One friend of mine had to give up playing video games. Why? He was seriously addicted on a level similar to the World of Warcraft South Park episode. So he got up one day, threw in his copy of Diablo II and said: “video games no more, I would like a social life”.

He would later tell me that the core reason for him doing this was that video games offered you the illusion of progress and achieving goals when, in fact you weren't. You were just sitting with your gamepad / keyboard tapping at buttons, moving fictional characters forward. He argued that games were bad because they were addictive and stopped him from achieving his real life goals. Diabo III has now arrived and he really wants to play it - he can remember all those feelings of being satisfied and achieving. In short when he played, he felt good. His goal was to translate this feel good feeling into social and real world interactions.

My friend inspired me to give up video games and see if this improved my social life. At the beginning of October I stopped playing whatever FPS / adventure game I was currently working through, sold my PS3, PSP and 3DS, and started finding other things to do.

The first thing that hits you when giving up something you spent a fair amount of time doing is boredom. What do I do now? So I started by ringing up friends. The first 2 months I filled out by visiting plenty of people and making sure that every night I had somewhere to go and someone to be with. It was great and I definitely felt less lonely from it. Only thing was that I got irritated if there was no one around. I started to read more. Something I still do now. I found I had time for books I would have never read, I even started reading some John Grisham novels. I got out of the house more often and made more contact with close friends. I drifted apart from other people as I felt less connected to them. I have another friend far away who spends the majority of his life in front of a screen consuming either films, television or games or just surfing youtube / facebook so I had nothing to say to him. After 2 months I was wanting to leave the house a lot more frequently, a very healthy thing to do.

I thought that giving up gaming would make me a more productive person and in a way it did. I ran a marathon and was training three times a week for this, I read more but it certainly did not make me want to work any harder. After six months I found I was not spending any more time working than I was before and considering my job, a teacher, I could have easily spent more time planning lessons and coming up with some really creative ideas. My personality hadn't changed as much as I thought it would. My parents have often told me that I seem chirpier when I'm not gaming but there's no real evidence to support their hypothesis. Perhaps it was just that they were always the ones to distract me from playing games and I didn't like that.

And so I continued avoiding games for the next 8 months or so. The only times I really missed playing were when I saw adverts or articles in the newspapers for games I'd been looking forward to. One day I saw my 'no games at all' friend with Angry Birds on his phone so I questioned him. “Well it's better than staring at walls on the bus” he replied.

This really got me thinking. There is gaming because you are hooked / addicted and there is gaming because you want to be entertained. When my friend said this I realised there is a pretty big rift between the two. Which one was I? One month on and another friend had just bought Batman: Arkham City. He asked if I wanted to see a bit and I told him about my year without consoles - “everything in moderation” he said. True, I thought, very true.

Was I the guy that was addicted to games or did I just really enjoy them. In truth I was probably a little from column A and a little from column B. I remember some nights when I first moved away from home where going to bed was not a possibility unless 30 minutes was spent playing a game first and sometimes shirked going out in exchange for playing games in a solitary setting. There's no risk of messing up social interactions that way and you are in your own sort of comfort zone. More recently I was happy to go out three or four times a week but I still think about gaming a lot. I get excited about games fairly easily and as such it's hard not to think about a new game on the horizon. I might not play Max Payne 3 for a long time and yet I'm still salivating at the thought of spending some time with Rockstar's latest.

Something hit me hard around February time. I found out I was going to loose my job and all the security I thought I had with that. I slowly realised that I didn't have much. I went onto Steam downloaded Half Life and started playing. All of a sudden I felt a little comforted. I played it little by little each day and after a week I had finished it. I then downloaded Max Payne and some other classic titles and started to play them through. There was a huge comfort in playing those old games and it distracted me from real life. I was still actively looking for other jobs and still am. Plenty of time was spent going to agencies so it's not like gaming stopped me in my tracks.

So here I am, I'm back into gaming and would like to get a high quality smart phone so I can at least buy cheap games on my phone whilst being more frugal with my money for the moment. My other friend was right. Everything in moderation. I do want to play a lot of games but the difference is that I'm conscious of it this time round. I know that I need to keep my social life going and am doing a pretty good job of it. I'm involved in my local community and am helping to run a couple of communal events this year. I hope I'm not wrong for getting back into gaming but only time will tell.

What do you think? Do I sound addicted or do I just need to be careful?