To preface, this post isn’t a bash on gaming. I’ve been gaming since I was 3 years old on the NES. It was (and still is) a part of my life. That said, while I turned out ok in the end, I would play games every free moment I had. I’ve spent thousands of hours in World of Warcraft during the TBC-WotLK era. My pattern would be school-home-eat while playing wow-sleep thinking of wow-repeat. My whole social circle formed around WoW and LoL/dota2 later. I would often listen to music while playing. Of course, we grew up and we became distant over time. I more or less ended up with barely any friends.
I don’t play games much nowadays because it’s simply better for my own mental health. I still play but with a lot more moderation - occasionally booting my PS2 or playing a run or two of Binding of Isaac. Most of my free time goes towards creative hobbies.
15 years later, whenever I hear music from that time, I get jittery and think about the fun I had in wow. I’ve fallen into that trap. Private servers galore, I used to play in them back then too, they’ve gotten even better since then. I start playing, ditch all my other hobbies, go out only for work, and in the end not have fun at all, and spiral into depression. The itch barely gets scratched. This cycle has been repeating over and over. I don’t want it to happen again and I just got the jitters again.
I don’t want to stop listening to music I like just because monkey brain associates it with WoW.
Here’s my advice as someone that quit drinking about 6 years ago due to my inability to drink responsibly.
Do you want to quit? If you feel like you can’t handle playing a game in moderation, maybe it’s time to think about quitting it entirely. If you feel like playing other genres of games will eventually draw you back into playing more addictive games like WoW, then you could think about quitting that too, it’s up to you. If certain music makes you think about playing WoW and you can’t control yourself if you listen to it , make a sacrifice and don’t listen to it. I avoided bars for years and still don’t really love being around when people are drinking. The sacrifices I make are well worth it though and I’m much much happier as a result.
Have a long, honest conversation with yourself about what you want from life and how video games fit into it. That’s what I did with alcohol and realized I didn’t want to waste my life on stupid shit any more and decided to quit.