I can play a video game for just an hour these days and then stop. I have no problem asserting control over my gaming because I have more important obligations.

这些天 我 只能玩一个小时的视频游戏，然后停下来。 坚持控制我的游戏没有问题，因为我有更重要的义务。

However, it wasn’t always this way. When I was in late elementary school to middle school, I struggled with a gaming addiction — to MapleStory, specifically. I would play almost eight hours a day on weekdays, and weekends could mainly more than 12 hours per day. During summers, MapleStory was all I did while my parents worked and largely left me alone.

但是，并非总是这样。 当我从小学晚期到中学时，我对游戏成瘾感到挣扎-特别是对MapleStory的迷恋 。 我在工作日每天要玩大约8个小时，而周末每天最多可以玩12个小时以上。 暑假期间， MapleStory是我父母工作时所做的一切，并很大程度上让我独自一人。

I had no control over my gaming.

我无法控制自己的游戏。

A couple of times, I stole my parents’ credit card to pay for in-game currency called NX in the game. On another occasion, I begged my mom to drive me to Target, the only store that sold NX in MapleStory. The Target ran out of NX cards, and I pouted and whined and got into a major argument with my mom as I scapegoated her for not taking me there earlier. She then gave in to my demands and then drove me to another target to buy the $25 card.

有几次，我偷了父母的信用卡，用于支付游戏中称为NX的游戏内货币。 在另一个场合，我恳求妈妈开车送我到Target，这是MapleStory中唯一一家销售NX的商店。 目标用完了NX卡，我po着嘴，发牢骚，并与我妈妈发生了重大争执，因为我替她her了她不早带我去的机会。 然后，她屈服了我的要求，然后驱车前往另一个目标，购买了25美元的卡。

My addiction to MapleStory brought out the absolute worst in me. Already a whiny child, I became a flat-out demon to my parents when they attempted to take the computer away. I got mad at anyone else who spent more than an hour at the computer. I distanced myself from my friends in real life all for the game.

我对MapleStory的迷恋使我感到最糟糕。 我已经是个小孩子了，当我的父母试图把电脑拿走时，我成了父母的恶魔。 我对在计算机上花费一个多小时的其他人感到生气。 在游戏中，我与现实中的朋友们保持了距离。

You know it’s terrible when maintenance for the game, which only lasted two or three hours, was a significant source of distress in my life.

您知道，仅持续两三个小时的游戏维护是我一生中最大的困扰。

While I played MapleStory, in part, to get over a hectic home life, my parents worked a lot and got home late. I was virtually unsupervised by anyone but my brother, and let’s be real: my brother liked video games too. He had no interest in being my babysitter.

在玩MapleStory的过程中，部分是为了度过忙碌的家庭生活，而我的父母辛勤工作了很晚才回家。 除了哥哥以外，我几乎不受任何监督，让我们成为现实：哥哥也喜欢视频游戏。 他没有兴趣当我的保姆。

The game meant a lot to me. It was the only source of stability in my life in a time I had none. When my parents were home, they got into screaming matches. They had gotten divorced when I was eight, and were in this strange arrangement due to financial constraints where they still lived together. It was hard for me as a kid, and it’s hard for me to talk about it as an adult. I’m withholding significant information about how bad it was because of the possible repercussions for my family.

这场比赛对我意义重大。 那是 唯一的稳定源 一生中我一无所有。 我父母在家时，他们参加了尖叫比赛。 他们八岁时就离婚了，由于经济拮据，他们仍然住在一起，处于这种奇怪的安排。 小时候对我来说很难，成年时也很难谈论。 由于可能对我的家人造成影响，我暂不提供有关情况有多严重的重要信息。

My parents weren’t big on capital punishment. They learned that it didn’t work for them with my older brother. However, one of the only times I remember one of my parents hit me was when I would not stop playing MapleStory one day in fourth grade. I had homework to do, and I was just glued to the monitor of my old eMachines desktop the whole weekend, and I acted like I was doing my homework whenever my parents came out of their room. But they were not fools.

