It’s hard to mix life and video games, they always seem to interfere with each other. Whenever something happens in real life, something in the gaming world happens. Christmas? Whoops, a huge amount of games just got released. A party? Whoops, your weekly World of Warcraft raid is that night. Exams? Whoops, Valve just released an enormous update for Team Fortress 2. Because every gamer faces these problems, here are some tips to keep a healthy balance between gaming and your life.

Tip 1
Limit the amount of games you’ll play. For example, say “This week I’m only going to play Left4Dead, Valkyria Chronicles and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.” This way, you won’t get swarmed by the huge amount of options when trying to decide which game you’ll play. Normally, you might think “I can’t do that, I’ve got no time, too many games to play”. But if you limit the amount of games, these thoughts won’t pop up. This is also very useful during the holiday season, with so many games coming out.

Tip 2
Spend less time on forums. This is especially useful for people like me, who can spend hours reading forums related to gaming. Whenever I pick up a game, I’ll also start reading forums related to it. Started playing Pokémon again? You can find me on Smogon. Taking a break from playing a lot of Team Fortress 2? Good chance I’ll be on the Valve TF2 forums. There is really hardly any gain from reading forums, so you save a lot of time by not doing so, and you can use this valuable time to do more useful things, like getting a job, or just playing more games.

Tip 3
You’re not forced to play everything right after it comes out, it can wait a while. Getting swarmed by games during holiday season? Pick up one or two, and just wait for a while before playing the other. New content just came out for your favorite MMO? Well, if you wait for a week before playing it, you can have just as much fun, and not everybody in the world will be trying to enjoy the same area at the same time. Even if you wait some time, the game or content will stay exactly the same, so there’s no reason not to wait. Team Fortress 2 is not fun with 10 medics on your team, and playing an MMO is not fun if there simply aren’t enough monsters to meet the demand. If it’s a single-player game, if you wait a while, the price will drop, and you’ll have more money to spend on other things; or, if the game is in high demand, you don’t have to stand in the cold waiting for midnight to be able to pick it up.

So there are lots of ways to make sure you have a better mixture of real life and gaming. It’s not necessary to drop it completely, as some would like you to believe. Keep these three tips in mind, the next time you have to make a decision between gaming and your life.

To pretend to be someone one is not, or is unable to be in real life, has always been a favored process to release stress and forget about most life’s problems ever since the ancient Greeks created the Tragedy as a form of entertainment. Playing a role, a projection of one’s personality under ficticious/imagined circumstances, possibilizes the experience of feelings and situations that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
Generally seen as a healthy sublimation of one’s aggressive impulses, in a Freudian manner, role playing shows its dark side when sometimes the actors become consumed by their own characters, inverting the transfer process, which may result in severe personality conflicts within the actor’s mind.

Ever since the dawn of the gaming industry, developers have spent a lot of their time creating games based on magical fantasy worlds where knights, wizards, dragons and damsels in distress were more than mere possibilities. There was a will to interact with these stories in reaction to centuries of spectating them. After years of toying with the limitations of A.I scripting, the bread and butter of the RPG genre, the Internet finally provided the necessary tools to connect role players worldwide and make them mutually interact inside virtual dynamic worlds, huge online theaters where every actor played an independent and unique role while affecting others at the same time. Thus MMORPG genre was born from the RPG and proceeded to replace its predecessor gradually, while not completely, attracting a considerably larger and more diversed fanbase and spawning an unusual amount of success and response.

However, what game developers failed to predict was how seriously some people would take this form of entertainment. Even though an excess of dedication of a player over a video game is taken as a benefit for software companies, since it usually translates on a larger income, growing obsessive behaviors towards a video game can generate hazardous effects, both game and real life based that will consequentially damage both players and developers.

Over the last few years we have heard of people who ruined their lives, commited suicide and even murdered others over MMORPG-related issues. Now, it is absurd to think or claim that this game genre carries some kind of curse or that its a threat to public health, but these facts clearly illustrate that something is indeed wrong with the way some players face it. What was initially intended to be a way to relax people is becoming more of a new source of problems and worries for those who use it. Though this social phenomenon might be a shadow on the role video games have started to play in our society, it is quite a fact that the MMORPG genre, with its so called “freedom” and “social interaction” has given birth to some of the most controversial cases and situations ever spawned by the game industry.