They say they're going to quit video games, but they don't actually quit.

so how did I quit video games we had
been playing all night long and we were stuck on this one mission and now finally it's like four o'clock in the morning and the time just the time just melts by when you're playing these types of games do you understand it was like just it seemed like just an hour ago it was like five o'clock at night I was just like I can't do this don't get me wrong I still play video games gaming has influenced my life in a huge way I I love video games I'll probably always play video games I missed it completely out on the ps3 and here we are at the ps4 the ps4 is reeling me back in there are a lot of guys performing these monologues explaining to you how they quit video games on YouTube but if you actually listen to the whole hog they didn't quit video games they say things maybe at the beginning maybe at the end maybe peppered in between that indicate they're still playing video games they're always gonna play okay so what what's the point of this monologue what's this milestone or this you know new moral attitude to life you gain if you're still playing video games I used to have a very substantial video game collection and I moved in with a girl and we live together for about three years and we fought like cats and dogs what a couples fight about the laundry the who's doing the dishes or you know who's taking out the garbage me and my girlfriend got into a huge argument one day and the following day I went to work and when I got home I went downstairs to my to my lair and everything was gone I freaked out I mean I know I know you guys have video game collections and I've seen them online and and just imagine for a second you know if you came home and all your stuff was gone I mean gone I mean the shelves gone everything was gone so my girlfriend got home and I confronted her about it and she said she took all of it and she chucked it in a dumpster and when I asked away she threw it out she wouldn't tell me and I belted her in the face and with the kind of luck I have I wound up breaking her jaw and went to jail for about a year and a half for it and while I was in jail I when I wasn't eating sleeping or gettin I was in the library on a computer and I was watching some game I would watch game review channels on YouTube that's what I would do and I said man I said this is great I said these guys a lot of these guys have impressive stuff and I said hey this is something I feel I can do this is something that I'm passionate about and that was my thing you know I said when I get out I'm gonna do this I'm gonna I'm gonna make this happen I'd like to start with a few comments that I saw on my previous video where I mentioned video games a couple of the comments were I don't know about you I enjoy gaming as a kid another one was it's not wasted time if you enjoy it and I did enjoy playing sometimes you see I do enjoy gaming I enjoy gaming a lot I enjoy gaming so much that even when I didn't enjoy gaming I would play games and maybe that tells you something gaming made me realize there was an inherent disconnect with myself with who I thought I was or who I thought I could be specifically there was a large difference and how I talked to people online in video games and how I talked to people in person online I was bubbly and outgoing and I was emoji I don't know if that's an adjective anymore but I would always send lots of happy faces and I don't even text with emojis but for some reason in online games I'm this totally different kind of outgoing person that I'm not in real life whenever we would make jokes in the chat I would always know exactly what but if you were to come at me in person and like a rap battle I'd have like no idea what to say I'm terrible at thinking on my feet in person but I can think on my keyboard if that's a thing I would play games to avoid starting something like a passion project I would play games just to keep that feeling of progression I would play games just to pass the time I would play games just because peer pressure and all my friends were on and they wanted me to come on so uh and I got the Xbox because all my friends were playing Ghost Recon and I remember them telling me oh this is so cool you know we go out and groups or whatever and we you know we've all played together we all all gone they talked me into it and I remember I remember playing with my buddy Frank one night and we do admissions together and I remember we got stuck on this one mission it was really hard it was like Frank had to run ahead to a spot I had to give him like cover fire and then I would run up to the spot and he would cover cover me with fire and it was like this really difficult part of the game and we had been playing all night long and we were stuck on this one mission and then now finally it's like four o'clock in the morning and the time just the time just melts by when you're playing these types of games do you understand it was like just that it seemed like just an hour ago it's like five o'clock at night and now it's four o'clock in the morning oh yeah and I remember just like being like I didn't want to stop playing but I was like I gotta I gotta get to bed I thought I had worked the next day I gotta get to bed this is ridiculous Gaming has influenced my life in a huge way I I love video games I'll probably always play video games all that space I have up here memorized for raid bosses and different Talent specs and all this stuff that got outdated continuously like why didn't I use that space for something that I could carry on with like a language or something there's so much space up here that I used for WoW and video game tactics that I can't actually use anywhere else so how did I quit video games I was working my dev job and then they let everyone go and I lost job looking back on it I was kind of forced into it forced into not having to focus on video games anymore when you're watching the world around you kind of fall apart a Lawson rank doesn't mean anything when you're about to lose your car a level up in a video game doesn't mean anything when you have no idea where your dogs are gonna live when you get kicked out are you gonna put