我的父母对死刑没什么大不了的。 他们了解到，对我的哥哥来说，这对他们不起作用。 但是，我记得我的父母中唯一一次打过我的次数是，当我四年级的一天没有停止玩《枫之谷》时。 我有作业要做，整个周末我都被粘在旧的eMachines台式机的显示器上，每当父母离开房间时，我的行为就像在做作业。 但是他们不是傻瓜。

My brother played a lot of video games too — his favorite was World of Warcraft. He spent days in Internet cafes playing the game and got to the max level in the game. But he wasn’t obsessed like I was — he had a social life and friends. I had, well, MapleStory. Some days, I would wake up at 2 a.m. to play MapleStory and have an easier time getting into quests. I’d later fall asleep in almost all of my classes.

我的兄弟也玩过很多电子游戏-他最喜欢的是魔兽世界。 他花了几天时间在网吧玩游戏，并达到了游戏的最高水准。 但是他并没有像我那样迷恋-他有社交生活和朋友。 我有《 枫之谷》 。 有时候，我会在凌晨2点醒来玩MapleStory，并有更轻松的时间完成任务。 后来我几乎在所有班级都睡着了。

MapleStory provided me with a distraction to fill a huge void in my life — and as an MMORPG, MapleStory gave me friends too and social life. Of course, I never met any of these friends in real life, but I grinded with them to gain experience points, and I did party quests with them.

MapleStory使我分心，填补了我生活中的巨大空白-作为MMORPG， MapleStory也给了我朋友和社交生活。 当然，我在现实生活中从未见过这些朋友中的任何一个，但是我和他们一起磨练以获取经验值，并且我与他们进行了聚会任务。

For Maplers who know, I got to level 122 as a fire/poison mage before the Big Bang patch. It doesn’t sound like a big deal to Maplers today, but it was a huge deal at the time.

对于知道的Maplers，我在Big Bang修补程序之前达到了122级的火/毒法师。 对于Maplers来说，今天听起来不算什么大事，但在当时却是一笔不小的数目。

But that’s jargon for another day. When MapleStory was down on maintenance, I watched YouTube videos about MapleStory. I went on forums that allowed you to trade items. I invested in scrolls that gave me high attack weapons and gloves and spent a lot of real-life money on the game (again, stealing my parents’ credit card).

但这又是行话。 当MapleStory停止维护时，我观看了有关MapleStory的 YouTube视频。 我参加了允许您交易物品的论坛。 我投资了给我带来高攻击力武器和手套的卷轴，并在游戏上花了很多现实的钱(再次偷了父母的信用卡)。

Anyway, MapleStory not only drained whole evenings and whole days. It drained entire summers. Time would pass by extremely fast when I was playing MapleStory. I tried even to quit the game a couple of times, but I would always come back, and then play for six to seven hours on weekdays, and 12 hours on weekends. I would criticize other players who weren’t as active as me, especially if they were in my guild.

无论如何， MapleStory不仅耗费了整个晚上和整天。 整个夏天都干ed了。 当我玩MapleStory时，时间将会流逝。 我什至尝试退出游戏两次，但我总是回来，然后在工作日玩六至七个小时，在周末玩十二小时。 我会批评其他不如我活跃的球员，尤其是当他们进入我的公会时。

I had a couple of close friends in Maple who I interacted with all the time. It was where I learned emojis like XD and acronyms like “lmao,” “lol,” and “rofl,” after all. I had three close friends in a guild I created, and we would play legitimately all the time. One of those friends was Nancy, who was college-aged and married, and I was online friends with her husband (although we weren’t as close). At the time, I was 12.

