Poll: Deleted for your health

[Trippy Turtle]

I voted for No, but that's because I never did uninstall.
I really should have. I wouldn't have gotten such a shit score for year 12 and there actually had a chance at a decent job.

 

[chiasmata]

Kinda althought it wasn't a PC game. I became too obsess with Animal Crossing to the point that I had a routine (wake up, collect fruit and fossil, sell it and talked to the villgers at leat once) but I wasn't having fun.

I pretty much lose it when one of the villgers leave so I take it upon myself to leave the game and delete it forever.

Yes, that sounds extremely familiar!

I recently uninstalled a Candy Cracked Saga clone on my phone because I couldn't stop playing it, and got mildly frustrated when I was socialising with friends because I couldn't pull my phone out and play.

 

[Dalisclock]

The first time I played the Sims, I spent 3 days playing it straight. I stopped only to sleep.

Then I uninstalled it, because I realized there's something wrong with simulating their lives all the time and completely neglecting my own.

I haven't played another Sims game since.

 

[Superlative]

Not yet. I haven't had a problem with gaming massively affecting my grades or taking a toll on my health/sanity yet.

Keyword being yet. It'll happen eventually. I did spend about 45-50 hours playing Civilization V in a span of 3 days when I bought it in the Steam winter sale, though. Fortunately, the compulsive need to play it seems to have petered out just in time for when classes start again.

I've also spent thousands of hours on MMOs (Phantasy Star Online 2 and FFXIV:ARR specifically). Those probably have negatively affected my grades, but not in a significant enough manner to get me to stop.

Civ 5 hit me pretty hard in grad school... its a wonder i got my thesis done.

 

[Stryc9]

Yes. I had to stop playing X3: Reunion because I would start within an hour of waking up at around 9AM and play until 2, 3, 4 in the morning, go to sleep and do it all over again the next day. I finally stopped playing when I had to wipe my hard drive and vowed not to install the game until I built a new PC. It was several years after that I finally built a new PC a year ago but I've not installed the game yet since then. Maybe again someday but not anytime soon, I've got a massive backlog to work through first.

 

[Ambitiousmould]

Not yet, but Elite: Dangerous may well be the first. I have been playing it about 10 hours a day for 3 days. Granted I have a week off from Uni and literally no work or studying to do for it (which feels weird, but good) but I don't know that I'll be able to quit. What if the next signal is a haul of Motrona Experience Jelly? That's the dream for a small time smuggler like me!

Seriously, it's super addictive. Even just travelling through space listening to some ELO is fantastic. It's really great though. dog-fighting is fun, it plays really lovely and it can be exceptionally therapeutic when doing trading, exploring or mining.

 

[VanQ]

I picked up Elite: Dangerous this week and if it's as good as it looked when I was watching my mates play it last weekend, I think I may be hooked indefinitely.

Replace "uninstall" with "unsubscribe" and yeah, I've been there. WoW fucked my grades up pretty bad sophomore year of college.

I'm gonna have to go with WoW as well. While WoW didn't fuck up my grades or anything, I have spent way too much time playing it. I dedicate about 15hrs per week to raiding alone and then more to just general play time. It leaves me with precious little time to play other games these days.

Btw Fappy, how goes your WoW progress? Haven't caught you online much since the beginning of the xpac. My guild got Mythic Twins last week and we're working on Brackenspore now.

 

[Fappy]

I picked up Elite: Dangerous this week and if it's as good as it looked when I was watching my mates play it last weekend, I think I may be hooked indefinitely.

Replace "uninstall" with "unsubscribe" and yeah, I've been there. WoW fucked my grades up pretty bad sophomore year of college.

I'm gonna have to go with WoW as well. While WoW didn't fuck up my grades or anything, I have spent way too much time playing it. I dedicate about 15hrs per week to raiding alone and then more to just general play time. It leaves me with precious little time to play other games these days.

Btw Fappy, how goes your WoW progress? Haven't caught you online much since the beginning of the xpac. My guild got Mythic Twins last week and we're working on Brackenspore now.

I quit again about two weeks into Highmaul

I just don't really have the time to dedicate to the game anymore. What free time I do have I'd rather spend on other things (and other games). I liked the Garrisons at first, but it ended up feeling way too much like a chore :/

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I know a friend who has to do this. He has to uninstall a game to avoid the temptation to play it. I have never had this problem, personally. Even when I am really into a game, it has no hold over me. Willpower and all that. What a pain it'd be to have to reinstall a game every time I wanted to play it.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

i voted yes but i never had to delete a game for health reasons

but ive had to do it for academic reasons, sometimes the temptation is too big and NuclearKangaroo cant fail his tests

 

[murrow]

I did it to Morrowind when I was in high school. It wasn't messing up my grades or anything, but it basically took all of my spare time. However, I always reinstalled it after a few months and that guilt feeling came back. At one point I phisically destroyed the CD so that I wouldn't have how to play it. Perks of a pre-digital era...

