I’m curious. I see a lot of chatter about people neglecting their families and life, but not a lot about what people did about it, beyond separating themselves from the person.
I do remember a “Foxtrot” comic where 10-year-old Jason wasn’t coming to dinner because he was buried in a game, and his mother unplugged the unit, which didn’t go over well. Someone on another site said she poured a can of soda into her boyfriend’s PlayStation, because she felt he was neglecting her, and she did admit to it. IDR if he got the message or not.
My then SO, now wife was really worried about their time spent playing Civ V over two decades ago. No, IMHO, she wasn’t anywhere close to addiction, but it was so easy and so comfortable that she felt she was wasting time she wanted to be productive with. The classic “I’ll just play a few turns” and then it’s 2+ hours later.
So she had me destroy the play CD-ROM (which confirms how old it was!). A year later, she bought it again, because it wasn’t Civ 5 that was the problem, just she was tired and stressed, and it gave her a way to relax and de-stress. And we both have a noticeable tendency to procrastinate and avoid doing unpleasant if practical things.
These days, people could do the same thing by obsessively checking on FB, news, other Social media, or what have you. I think the “gaming addiction” was an over-specialization of labeling the common human desire for distraction which is easily taken to any number of specific extremes.
You cannot help an addict, of any kind, who does not want to be helped. Destroying or giving away the game system will result in great anger, verbal and possibly physical abuse and may cause the addict to end the relationship. If you throw out an alcoholic’s liquor, they will not stop drinking. They will sell their prized possessions for pennies on the dollar, have sex with disgusting stranger or do whatever else it takes to get money to buy more alcohol.
During the Farmville era, when I was living in my old town, I knew a woman who realized she had a problem when she cancelled plans with one of her adult children because her crops needed to be fed. She called her daughter and rescheduled, and never went back to Farmville and let the whole thing “die.”
And that’s part of the problem with the question in the OP (no shade on you nearwildheaven, you’re just using a common term) - who is defining the “addiction”. In the case of your and my anecdotes, it’s not a true “addiction” - because the people realized it was a problem and could change.
Most addictions are either well past that (physical, psychological or other) or are just handy labels imposed by another person (often spouse or parent) on behavior they’d rather another person not do, based on said SO/Parent’s judgement of what’s appropriate/needful.
In my 20s, I had a group of friends who were really into Everquest. I like gaming but I couldn’t get into that just because it looked like such a huge time suck. We would be heading out on Saturday night and it would take hours to round everyone up because each stop we had to wait a half hour at least for the dude to finish some quest or whatever.
My son (age 10) is really into Fortnite. One time I got tired of being put off with “one more minute” for two hours so I turned off the wireless router. It did not go over well. He was in the middle of some transaction with another player and it just created this huge problem as he almost lost whatever easter egg they were exchanging.
So the moral is I make sure he gracefully exits whatever game he’s playing.
This sounds like abuse, and I don’t use that term lightly. It would make me reevaluate that relationship, that’s for sure.
That’s how I do it with my eldest. She is told to finish the round, episode, whatever, and then surrenders it with little fuss. Taking a heavier hand would backfire.
The younger one is not quite there and will abuse that privilege, so still gets a warning but sometimes it needs to be somewhat stricter.
I took away and grounded kids from their devices/games often.
Never figured on destroying something I paid umpteen dollars for.
If you’re a couple(adult) and wrestling with this, it’s another cup of tea.
Anything that’s done obsessively with out regard to anothers feelings is gonna be a stick in the crawl. One way or another.
I’m sure a lot of Dopers have experience with this issue of intrusive video game usage! I never had the plug pulled on me and I never did it to my kids, but close!
If you haven’t seen the Netflix documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin I highly recommend it. When a young man in Norway whose life was constrained by muscular dystrophy died, his parents were amazed to discover a worldwide network of people who loved and respected him via his gaming persona. The documentarians did a remarkable job of recreating the online interactions verbatim using logfiles. One of the folks he had a particularly close relationship with vanished suddenly one day because - you guessed it - someone pulled the plug.
From the other side, I can share what it’s like having been the recipient of that. (Hopefully not off-topic, but putting it a dropdown just in case.)
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Dad did this several times when I was a kid. At a restaurant, while waiting for our order, I started playing a Gameboy. He grabbed it out of my hands, yelled at me, and then threw it across the restaurant while screaming obscenities for several minutes. We left awkwardly after Mom paid. Couple years later, he turned off the computer in a middle of an online match, then tried to hit me with a cane (not in an abusive way; corporal punishment was normal in that society and time period). I blocked it; he got even angrier and ended up calling the police. They came, looked at each other, and basically told me, “You be good now, son, and listen to your old man” and left. There were other minor incidents too. I only learned to avoid him, distrust him, and to cover my tracks better.
How did it turn out? Well, Mom divorced him a few years later. I fell into a deep depression and told myself I’d never have kids because I don’t want to pass on his genes. Eventually got snipped, with that memory still fresh.
Turned out OK in the end though. He and I barely talk anymore, but we’re no longer on bad terms, just not close. Decades later, I became a computer programmer (Warcraft 3 taught me), got an environmental science degree (was a “druid” in Everquest), and am in long-term relationship with someone who’s never played video games (because there’s more to life than games). I still game, though, whenever time permits.
The hard line didn’t really work. If anything, it backfired. Made me double-down, becoming even more withdrawn and isolated, and made him seem quite insane. That’s especially the case now that gaming is so much more normalized than it was in the 90s. But even back then, making a huge scene at a restaurant over a Gameboy wasn’t exactly well-socialized behavior. Besides, these days he’s more addicted to his phone than I ever was to games.
These days, if my SO says “Come on, you’ve been playing for so long, let’s go do something else”, I’d be like, “OK, you’re right. How about a hike?” If she just pulled the plug without saying anything, that’d be a serious WTF moment, same as if I turned off the TV while she was binge-watching the latest season of her favorite show. A little communications goes much further than a spiteful cord-pull.
And I think the addiction/distraction is usually more about something else missing in their life; addressing the game without looking at the person and their life holistically is merely treating the symptoms.
I mean, with something like gaming, is the difference easy to tell? What would a clinical diagnosis of “gaming addiction” look like over someone who “merely” plays a lot?