wanted me to go to bed with her at night too, and basically if I played video games, that didn't work out for any of us. One night we had an awful fight because I stayed up really late playing video games with my friends, like four in the morning, she had to get up for work at like six and the bedroom was right next to the TV. It was unbearable for all of us.

So that's when I started my business, and I said, "Okay, I've got a video game addiction, I will give up playing video games." Well I just started it off with one video game, specifically I gave that game away and said I wouldn't play that game anymore. Well guess what, I started drinking and playing other video games, and then within a week or two I'd had a relapse where I went to Redbox and picked up Call of Duty Black Ops and then had an all nighter drinking, gaming bender with my friends. And that then finally got things into where I tried to quit drinking as well. Well that was the most I've taken off of playing video games as an adult. When I started my business on video game addiction, I took a few months off of playing any video games after I'd had that hard time of my wife and I had so much energy without playing video games that even as a graduate assistant, working 20 hours a week as a master's student with a full load of class, this is working towards my PhD. And I wasn't planning on working towards a master's, but I picked my master's up and dropped out after that, just at the end of the year.

With so much energy, I put all that energy from gaming into my company, in fact there was one really helpful bad thing that happened to me. I told you how much I liked to gamble, well I'd started gambling on video games with my friends and I lost $350 one night gambling with my friends online, betting on, as I was drunk, betting on who would win games of one on one at Black Ops. And that motivated me because $350 was a fortune to me back then, that was at least a week of pay at my graduate assistant job and I didn't have any money to be wasting, I was borrowing money to go through school. I got so mad that the pain was so great I said, "I'm not going to live like this anymore." So I put all my energy from playing video games into building my business up. And by the Spring of 2012, my business was looking very promising. I was writing business plans, I was getting clients and I changed what I did several times and then as my dad had a heart attack, then I realized I wanted to have him come to my graduation before it was too late, I graduated and got my master's degree and dropped out of my PhD program in 2012 so that I could focus on my company full time.

Now this was a great thing for my gaming at first, because even though I started my business on video game addiction, I quickly turned my business into "How can I make money?" And the video game addiction, a year later, wasn't that important and I realized that maybe I could do games with my friends in moderation. And it didn't make sense if my friend visited and not play any of our favorite video game together. So you might say totally relapsed on playing video games and by the end of 2012 I was starting to have some of the all night gaming benders again. I was back to drinking after realizing that my life was not getting better by simply not playing video games and drinking that I was in fact mentally feeling like my life was getting worse.

So my wife and I hoped that I could just play less video games and drink less and manage everything. So as my dad started to get sicker and I started to hate it more, and as the continued spiral, the continue one night of gaming and drinking all night, wanting to do it again and by 2013 I read this book called "The Four Hour Work Week." Now for the year before this, my business had kept my gaming and drinking in some kind of reasonable check. So I was so consumed by my business that I didn't focus as much on wanting to play video games or drink. So I just was thinking and doing my business stuff all the time for 2012. By 2013, then I'd even written a book about video game addiction, which ended in my story, having said where I just drank and played a bunch of video games the night before, so maybe it's not over yet.

By 2013, I read this book called "The Four Hour Work Week," by Tim Ferris which emphasized the value of doing your best work in the least amount of time. So I took that as a great opportunity, "Well, this means instead of working on my company 50, 60 hours a week, I can just start drinking and playing video games and work a few hours every week and make the same amount of money." So while the book had a lot of good points in it, I misused it and then after reading the book, I started going back to drinking and gaming. And this is where things, within a year of doing that, were coming tumbling down. My wife would be gone at work for 12 hours during the day and I would be, I would go to my company office that I made, I'd go work out, and then by one or two in the afternoon I would start, pull the video games out, grab the bottle vodka and then I'd be drunk and playing video games for 12 hours after that. Then the next day I'd be too hungover to work or do anything except go play more video games, and then I'd want to get some games in with my friends the next day, so my whole life again got consumed by video gaming and drinking.

