Games and Time Management

Games are meant to be addictive. The more you play the more you want to play them.

I know from experience. I played almost continuously in one of my high school years, and had such a period in my twenties too.

To keep the "addiction" under control, you need to be strong, and set out some limits, and not cross them for the fun of the game. Not even because 'otherwise you will lose'. There will always be someone (or a group of gamers) who can kick your ass. You can't beat 'everyone' all the time and you can't defend against 'everyone' all the time.

The way I see it now, when I notice I dedicate quite a large portion of my free time to gaming, is I need to time manage it. As unattractive as it may seem, this is the only solution not to be sucked in, and to have time for all the other beautiful things in life.

For now I'm in "discovery mode". To see how much time I really spend gaming, on average. Because on Steem Monsters, for example, it's easier. You start at this time and end at that time. Either the ranking for the season or in a tournament, you have a distinct time span you spend playing. Plus any additional time you might spend writing a SM post or in the market, or analyzing your collection.

On DrugWars, it's a little bit more complicated. You check the available resources to upgrade/build army. You might check if you got attacked occasionally (since there isn't an alerting system). If you do any attacking yourself, you look for targets, select armies and launch attacks. It's quite difficult to quantify the time spent in total for these activities.

Of course a bot doesn't mind doing any of the tasks above, because for it time is only a parameter. For us though, time is something that passes and never returns.

I love both games and I will continue playing them. But soon, I'll simply add time limits to that, just like on any other daily task. Gamer in me already protests... :)