Sobriety from League of Legends

 

    My tumultuous relationship with League of Legends is a tragedy best served in three parts. It's half a crime, half a medical condition, and 100% a story that requires careful documentation. I feel it a proper introduction to the kind of person I am. 

The Victim.

    I don't like video games. 

    I feel this a very broad generalization that isn't actually very accurate. It's more accurate to say I did not grow up playing video games. I have no "gamer sense". One really good video on the topic is "What Games Are Like for the Non-Gamer" by Razbuten (which, admittedly, I've only watched part of because ... video games don't interest me.) Qualifying that last statement - I don't actively seek out new games to play. It's just not a hobby of mine.

    Some things to put this to scale: I've never finished a Pokemon game. I couldn't get past Waterfall in Undertale. The only game I can claim to "know" and have played with any regularity is Minecraft. 

    I would always tell people "I'm bad at video games" but no one ever believed me. So I relied on one story: when I was younger, I heard of a game called "League of Legends". Very popular, apparently. I wanted to get into cool, popular things, so I tried to get past the tutorial. 

    Tried for 2 hours. Died to the 1st tower. Didn't understand the minions were supposed to be taking tower shots for me so I just... kept walking up and dying. Walking up and dying. Wasn't having fun. Quit.

    This was the story I told my friends in year 2020.

    The year of 2020 was noteworthy for a few things. It was the end of my first year of college! I'd just revealed I was dating my boyfriend to my family a few months prior. I was living away from home for the first time!

    A wild realization I'd also made in roughly 2020 was also that I was an extrovert. Not only do I actually like being around people, but I couldn't function without other people. 

     Totally unrelated to these factors, a global pandemic happened.

The Addiction.

    All social interaction transferred online. My friends - the vast majority of which are gamer introverts - were somewhat content to sit and game for the first few months, while I was in nervous breakdown mode within weeks. They would invite me to game, but - well - I wasn't a gamer. And I wound up telling them the story about how I couldn't beat the League of Legends tutorial when I tried all those years ago.

    "Huh," said one friend. "I wonder if you could beat it now?"

    So I downloaded it. I beat it. 

    "Well, now we have to teach you how to play!"

    This, my friends, was a canon event. This catalyzed and defined the course of my life for literal years to come. People I did not know have had their lives changed by this simple, innocuous decision. A brief overview: 
  •  It pulled my friend and boyfriend out of League of Legends retirement. (Both played in middle school and quit, until I dragged them in.)
    •  Boyfriend quit not long after they changed his favorite champion.
  • I begged my other non-League friends to join me so I wouldn't learn alone. My friend's roommate, within weeks, spiraled into an addiction so strong she was gaming for 8 hours a day.
    • A grand total of 4 new people were directly influenced by me to start playing League of Legends.
    • All 4 suffered some form of addiction or genuine emotional anguish from playing this game.
  • I suffered genuine emotional anguish. (Nothing like feeling like a worthless teammate!)
  • Friendships (multiple) were tested or flat out broken by in-game behavior. 
So if you ever needed a reason.

Still, I played. For about 2 and a half years I was in deep. Why? Two reasons:
  • My fatal flaw. I love my friends. Couldn't function without social interaction, and this was a collaborative game where we could all work together to a common goal, everyone knew how to play. 
  • Sunk cost fallacy. Once again - I was not a gamer. And there was a sense of pride in playing a "real" game that took "real" skill that you had to develop over time. League of Legends gives you a grade on how well you do with a champion, and then they give you shiny tokens. 
    • Not to mention, I love stories. League of Legends has genuinely interesting lore, but I'll get into that on another post.

The Sobering Up. 

    I think it's important to note that this addiction did not come from a place of "oh, but the game is good!". I think I very quickly learned that the Game Is Bad and everyone who plays it Does Not Like The Game. But we all still played it - mostly for the above reasons. It really was a toxic relationship - the highest highs, the lowest lows. 

    What really broke my addiction was changing circumstances, changing mindset. Which I suppose brings me to the actual point I wanted to make with this post, (other than a documentation of me, who I am, proving I exist to some distant entity).

    I really think people don't change unless they want to change. 

    I really think that anyone who says that someone else can't change really means to say They will never want to. And I think that's an important distinction. Another important distinction is the difference of  I'd like to reap the rewards of changing, and  I am willing to put in the effort to change. 

    Back then, I would have liked to reap the rewards of not playing League. I liked feeling well-rested. I liked not being upset at myself for not moving pixels on a screen the right way. But I didn't want to give up the sense of accomplishment. I didn't want to lose the time with my friends. I didn't want to feel like all my effort spent learning my first "real" game was for nothing.

    I really could only give it up once I started losing the desire for the good things as well as the bad. Not that I wanted to stop spending time with my friends - more that, I realized I could do it in other ways. That I didn't want time spent with my friends to be on League - or for my sense of self-worth and the outcome of my joy that day to be tied to League. More importantly, I had a very insightful conversation with my boyfriend one day as we were walking around.

    He'd been trying to get me to quit for years. He quit not long after I had just started to learn, and had been a staunch anti-Leaguer since. 

    We were talking about me quitting again, and the point was brought up - who was I, before I played League? More importantly, who was I, before video games?

    He brought up a feeling he was having about not being as productive or focused as he used to be. That before, he would reach to work on a project instead of reach to play a video game. 

    It's very important to note here: it's not that video games are evil.  It's more that, video games are low-effort input, high-reward dopamine output. Whereas working on self-improving skills - writing, coding, reading, cooking - were often high-effort input, and higher-reward dopamine output. But once you stopped putting in effort for projects, it was easy to stay that way.

    He calls it inertia; "an object in motion tends to stay in motion. An object at rest tends to stay at rest." 

    Before I was a gamer, I wrote short stories for fun. In middle school, I'd read a new book every 2 days. And I used to draw, every single day. Those were the things I'd race home to do. 

    I think that conversation made me miss that person I was. I missed being a creative person who spent more of her time creating than she did consuming. Coming home exhausted, just wanting to connect with my friends, it was easy to put on the headset and put my joy up for gambling. The rest of the night and how I'd feel would be determined by a poorly-designed MMO's matchmaking system. Most of the time, I would lose that bet, badly. 

    I realized I didn't want to do that anymore. I uninstalled that next weekend. 

    There's nothing wrong with being a gamer, anymore than there being something wrong with being a reader. It's stimulating, it's rewarding, it's a fun hobby that connects people. I even started playing other "real" games, like Baldur's Gate 3.

    But I'm not built to be a capital-G gamer. Hopefully, I will create enough things to figure out what I'm actually meant to be.  

    And unless League of Legend's unholy-high relapse rate makes me one of its statistical victims, I am now sober🎉🎉🎉!

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