After a year of this, and after a year of doing before of almost nothing but losing money, I was nearly bankrupt in 2014, I was playing video games almost every day, probably 30 or 40 hours a week, playing different games with different friends, playing all kinds of single player games by myself and drinking and having some really scary nights after getting bored with playing video games for 12 hours and having drank and just feeling really alone. Lots of things, like my wife would want to do something like go to dinner with her family and I'd get drunk instead and play video games and either I went one time and was really, had an awful time with it and then other times she'd just, we'd plan things like going to Universal, but I'd planned and played video games with my friends the night before and then I'd be too sick to go the next day to Universal. I'd do things like I'd tell someone I'd help them move, but then a new video game map would come out the night before and I'd have to stay up till eight in the morning, drinking, playing that with my friends and then I would say, "Hey I can't help move at 10 o clock, I'd have to drunk drive over there."

So my drinking and gaming just brought my whole life tumbling down and gratefully before it all fell completely down, I realized that it was, I had time to stop. That if I would stop it wasn't too late, but if I didn't stop it was too late. So thankfully that's what got me into Alcoholics Anonymous, seeing that my whole life was going to tumble down and I couldn't handle it. I couldn't handle losing my wife and losing my business, that was just going to be it for me. So while worked and went to Alcoholics Anonymous on a daily basis, I didn't think anything of the gaming, in fact I was really happy that I could play video games without drinking, because playing video games while drinking often greatly lowered my performance at the game, I usually played best when I wasn't drinking.

So I started actually having more fun playing video games, again with my friends and my video gaming then got more consistent. And if anything, increased, because instead of having the drinking and video games and then I'd have essentially work binges or time with my wife binges where I wouldn't do any of the other things, then I started more consistently doing gaming and then as my daughter came along, and I would start playing video games all night while my daughter, while I watched my daughter. So I was playing a lot of video games, even as a dad, I still found time to play 20 or 30 hours of video games a week, and do my business, and hang out with my wife, and go to my meetings. I was amazed at having the flexibility in the work schedule, gave me so much room to game. I'd do things like stay up with my friends till four or five in the morning, and then my wife and daughter, I would come to bed, and then my wife and daughter would wake up about six in the morning, so as you can imagine, even with being sober with the video gaming, staying up late and being so self centered, the video games caused a lot of challenges for all three of us in the house.

And finally I realized that in just 2016, I realized that life is better for me and my wife and daughter if I go to bed with my wife. And that was, was amazing how long it took me to see that. Ironically, as bad as things would get drinking sometimes, I often would figure out what I needed to do, like get sober a little bit faster. With not drinking I had this "Holier than thou" approach lots of times, that everything else I'm doing relatively is fine. See I'm not getting drunk all night, so who cares if I stay up and played games till four in the morning. Well I eventually saw that all of us were suffering, and mostly me, my sleep was miserable. Then with my wife and daughter being up during the day, even as quiet as they were, then the mailman would come by and the dogs would bark, I finally realized I need to stop staying up and playing video games with my friends until four or five in the morning.

So just in the last seven or eight months I've finally set a time that I've got to bed with my family every night and I'm not going to play video games right up until I go to bed, because I also noticed that if I played video games till five in the morning, I'd be really sleepy but I couldn't fall asleep because my mind would be so amped up off the video games, then I'd be so high and going so fast off the video games that I wouldn't be able to go to bed. And playing video games with my friends was very much an experience for all of us, lots of times of getting high. We'd all win and do really good and we'd all be laughing and joking and having fun and then just like any other kind of high, everything would crash, we'd be playing terrible, we'd all be screaming at each other and video games started to be an opportunity for me to do more spiritual practice, because anyone I feel like can be enlightened in a nice environment when everything is going wrong in the video game and the high just wore off, that's a great opportunity to try and be a better person.

So as I, my wife and I moved into the two bedroom, one bathroom we're in, we used to have a three bedroom, two bath house where the master bedroom was on the opposite side of the house, so I could reasonably play video games all night pretty quietly. But as we moved in into this new house, there was no room for me to play video games because the games were literally, are literally now where I used to play, in my bedroom. So I, since we've moved into this house, I have not, I've went to bed with my wife every night unless she's been sick in which case I've went to bed at our usual bed time and she went to bed early. Like last night she went to bed a little early, like an hour early because she's feeling sick, so I stayed up till our usual bed time of 10:30 and then went to bed. I read in the living room and took a shower.

