Video Games Are Ruining Your Life
The Amplified Impact Podcast
May 22nd, 2023
I recently tweeted about video games and the responses I got were intense.
So in my tweet, I mentioned porn, junk food, and video games, and I said that there’s no such thing as cheap dopamine…you don’t realize the true cost you’re paying.
And while most people can agree the other two aren’t great, there are a lot of folks out there who are convinced that video games are harmless.
But let me tell you, I’ve played my fair share of video games in my life. I grew up with the Internet and I was playing video games before they were cool. I’m talking original StarCraft and Diablo.
But here’s the thing…for me, video games became an addiction.
I would spend 15 hours a day playing and it was ruining my life. So I had to cut video games out of my life completely to get away from that addiction.
Now, I know not everyone has the same experience as me, and that’s totally fine.
Some people can play video games for 30 minutes a day and be totally productive in other areas of their lives.
But even if you’re only playing a little bit, there are hidden costs that you’re paying for that cheap dopamine hit.
Even if you think you’re being totally productive and functional in other areas of your life, these costs are still impacting you more than you realize.
And remember, I’m not saying you should never play video games again. I just want to start a conversation about the true costs of our recreational activities.
Trust me, you’ll thank me later.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“The poison is in the dose, okay? So that’s a phrase that we hear where the difference between something being poison or being medicine is just in how much of it you take often, right?” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. Now today I need you to buckle up, get ready, brace yourselves, because we’re gonna talk about something that has the potential to trigger many of you, maybe elicit a very strong emotional reaction. And I and I say that because I recently made a post, a tweet on this topic and I was surprised by the number of people who turned out to the comments to pick pick up their pitchforks and their torches and try to burn the non believer at the stake. And so if that’s you, just bear with me here because we’re going to talk about video games and whether or not they are a good thing or they are a bad thing. And a lot of people have a very deep emotional connection to video games. And so the idea of saying, hey, video games are bad, makes a lot of people just go into a blind rage. And I’m not here to say that video games are bad. I really am more interested in talking about the unseen costs that we pay for certain activities in our life.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:03]:
So the post that I made went like this. It said, porn, junk food, video games, there is no such thing as cheap dopamine. You just don’t understand the price you’re actually paying. Okay, so in this post, we’re calling out porn. I think a lot of people can get on board with the idea that pornography not great for most people, right? Junk food also people can say not great, but video games, a lot of people came out and they’re like, no, I got called a boomer. I got people telling me that I was just out of touch or all these things. And here’s a little bit of context for perspective is I have probably played more video games than 99% of people in the world. There was a time I grew up with the Internet.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:53]:
I was like first generation. I was born 1984, so I was born with first generation Internet games. And I’ve been playing since the very beginning all every video game you can imagine. And I got very, very serious about a number of them. I played StarCraft, the original StarCraft back in God Dang, that would have been like late 90s, early 2000s. That was a long time ago. Very first Diablo with StarCraft. I actually played it at a very high level.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:19]:
At one point on the ladder, I was ranked like 300th in the world. So I played it a lot. And then moving on from there, I got really into first person shooters. I played a lot of Halo and a lot of Destiny and I was quite into that world. In fact, I almost took a job at Bungie back in 2011, 2012 to work on destiny and the storytelling there. And that was going to be a job of a lifetime. I was really excited because I love video games. I love storytelling.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:51]:
I love the visuals. I love everything about it, which makes a lot of sense because as a person with ADHD, we are drawn to the novelty of video games. But the problem for me was I could not control that stimulus. It became an addiction for me very, very quickly. And I would literally spend 15 hours a day playing video games. It was impeding my ability to do work at school, my relationships. It was destroying my life, and I could not get out of it. And so the only solution for me was to just get rid of all video game consoles, because I just couldn’t moderate.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:30]:
I could never find moderation. I was like an alcoholic who just says, I can quit whenever I want to, but then they just go right back to the bar, and that was me. So the only way for me to get away from it was cold turkey. I had to just shut it down. Now, I’m on one end of the extreme, but there’s a lot of people who will say, I only play 30 minutes a day right before bed to unwind. I’m being very productive in all the other areas of my life. And to that I say, that’s fantastic, guys. That’s awesome.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:55]:
Video games can be a great release. It can be a great recreational hobby, a great way to connect with friends, a great way to make boost your creativity and enter into a world of novelty and fun. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it’s important that we understand what are the expense, the costs that we are paying by playing video games. And to look at a video game and say, oh, there is no cost, well, that’s just not true. There is. And it’s actually probably more impactful to your brain than you even realize, even if you’re still managing to be functional in other areas of your life. So I wanted to talk about three in particular. Three areas that you are paying a cost for this cheap dopamine that the video games are giving you, even if you’re only playing it on your terms for a little bit every day or once a week or whatever it is, just to unwind and relax.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:45]:
And again, nothing wrong with that, because as they say, whether it’s playing a video game, it’s watching a Netflix movie, it’s eating junk food, whatever it is, the poison is in the dose, okay? So that’s a phrase that we hear where the difference between something being poison or being medicine is just in how much of it you take often, right? There are medicines, there’s drugs that are great for you if you take them to their prescribed amount, but if you take more than that, it becomes poison, right? And it’s the same thing. Moderation is the key to everything in life. But in particular, I really want people to understand that there are costs that you are paying inside of your brain when you play video games that you can’t necessarily see or feel in the moment. But over time, over years and decades, they play out in a way that is very predictable and they will take a toll. And so I’m of the mindset that we should be cognizant of what those tolls are. So the first one is obviously the dopamine receptors in our brain. And we know this from social media, from just internet in general, from video games. They are designed to push the dopamine button in your brain.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:57]:
And the dopamine button is the feel good button. It makes you feel good, it makes you feel motivated. It’s the chemical that makes us move towards a goal, a target. It’s the thing that motivates us to get out of bed, to go chase the elk, to kill it, to bring it home and eat it, right? If we didn’t have dopamine, we would have no motivation or desire to go out and do the thing. And so video games have this way of stimulating our dopamine receptors, our dopamine response in a way that the natural world just never does. Because the truth is, the natural world is just kind of boring. And so we live between kind of like this low level dopamine baseline and it peaks as we do certain activities. Whatnot? But when we play video games, it is a dump of dopamine flooding our systems in an unnatural way that our human evolution, our human biology did not evolve to process.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:54]:
Okay? So that’s number one is that when you are flooding your system with that much dopamine, it raises your baseline of what you expect to be normal, what it requires for you to feel good, to feel motivated and feel directed towards a target. And so that one’s massive because you play enough video games for long enough and the rest of the world starts to gray out a little bit, it becomes very hard to get motivated to pursue ambitious things at work and your normal life. And you can see this. It’s really interesting reading the comments on this particular post because some of them were like, you know what, I don’t need to rise and grind. I don’t care about my job and this and that and I have stability in this and I love the video games and the junk food in moderation because they bring me happiness and fulfillment and it’s like listen to yourself. You are trying to convince yourself that you have accepted a life of mediocrity. And that’s what dopamine does. It literally lowers your expectation of what your life could be.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:53]:
And then you start to get the satisfaction and happiness that you would otherwise get from your real life achievements and it just kind of super transposes it on top of the video game and that becomes your new reality. And so now you have sacrificed the real for the virtual. Okay? It’s really hard to see in the moment. I was there too, when I was playing video games and I was climbing the ladder, there was something that was so profoundly important about getting that next level up, getting that next item, completing that next quest. For some reason, when you’re in the moment, it feels like the most important thing in the world. And it feels truly important. Like if I get to a level 100, this matters and I’m going to look back on it in 30 years and this is going to be an achievement I’m proud of. But I’m telling you guys, having climbed all the ladders and all the video games and played them, all the video games that I played, I played at a very high level.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:51]:
I got really into them. I can tell you that after you leave that video game, you get distance from it, after a couple of months, you realize it was all for not. There really was no value in having done that next quest or that thing. All these things that we build up in our minds as being important, they truly are not. And it’s really hard to see that in the moment. It only comes with time and distance away from that dopamine dump that you’ve been deluging into your brain. So that’s number one is dopamine. The second is motivation, right? Because if dopamine is the motivation chemical, it’s the thing that gets us up and gets us moving.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:28]:
Well, video games are very good at keeping you motivated inside of it, right? Like the quest and the leveling up, like the whole framework is designed by brilliant people to keep you motivated and playing the game for longer and longer and moving towards goals. But the problem is this triumph circuit inside the brain. It lights up when we accomplish something hard or challenging. And video games are very good about making us feel like we’re doing hard and challenging things. Because video games are hard and challenging and there are benefits to video games in the sense that studies have shown that they boost creativity. That’s a great thing. However, if the only way that you feel triumphant now in life is when you’re playing these video games. Because in the normal world, again, life typically does not bomb us with the type of dopamine that we get in video games, then our achievements in life, they pale by comparison to the achievements that we are accomplishing inside the video game.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:31]:
And so again, the video game is becoming more important than our reality in many, many ways. And what I find is when I got away from video games, my motivation for a long time it flatlined and I struggled because I never had to work up the motivation to play video games, right? That was always easy. Staying in the video game was very easy. But then in real life, to do the things that are hard and meaningful and moving you towards a life of purpose and of greatness. Those are hard things and you do have to be able to self motivate. And when you have been dumping your brain for so long and raising your dopamine baseline so high, it is very difficult in the real world to get to that level where you can actualize and get momentum and traction towards your goals. And again, this doesn’t even require full blown addiction to video games in order for you to start suffering these effects. Because a lot of these things, they’re sneaky.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:32]:
They’re sneaky and they just kind of creep up on you because your baseline is getting raised over time and you just don’t see it when you’re in the moment. I know I didn’t and I say this because I did not go through just one phase of addiction with video games. I went through like four or five where it was like a year or two where I’d go really, really hard and then I would get away from it for a year and I’m like, oh my God, why did I ever do that? And then I would get back to this place like an addict and think, you know what, now I have it under control because now I have perspective about how dangerous it is, I’m going to moderate it. So I’d go back and start doing it again and the next thing I know, two years would go by and it was like, bam, that goes. And that was like my 20s, all of my twenty s a lot of my teenage years was just kind of spent in this cycle. So I’m just saying, like, it sneaks up and you think you can control it, and then you look back and you realize just how out of control you truly were. The last thing is the last really negative effect that I saw, at least from video games in my own life was escapism starting to escape into the video game and away from real world relationships, real world conflicts, real world challenges, and just trying to dissociate from those things. And as a result, my relationships with friends, my family, my significant others, they suck.
Anthony Vicino [00:12:42]:
They really struggled. This is one of the reasons why my fiance left me. It’s one of the things I don’t talk about is because I fell into a video game hole and nobody wants to be with somebody who is just falling into that world. And that one is another sneaky one because the world of the video game suddenly becomes more real than the real world and you’re more interested in it because it is inherently more interesting. It was designed to be interesting. And the truth is, the real world is just kind of boring, which again is why we don’t get the type of dopamine from the real world as we do from video games. And it’s very important that we’re not tinkering excessively with these very deeply rooted biological systems that have evolved over millennia. And so I’m not saying video games are bad in moderation, everything is okay.
Anthony Vicino [00:13:35]:
I think if you can be healthy with it and tempered in how long and how actively you play, it can be okay. But I just encourage you to think long and hard about what the costs are that you’re actually paying when it comes to playing video games and not saying you need to go away from them or anything like that. But when I hear people saying, I only play like 30 minutes a day, I’m like, 30 minutes a day is a lot. That is a lot of dopamine to be dumping into your body. And somebody in one of the comments said something about how they only play for 30 minutes right before bed. And I was like, I’m really curious to see what your sleep looks like. How much sleep are you getting every night? What’s the quality of your sleep? And I bet if we looked at those numbers, they are not getting very good sleep. And what they maybe don’t realize is that the effects of the video games that they’re playing right before bed is having a deletorious effect on the rest of their life.
Anthony Vicino [00:14:26]:
The energy levels that they have, the focus levels that they have into the next day. And they might be okay, but they don’t understand, like, they could feel great and that it may be that chunk of time. So all that to say, I still struggle with video games, guys. I don’t struggle with destiny or fortnite those games. I struggle with chess these days. It’s a different medium, but same concept. And so I say this all to you as a person who’s still deep in the struggle of trying to get away from it. So I’m not saying I have it all figured out that I’m better than you.
Anthony Vicino [00:14:58]:
I’m just saying, like, as a person who’s been in deep in that hole before and then out of the hole, I can tell you life is better when you’re not in it. So I hope this brings you guys some value. Let me know in the comments. What do you think about video games just in general? Am I way off base here? Have you had similar experiences? Shoot me up. I would love to hear about your stories as it comes to video games, because again, I love, love video games, and I love hearing about other gamers experiences. So I thank you guys for being here. As always, you rock. Until next time.
Anthony Vicino [00:15:27]:
Until tomorrow. Stay hyper focused, my friend.
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