A good measure to use when determining the value of a hobby is if it adds to or takes away from your sense of balance. Healthy activities help you feel revitalized, refreshed, and ready to tackle your challenges. Destructive activities leave you feeling drained and empty inside and less able to cope with the struggles of real life. Destructive activities also tend to leave you feeling compelled to continue rather than feeling in control of your decisions.
Although there is no specific test for addiction to online gaming, the following are factors that, taken together, may indicate an unhealthy involvement or addictive tendency.
• Do you play compulsively?
• Do you play for long periods of time (often longer than you had planned)?
• Once online, do you have difficulty stopping?
• Do you play as often as you can?
• Do you sneak or violate family rules in order to play, even when facing punishment or loss of privileges for doing so?
• When you are not playing, do you obsess about the game, plotting and planning your next opportunity to play?
• Do you sacrifice real-world things for your online world?
• Is your gaming negatively affecting your relationships with family members or other non-gamer friends? For instance, if you are a parent, does it cause you to neglect your children’s needs? If you are a child, does it cause you to distance yourself from your parents and siblings?
• Do you consider other online gamers (even those whom you’ve never met in real life) to be among your best friends?
• Is your school or work suffering because of the time and energy you spend gaming?
• Do you neglect personal hygiene?
• Have your sleep patterns changed since you became involved with online gaming? Are you staying up extremely late or getting up in the middle of the night to play?
School work suffering......sadly, in the last 2 weeks before graduating. I'm gonna have to back off a little if I want to keep the 4.0 I've earned over the past 13 months, and might lose because of 2.5 weeks on tengaged! AHHH!
Ok maybe not, but sleep pattern- def effed up, i do sometimes stay on a lil longer then planned, and I do consider a few people on this site really good friends even though I've never met then IRL.. lol <3
Is this for me <_< >_>