Normally, though, this isn't a problem for me. I take great pains not to neglect my social life, and have quite a good discipline when it comes to respecting deadlines, after a rather traumatic episode in which I missed one.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

Discworld MUD...i got myself banned after i had wracked up 70 days of in-game time after only a year. I went back a few years later and pretty much did the same again although it was much easier the second time around to quit. Haven't been back much since because they changed the game so that you didn't need to do anything to gain xp, just spam some commands and avoid any chance of dying...hey presto, a competitive game ruined! Lowest common denominators rule the world now

 

[Jandau]

I have a love/hate relationship with MMOs. I love them, but I either get bored inside two weeks, or I realize one day a couple of months down the line that my free time is 99% playing my current MMO, and the remaining 1% is watching/reading stuff about my current MMO. At that point I quit in disgust and stay away from the genre for about a year or two.

I put this down to my completionist personality. I need to do everything in a game. Every time I played Mass Effect, I explored ALL of the planets. ALL OF THEM! Even though I knew it was pointless. Even though I really didn't want to. But I had to do it. This translates poorly into the MMO sphere, where every game is built around timesinks. It's even worse with daily quests/activities, where I start to feel guilty if I don't clear them every day.

However, the problem is that I genuinely like MMOs! I enjoy the big open worlds, the emergent social gameplay, the feeling of camaraderie when dealing with group content, or even just playing solo with the knowledge that you aren't really alone there.

 

[AnthrSolidSnake]

I never understood people who get into one game for weeks/months/years. I get bored far too easily.
I think the closest I ever had a game keep my addicted and playing was Titanfall. I wracked up over 100 hours in a matter of a week or so. I think it was the speed and free movement that sucked me in so much.

My girlfriend hates it that I don't like MMO games for that reason though. I don't have the patience to dedicate to one game.

There was a time when I was younger that I was REALLY into Guitar Hero/Rockband though. Probably because among my peers, I was the best at it. It was also a case of being grounded though, and my parents said the only game I could play was Guitar Hero since it was a birthday present from my grandparents. Even today I can't resist picking up one of those cheap, plastic guitars, like picking up an old habit, at least for one session.

 

[kasperbbs]

Civ V. I couldn't stop playing it. The "just one more turn" bug bit me hard. I felt like a dope fiend.

This. Time flies while playing that game and when i finally get that 'just one more turn' message it's already 1 A.M. and i have to get up at 4:30, i love that game, but there are other things that i would like to do with my spare time and going to work without sleep kinda ruins the whole day.

 

[Guffe]

Nope, never been so hooked to a game that it has been a health or school issue.
It might be that I've been close, but never crossed the line. And in this case it has with school, not health to do. The game I'd say has been close to achieve this was WarcraftIII.

 

[FPLOON]

Kinda? I mean, it wasn't like it was affecting my life in a major way or anything, but... If you're playing Yu-Gi-Oh! Tag Force 4 for the PSP and you spend the first 20+ hours of the game setting up a chain of "tag team"-based events that, in turn, would make you always have a tag team partner until the game's equivalent to "The End" kicks in, at that point it's best to quit cold turkey and never look back...

Other than that, I would quit a game I enjoyed immensely if, at the time, I was trying to get 100% completion out of sheer frustration...
*cough*LollipopChainsaw*cough*

 

[Doom972]

There are games which I've sunk hundreds of hours into, but there is always a point in which I'm bored with a game and want something different.

 

[mitchell271]

No, because I possess the wondrous ability known as "self-control". I'm busy with school but I fit in games, MTG and music when I can, I don't let them dominate my life. If I don't have 30 between sitting down and leaving, I won't start a game of Smite, but I might play guitar for a bit or practice a bit of BlazBlue. I learned time management and self-control at a pretty young age. I blame my dragon mother...

 

[Plasticaprinae]

Theres this game you can get on your phone called Ingress. You play with many, many people around your location. You compete over maintaining points located throughout the world. You walk or drive to certain points, usually around famous landmarks, and hack them. It sounds nice, it gets you out of the house and such. But in my experience, it was incredibly stressful. If a point gets captured, I had to drop everything to go and claim it again. It was starting to take away more energy rather than giving me happiness. It doesnt help that theres cheaters that can take away huge swaths of land away from you all at once.