Playing Online Video Games After a Huge Break
Whoa, that's super weird. Here's my experience in playing Brawl Stars after 2 years!
Since I was 6 years old, I have been absolutely in love with video games. They always provided me with an easily-accessible portal to escape reality and enter a universe where I am totally in control!
Online gaming was even better. In addition to the advantages of offline games, they allowed me to engage with different people from all around the world and make new friends!
However, I quit online gaming when I was 15 (in 2022) because it became sort of an addiction. In fact, I couldn't survive one day without playing my all-time favourite: Brawl Stars! My main goal was to drag myself into a dopamine detox so that I could make boring stuff (e.g. studying) more enjoyable.
What is a Dopamine Detox?
Dopamine is a hormone released by your brain whenever you do a pleasurable activity like playing video games and watching movies. That's why it's called the "feel-good" hormone. Your brain craves for it.
Your dopamine levels rise higher than the baseline whenever you engage in a highly enjoyable activity. The higher these increased levels of dopamine are from the baseline, the lower your dopamine levels drop when you stop doing that activity.
Lower levels of dopamine cause a lack of motivation, tiredness and inability to focus. This is why studying is so hard after playing video games!
However, after a while, your dopamine levels automatically return to the baseline.
That means you have to stop doing any pleasurable activity for some time (it can be short or long depending on how much your dopamine levels are deviated from the baseline). That way, you can end up with healthy dopamine levels. This is called a Dopamine Detox!
Coming Back to Online Gaming
I'm a huge fan of the Supercell game, Brawl Stars. It's the online game I have most seriously played in my life. I was even fairly good at it!
After giving up on Brawl Stars in 2022, I checked it out again in 2024 for fun. I was quite surprised to see how far I had come:
However, I was so lost in the game! It'd been 2 years since I last played a Brawl. A ton of things had changed. Apparently, that's how everything's supposed to work. Nothing can stay the same forever!
Anyway, after playing a few matches, I started to get the new things under my belt and my muscle memory struck back! That's when I realised that I was trapped in Brawl Stars' feedback loop!
I was getting exposed to huge levels of dopamine after a long time. My brain was so greedy that I ended up playing around 30 matches non-stop!
I dare say, dopamine's influence on the human brain is insane! After I stopped playing, I was literally shivering. I had no motivation to do anything else but play one more match!
And so, I went on, cracking 10 more games! In the end, I was finally able to break the trap and uninstall the game.
Conclusion
Believe me, it was too much to handle after a 2-year-long dopamine detox. I’m planning to use some cool apps to moderate and maintain healthy gaming habits. (ScreenZen and StayFree are good options)
So, let me just sign off and play a few more matches real quick! See you in another article!