So when we moved into this house, I realized I had to stop the gaming and any time, and manage the gaming strictly. Well after I got banned from Udemy, where I was making 95% of my income, a funny thing happened, similar to "The Four Hour Work Week." Instead of looking at my business and saying, "Okay, what's the best thing I can do for my business right now to try and keep things rolling." I switched over and started doing video games full time, and it was kind of fun, I enjoyed it, I even made the first page of Twitch, if you've watched or been on Twitch.tv, I even made the homepage one day with my boss fight in Call of Duty Black Ops Three zombies on the Gorod Krovi map. I managed to, I was one of the first to do the boss fight solo, and I got several hundred people from Twitch watching, that was a lot of fun. On one of the new maps also on that, Zetsubou No Shima, I had about 700 people watching me play zombies one day on Facebook on Sunday morning, that was pretty cool. The newsfeed Facebook would show a million plus people lots of times that I was playing zombies, it was really ego-feeding proposition.

And then on the last Call of Duty Black Ops Three zombies map, I actually got the number one leaderboard ranking in the world on the day the map came out. Now that was something really hard to do lots of times, because there were kids like I used to be when I was 17, 18, I mean they'd play all day, every day and you would never be able to get higher than them, if you didn't just play as much they played. So I had a strategy all set up, planned out, and worked out perfectly, and I got number, got to be the very top ranking on the leaderboard out of several thousand people who'd placed before me and then well I don't know if I'll get number one again, but so I had some great moments with gaming.

But I had about five months after I got banned from Udemy where my main focus was video games, which seems like a pretty crazy thing and yet, then by November I realized my business was going to go under if I didn't start taking my business seriously again, that just playing video games, sure it might work out, it might have some potential, but was that the best value I could offer the world? As a married man with a child, with limitations in time and space where I can't stay up till midnight or five in the morning to play the newest game right when it comes out on livestream. Sure I mean I could arrange my whole life to do that, but is that the best thing, I started to ask myself, is, what is the best thing for me to be doing? What is the way I can be of greatest service to the world? How can I do the most good with my business?

And the more I asked those questions and the more I started to look at and think, "Well what are my goals for my business in 2017?" As I was playing video games, I was also assuming my business would go downhill in 2017, which if I just played video games full time, it may have. But as I started asking more questions, I realized the best opportunities I have are to teach. The best opportunities I have are to talk about things like this. Then it doesn't make sense to be playing a whole bunch of video games, and not doing all my other teaching and internet marketing and all the other technical tutorials I do, for months I didn't hardly do any of those because I was video gaming so much.

So by November I realized a change had to happen or my business was really going to go downhill. And after five years in business, after beating all the odds, after paying down so much debt, and now being the sole provider for my family, I realized that I want to do the most good for the world and there's so many other people who are in a position to do good with gaming, there's so many other people who can teach and do tutorials on gaming, that for me there's much more things that I can do that will be suited to my situation more effectively. So I transitioned back to doing my business again with the teaching and tutorials on internet marketing kinds of topics, and to doing that full time. And I started doing a podcast called, "Happier People" as well. And then after a month of switching my focus like that, I started to ask, "What would my life looked like if I didn't play any video games at all?" By this time I'd scheduled three gaming nights a week with my friends. I played, and I was trying to play a game of League of Legends every day, so I was trying to do a little bit of gaming in the middle of doing the rest of my business.

And as I asked, "What would my life look like without gaming?" I realized I wanted to find out. I had just played the day before, a game of League of Legends, which was quite annoying, it was one of the low points of my day and I was placed into the bronze four division, which the bottom of all League of Legends' rank division is bronze five, so I realized would it be worth me playing hundreds of hours to try and level up to a level that one of my friends was easily going to be able to do better? Why would I not use my very best and powerful skills, teaching things like Facebook ads and marketing that only a few hundred maybe a few thousand people in the world can demonstrate? There's hundreds of thousands of people who are way better than me at League of Legends, why not do the very best I can do, why not focus on the skills that I uniquely can do and why not focus on building my business up more so that I could help other gamers to be able to build their businesses up more?

So as I asked, "What my life would look like without gaming?" I wanted to find out. Meanwhile I'd had this curiosity about playing music, so I realized if I quit playing video games, I'd have time to try new things, I'd have time to play music, I'd have time to make some t-shirts. I'd have more time with my family and I'd have more time to actually call my friends. But it was hard in the sense that I thought that I had to play video games to hang out with my friends, but as soon as I decided to see what my life would look like without video games in it, then I realized I could just easily call my friends instead of playing video games. And then I would enjoy talking with them on a phone call much more than I would playing during the game.

