A hobby doesn't have to be an addiction, there are casual gamers, hardcore gamers, professional gamers, and I guess the people who do more than their healthy share of gaming. Getting the addicts to game less and do other things might require cold turkey for some of the poor souls out there, but you can actually start with a timer.
I remember one of my friends was put on a game-timer by his mom. She didn't play, she had the system plugged into a timer and it would shut off. Imagine you're doing great in a game and everything just shuts off. (Momma no!) That sucked so bad, but... if you feel like you need to put a timer on that's an option. If you decide to put your children on a time, be fair and let it be a simple egg timer so they can save their progression, or... the money spent on the game will go to waste.
I think I was addicted at one point in my life. I know I was... but I found a happy medium with friends who motivated me to put down the controller and enjoy other things. We (well... Blu) talked about this already but the post was a year or two ago and I just feel like people like the Well Being Chief may have to pull it back some. If you game in moderation and you love it, why can't you play a video game?
One thing we promote is playing the types of games that work with your lifestyle. A busy bee can't work all the time and dedicated hours to Final Fantasy, but the busy bee has the right to dedicate an hour or two per week to enjoy his or her favorite game if they want. What's a life full of work without play? Grace mentioned that it's a break from reality for her.
What's the other side of not having time to smell the roses? That's straight-up depression in my opinion, and I believe that some people run into a midlife crisis because they didn't stop and enjoy once in a while. Being a grown-up doesn't mean a life of working every hour with no fulfillment. That's cap though because some adults aren't working all the time, some sleep in a lot when they aren't at work but a crap ton of people are on their phones too flipping through social media.
I call cap because (come on) it's not like that time is going to anything that's comparatively better than gaming. If we aren't playing single-player games (offline), we're playing multiplayer games interacting with other people doing something we enjoy doing while socializing. My idea of socializing isn't taking pictures of myself with filters to show my good side on camera just to wait around and see who likes and comments on them. We're enjoying some game time. I was thinking about this and I was going to add it to the top 10, but I wanted it to be separate.
Yes, you can put too much time into something, but just eliminating it isn't always good. You can eat too much fruit, but that doesn't mean you should stop eating fruit. Exercise your options, there are different types of games and some have hundreds of hours in gameplay but sports games are limited to a time clock. Fighting games are on a time clock. Racing games are based on the length of the track. Casual games can be picked up and played on your phone and when you close it, you can pick up where you left off if it's like Candy Crush.
It's up to you if you want to quit... that's up to you, but if you want to game on... you have the right to.
I don't think that some people realize they're gaming when they play Wordle, but... they are (ha).
