At the start of this year I stopped playing video games except when in social situations. My hope for doing this was I would be able to study more without the distraction, and sometimes playing videogames encourages behavior that lead me to be more reclusive than I think is healthy for me.
This worked fine for the first two months, however the last two days have been really rough on my mental state. I found myself breaking down and playing video games last weekend. I was bummed. I planned to go a full year without doing that. But considering I am still alive to be bummed, things could always be worse.
I started think more about about. Was not playing videogames producing the behavior I wanted to see from myself? Maybe.
I think I definitely have better study habits now, I worry more about the reclusive part but I think that could be solved with mandatory breaks every 30mins to an hour to think about what I could be doing different, and opportunities I could make.
The biggest problem I have now with not playing videos games right now is I realized today I replaced them. I checked my YouTube recommend. Every single video, every one, had some tie in to video games. Weather it be reviews, clips, or streamers playing them. I wasn’t getting away from video games at all. I had replaced playing them with watching other people play them. I created a videogame proxy. And I think that’s even worse.
I spent almost all time on YouTube when I wasn’t study, it was what I used for leisure. If that was all videogame videos (which it usually was), then I think I ended up sending more time on videogames than I did before. Which I think isn’t good.
So I think I found a solution. I thought about it, and while I am uneasy about playing videogames again since I don’t want to regress into being unproductive, I’m proposing I play them for a fixed amount of time per day as a trade.
I can play video games for an hour and half per day after my study timeclock is over, in exchange that every YouTube video I click on from now on can’t be video game related. I’ll start this this Wednesday at the soonest. Track how this works out for me for a month, and decide what changes need to be made.
The media we consume have power effects on who we are. Considering I spend most of my time on YouTube, consuming all game news is essentially trapping me in only knowing gaming, despite me not playing them. This would hopefully allow me to find some of my other interests and become more well rounded, even if that means just replacing videogames with animal videos. Most of my life has sadly been gaming related, those would hopefully make me branch out more. I know I can’t quit cold turkey, so here my attempts to iteratively improve myself on the margin.
I guess you could also do it for Youtube channels which are informative & entertaining, e.g. CGP Grey and Veritasium. I believe studies have found that laughter tends to be rejuvenating, so optimizing for videos you think are funny is another idea.
>I’m proposing I play [video games] for a fixed amount of time per day as a trade.
I’ll suggest doing this as a fixed amount of time on a weekly, not daily basis- some days the quota you set may be too high (because you’ve gotten really into some productive thing that you want to do more than play video games), other days it may be too low (because you just need time to chill out), and having a weekly quota of video games lets you adjust according to your mood on any given day.
At the start of this year I stopped playing video games except when in social situations. My hope for doing this was I would be able to study more without the distraction, and sometimes playing videogames encourages behavior that lead me to be more reclusive than I think is healthy for me.
This worked fine for the first two months, however the last two days have been really rough on my mental state. I found myself breaking down and playing video games last weekend. I was bummed. I planned to go a full year without doing that. But considering I am still alive to be bummed, things could always be worse.
I started think more about about. Was not playing videogames producing the behavior I wanted to see from myself? Maybe.
I think I definitely have better study habits now, I worry more about the reclusive part but I think that could be solved with mandatory breaks every 30mins to an hour to think about what I could be doing different, and opportunities I could make.
The biggest problem I have now with not playing videos games right now is I realized today I replaced them. I checked my YouTube recommend. Every single video, every one, had some tie in to video games. Weather it be reviews, clips, or streamers playing them. I wasn’t getting away from video games at all. I had replaced playing them with watching other people play them. I created a videogame proxy. And I think that’s even worse.
I spent almost all time on YouTube when I wasn’t study, it was what I used for leisure. If that was all videogame videos (which it usually was), then I think I ended up sending more time on videogames than I did before. Which I think isn’t good.
So I think I found a solution. I thought about it, and while I am uneasy about playing videogames again since I don’t want to regress into being unproductive, I’m proposing I play them for a fixed amount of time per day as a trade.
I can play video games for an hour and half per day after my study timeclock is over, in exchange that every YouTube video I click on from now on can’t be video game related. I’ll start this this Wednesday at the soonest. Track how this works out for me for a month, and decide what changes need to be made.
The media we consume have power effects on who we are. Considering I spend most of my time on YouTube, consuming all game news is essentially trapping me in only knowing gaming, despite me not playing them. This would hopefully allow me to find some of my other interests and become more well rounded, even if that means just replacing videogames with animal videos. Most of my life has sadly been gaming related, those would hopefully make me branch out more. I know I can’t quit cold turkey, so here my attempts to iteratively improve myself on the margin.
lsuser had an interesting idea of creating a new Youtube account and explicitly training the recommendation system to recommend particular videos (in his case, music): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wQnJ4ZBEbwE9BwCa3/personal-experiment-one-year-without-junk-media
I guess you could also do it for Youtube channels which are informative & entertaining, e.g. CGP Grey and Veritasium. I believe studies have found that laughter tends to be rejuvenating, so optimizing for videos you think are funny is another idea.
>I’m proposing I play [video games] for a fixed amount of time per day as a trade.
I’ll suggest doing this as a fixed amount of time on a weekly, not daily basis- some days the quota you set may be too high (because you’ve gotten really into some productive thing that you want to do more than play video games), other days it may be too low (because you just need time to chill out), and having a weekly quota of video games lets you adjust according to your mood on any given day.
That’s a good idea, I’ll try that.