Until high school, I considered my life to be quite smooth and uneventful. Everything proceeded as planned and expected by myself and my parents. High school became the turning point of my life because I experienced the first major bump: I played video games too much when I was in my high school so that I didn’t get high scores on most subjects. This marked a terrible beginning of my high school. Despite the defeat, I still got high scores on math due to my strong interest in it. My passion for mathematics became my saving grace. Through math, I gradually stopped playing video games and indulging myself in the virtual environment. Instead, I focused on my studies and my real life. This first major bump in my life all started back when I was a high school junior student in 2012.

My first contact with video game was because of the recommendation of my friends. Back then, there was this game called “Defense of the Ancients” that got very popular among us students. A lot of my friends around me were playing. I simply didn’t like the feeling of being left out. And usually some of my friends communicated with the terms in the game. As I didn’t play, I usually couldn’t understand what they were talking about. So, from that time on, I made up my mind to learn to play the game and got hooked quickly. Not only did the game settings and heroes intrigued me, I also loved to chat and make friends through the game, which gave me a lot of emotional support and sense of belonging that I had never felt before. As a result, I began spending more and more hours gaming.

The good thing about being a junior student was that most of the materials taught in class was only an extension of the middle school stuff. This allowed me to pass the exams quite easily even though I did not spend much time studying. However, my solid knowledge base from middle school was soon stretching thin. By the second year of my high school, my grades took a nosedive and I ranked the bottom in my high school class, an unprecedented low in my academic profile. Although I knew I needed to find a way to stop, whenever I arrived home planning to do my homework, I wanted to play more as I saw the computer.

Meanwhile, I was also exposed to several other games. Playing video games became more of a compulsory habit for me than a leisure time enjoyment.
My teacher was among the first to realize that I had problems. She had always been caring about every student in her class, and she would allow my grades to continue dropping. At the semester end of the junior year, I remember being asked to go to her office and have a chat with her. When she found out about the reason for my dropping grades, she said: “It is nice to have hobbies. However, you are too smart to allow your hobbies consume your life.”

She told me that she always considered me to be a promising and bright student, because I was never among the trouble makers in the class. She expected me to sort out my problems in the following year, because the lessons were only getting more and more difficult. Without enough effort, she was worried that I could not get into a good university.

My teacher’s words were not harsh. She was the one who rang the first alarm bell for me to change. Seeing the dropping grades, my always liberal parents knew that they had to interfere as well. During that time, after returning home in the evening, I always hurriedly ate the meal and started playing the video game. One day during the summer vacation, I continued until after 12 a.m. My father told me that I should go to sleep, but I just continued playing because I was too focused on the game. The father urged a few times, and it didn’t work. At nearly 1 a.m., my father was really angry and shut down my screen. In the following morning, my parents had a serious conversation with me. They threatened to confiscate my computer unless I had healthier schedules and improved my grade in the new semester.

The final decision to stop playing came from myself. Deep down, I knew the warnings from my parents and my teacher were right and for my own good. However, it was difficult to let go of the game because I had made so many friends. In addition to being in the game, we also had contacts in private. We had a special bond with each other and we could chat about almost anything, although we never met in real life. To my surprise, when I told them my worries about the dropping grades, they had similar opinions like my teacher and my parents did.

They all suggested me to gradually stop playing games for a while at least and invest more effort in studying. By the end of junior year, seeing my math grades suffer was truly the last straw for me. Thanks to the support from my teacher, my parents, and my friends, I made up the decision not to play video games anymore, so that my real life wouldn’t turn into nothing but dullness and disappointment.

As I began year two of my high school life, I began fighting the addiction through my favorite subject: math. Math had been my favorite subject since day one. I always find the numbers, shapes, and figures in math fascinating. In order to keep myself alarmed about what video games had done to my grades, I even created a function that recorded the intensity of my video game playing as well as my grades. Having plotted the graph with the two set of entries, a huge decline appeared in the graph as I first realized the damage of gaming. I continued plotting my grade changes in the following semesters as a form of motivation. My goal was to plot a rising curve by putting in all my efforts into studying.

In order to further reduce the temptation of gaming, I persuaded myself to sell my laptop and focused on improving my grades. I used the money to buy more books about math, physics and English, as they were the subjects that I was interested in the most. In addition to paying attention to my teachers in class, I also took extra classes to make up for the slack in year one. These efforts paid off as my grades began rising to satisfying levels.

To my biggest satisfaction, my math grade remained among the top 5 in class. Interestingly, I found the similar joy in studying like I did in video games. Just like how my friends in gaming supported and guided me, my friends in class offered me their help as well. They were always there when I encountered a problem, and I was there to help them with math as well. My teachers and parents seemed delighted about my change as well.

In addition to improving grades, I discovered a range of new hobbies as well. Basketball is among them. I had been playing basketball occasionally since middle school, until video games attracted most of my attention. In 2014, I joined my high school basketball club to enrich my leisure life. Basketball served as a great distraction from the temptation to play more games. Through basketball, I experienced the importance of teamwork and friendship.

Again, this experience created similar feelings like when I was playing DOTA. Unconsciously, my life was experiencing a major transition. I had much more regular schedules than year one. I work up and went to bed early every day, attended regular basketball trainings, and paid full attention in class. During the weekends, I found myself to go out more to the movies or the library, instead of locking myself in front of the computer screen for the entire day.

In the senior high school year, I could finally say with confidence that I said goodbye to playing video games for good. I obtained quite good scores on many subjects in the final year after changing the habit of playing video games. I always remember how my teacher warned me about the distinction between healthy hobbies and unhealthy indulgence. I consider this experience a valuable lesson for my life. Just like the old say of not putting all the eggs into one basket, out life is way too important to put into one basket as well. Focusing too much on one activities may bring temporary pleasure. However, it makes life extremely imbalanced and fragile. This is why I like to fill my days with different types of activities nowadays. In the future, I will explore more possibilities with my life and enrich it as much as I can.