My gaming had ruined things for my friends a lot because I was demanding that we play on a livestream all the time. So that had to mean I had to set everything up and everything then was filmed live, which, that is very difficult to deal with, especially when the friend and I are all on voice chat, we can't really talk about our personal lives and get into things too much, because everything is all out there in the open and lots of times, hundreds of people would be watching. So it was very much more like a performance than a relaxing time to hang out with my friends. So I'm grateful today I had the courage to ask a better question, to say what would my life look like if I didn't play video games. And I don't have anything against playing video games, I'm open if all the stars align and it seems like the right thing for me to do to play video games, I'm open to that. But I pray today that I remember all the experience I've had playing video games already, then I'm willing to try something new because it's tough trying new things.

I tried to play some music yesterday, and I've played music enough now that I'm starting to get a little bit more knowledge on it. And I've played around with lots of things and I, it was challenging. Yesterday tried to make some music for a few minutes, tried to make some shirts and nothing happened. And I've done it enough now where it's not new anymore where, in the sense that I've been doing it a bit already. So it's challenging sometimes to learn something new. I have this fear then, that I'll never be able to play music as good as I play video games, which is ridiculous, if I spent 20,000 hours playing music, I'd be able to make some best sellers probably. If I spent 20,000 hours creating t-shirts, they're probably be every, they're, I'd probably have sold 10 million dollars in t-shirts, if I spent that much time designing t-shirts. So I'm grateful today to see the opportunity cost things have in my life. As long as I play video games, there will be a lot of other things I won't do. I won't play music, I won't make shirts if I'm playing video games. Or I won't spend as much time with my family, or I won't make as many tutorial videos, or I won't make something like this.

I want to do my very best work today, and I want to respect that after 20,000 hours of playing video games, there might be some other things I would like to learn and do in this life, that this body might be best suited to try some new things. So I have had so much fun playing video games in my life, and I'm grateful today to have the courage to try doing something new. So this is been, an especially behavioral addiction for me in the sense that other substance and other addictions and prompts would latch onto it. But here you have something that doesn't have anything bad integrated into it, per say, It's just a behavior. And there's, I've played lots of times, I've played video games in moderation, and then lots of times it got out of hand and was what I would say is an addiction.

So today I'm not looking to play any video games, I'm avoiding playing any games today, and that includes any mobile games on my phone, that includes any games on my computer, and I gave away both my Xbox One and my PlayStation Four. I gave them away out of feeling good about it, out of not feeling like, for example, if I just sold my Xbox and sold my PlayStation Four, out of not feeling like I could just go trade the money back in and buy another one right away. But to give them away and really just grieve that loss, to just grieve that space of playing those video games and to be grateful for the things that then fill that space. To be grateful for the chance to make music today, to be grateful for the chance to make some new t-shirts today, to have some time to try and play an experiment with things. To have more time to do good work in my business and not be spending so much time in my business, trying to turn playing video games into something that makes money.

So I'm very grateful for the experience I've had playing video games. If you want to watch, you can look on YouTube or Facebook, you'll see all kinds of me, videos of me playing video games and it's amazing all those videos of me playing video games, a lot of people stopped following me, and unsubscribed, stopped watching my videos that I really wanted them to watch, like tutorial videos. A lot of people told me that they couldn't stand to keep seeing all these gaming videos, that they just wanted the tutorials.

So it's amazing how many, how having everything together like that, lots of times, can cost a little bit and yet a lot of the gaming audience has converted into watching other videos as well. So it's well worth it to unify your life today and I'm grateful I feel that I have a unified life. I'm grateful for all the fun I've had gaming, I've built some amazing relationships, and one of my top contractors, and one of my partners for my business has been a friend that I met gaming, and so is another one. And one of the guys I talk to every week has been a gaming friend. And I've been able to keep up with my friends from college by playing video games, so I'm grateful for all the great things video games have done for me. I'm excited to explore my life in more detail and see what's possible when I've got the space that video games used to take up. So thank you so much for experiencing it, this with me. I hope this is really helpful for you, and I hope you have a wonderful day today.

Love,
Jerry Banfield