him back in the shelter a new item in game that gives you more power it doesn't mean anything when you're just wondering how you're gonna buy food next week none of what I did in the video games mattered Paul Bashir the political leader in charge of anonymous of the voiceless Paul Bashir one of the few hit videos on his YouTube channel is him allegedly talking about smoking marijuana it's only five minutes long that video but if you really pay attention he's telling you he does not plan to quit okay Farah wada he's talking about how hard it is from just take a couple months off take a break for a couple months but he's not committed to sobriety he's not committed to critical quit means quit there's a difference between pause and quit you might think that video game addicts would be familiar with that that it was being pausing and quitting we're talking about here is quit it homeboy but I think maybe on a deeper more more unconscious level what they're doing in performing these monologues is playing a game it is portraying a fictional character you know maybe without without realizing it maybe they're talking about hopes and aspirations this other person whether that's the person they depict on YouTube or maybe a person they aspire to be I had a friend friend from high school and then I didn't talk to him about ten years so let's say he and I were friends at 17 then we met again aged 27 and he told me this story and I was laughing and he wasn't he told me the story about how you know he'd been collecting comic books continuously from childhood through the 27 when we had this conversation and the comic book collection it took over his bedroom the bedroom in his parents house and he had moved out and was living in an apartment but this whole bedroom is full comic books and I don't know what the situation was but he goes to this bed you know so he's dropping things off and picking them up at his parents house to keep this comic book collection going and he's making love to his girlfriend at the time he's a fully grown man with a girlfriend and the job and responsibilities and stuff at age 27 or something he's making love to his to his girlfriend and his comic book collection literally collapses on his head he's got so much weight on the upper the upper floor of his bunk bed he's got these boxes and boxes and with several hundred pounds of paper and plastic he who comes crashing down on the two of them love they're making love and I'm laughing it and it's okay so so what's the end of the story is this where you finally made the resolution to stop collecting confident and he looks at me stunned like it never even occurred he was like oh no no no he just relocated the boxes to the base mutters like you know he came up with a new plan for how he can keep a mass and comic books keep spending his time and money doing this but look guys comic book collecting I don't know anyone who has stories of staying awake until 4:00 a.m. or 5:00 a.m. reading comic books and then going to work the next morning completely exhausted I don't I don't know about that I don't know but this kind of really negative impact in your life and guys if I had done that just once with anything if I stayed up till 4:00 a.m. or 5:00 a.m. doesn't matter what the activity was with his video games or comic books those I'd be deeply ashamed of what I'd done that night and at the impact that was having in my life if I did that just once and the nature of video game playing not even video game addiction just a video game playing is that people do this again and again and again and these are grown men who keep making the excuses to do it again and again and again even after they come on YouTube and give us these monologues telling us about how they quit when what they really mean is they hit the pause button I'd say the thing that that really put me what the end of my video game career to me is very and it was like I was like towards the end I was just fly under it and then all started with sixty four-bit I blame it on 64-bits when the Dreamcast came out I remember me and Phil had gone to this game store and we saw a Power Stone and we was just like wow what is this all about and it was like oh my god but the idea of getting a Dreamcast at that time we had no money man we just at this point we had no money and what really oh what made me buy the dream maybe I paid more than that for it because I wanted Phantasy Star Online oh this is like this is like my glimmering hope this was what was gonna bring me back into gaming I got Phantasy Star Online and a Dreamcast and I remember taking it home and connecting it to the Internet oh yeah and remember you would go to that hub world where everybody was running around but what really sealed the deal for me is I remember I was moved in with this girl and I'm playing Phantasy Star Online and I got the headset on and I remember I think I was probably even like Yellin to somebody or yelling at somebody or something like that and I remember my girlfriend come home from work and she comes through the door and I'm like I'm like in bed in my pajamas propped up and I'm yelling and I got I got the [ __ ] headset on and the joystick I mean the turret the Dreamcast joystick was like this like this [ __ ] like whammo frisbee in your hand and she walks through the door and I'll never forget like the look of disappointment in their eyes and I look at her and I just had like this look of guilt on my face because it was like yeah she comes home from a hard day's work we're in this apartment thing together now this is like the first time I ever moved out and I was just like I can't do this in my mind I just I can't do that it was fun but I was like this it doesn't it doesn't fly it just doesn't fly all the confidence and all of that I'm a different person online and everyone enjoys me here I couldn't take that into real life now I have to snap back into me I'm this great player online but in person I'm just I got to snap back to not being whatever I wanted to be you need to set yourself up in a life situation where video games doesn't matter everything else is more important which can be hard to do if you're forced to do it yourself don't get me wrong I still play video games [Music]