我在枫树有几个亲密的朋友，我一直与之互动。 毕竟，我在那里学习了XD等表情符号和“ lmao”，“ lol”和“ rofl”等缩写。 我在一个公会中有三个密友，我们会一直合法地比赛。 其中的一位朋友是南希，她已经上大学并且已婚，我和她的丈夫是在线朋友(尽管我们之间的关系不那么密切)。 当时我12岁。

If the stolen credit cards weren’t bad enough, my grades would suffer. It wasn’t horrible, and I thought I could rely on my natural intelligence at the time to get through middle school. I did alright, but I didn’t study or perform to my potential because I was so addicted to MapleStory.

如果被盗的信用卡还不够糟糕，我的成绩就会受到影响。 这并不可怕，我认为我当时可以依靠自己的自然才智来读中学。 我没事，但是我没有学习或发挥自己的潜能，因为我对MapleStory如此上瘾。

How did I recover from it? Well, I did through sheer luck, or I don’t know where my life would have gone. I scroll through Reddit threads occasionally about how MapleStory ruined people’s lives, and I count my graces to God — after all, it could have been me if I never stopped. I must have logged tens of thousands of hours, but I stopped.

我如何从中恢复？ 好吧，我是靠运气做的，或者我不知道我的生活会去哪里。 我偶尔浏览Reddit主题中有关MapleStory如何破坏人们生活的信息 ，并且我向上帝算是我的恩宠-毕竟，如果我永不止步，那可能就是我。 我必须记录了数万小时，但我停了下来。

One reason is that I got hacked. Well, hacked is a generous term of describing it — I was just a fool. Someone in my guild said they could get me hundreds of millions of mesos (MapleStory currency) and unlimited NX. 11-year-old me thought it was possible, so I gave him my account information. I didn’t get that account back. As a result, I took a bit of a hiatus because I was so angry at myself for being such an idiot.

原因之一是我被黑了。 好吧，hacked是描述它的一个宽泛术语-我只是一个傻瓜。 我行会中的某人说，他们可以让我获得数亿个mesos( MapleStory货币)和无限的NX。 11岁的我认为这是可能的，所以我给了他我的帐户信息。 我没有收回该帐户。 结果，我有点犹豫，因为我对自己这么傻瓜很生气。

In another instance, I also gave my friend, Chris, the information to my account in elementary school. I started to lash out at him in class and the playground to give my account back after he changed the password. I couldn’t control my temper, and I threatened to beat him up a couple of times. He denied that it ever happened. Tensions between us got so heated that our classmates reported my behavior to the guidance counselor, and I was called in to settle things with Chris. It didn’t work.

在另一种情况下，我还把我的朋友克里斯(Chris)的信息提供给了我在小学的帐户。 在他更改密码后，我开始在教室和操场上向他猛烈抨击，以将我的帐户还给我。 我无法控制自己的脾气，并且威胁要殴打他几次。 他否认曾经发生过。 我们之间的紧张局势变得如此紧张，以致于我们的同学向指导顾问报告了我的行为，并叫我与克里斯达成和解。 没用

When I was at level 122, I used my parents’ PayPal information to pay $5 for NX, obviously without them knowing. My dad canceled the charge and reported it as a fraud. The next day, my account was suspended until the purchase went through, and I wasn’t going to have that conversation with my dad about how I stole his PayPal information.

当我的水平为122时，我使用父母的PayPal信息为NX支付了5美元，这显然是他们不知道的。 我父亲取消了指控并将其报告为欺诈。 第二天，我的帐户被暂停，直到购买交易通过为止，我也不会和父亲进行关于我如何窃取他的PayPal信息的对话。

I simply wasn’t in control of my life: MapleStory was.

我根本无法控制自己的生活： MapleStory是。

To this day, it is MapleStory that reminds me I’m an addict. It was my first addiction, but I can become obsessively fixated and lose control just as easily over my work, over my athletic accomplishments.

直到今天， MapleStory提醒我我是一个瘾君子。 这是我的第一个上瘾，但是我会变得迷恋不解，失去对工作和运动成绩的控制。

To people who don’t think gaming addiction is serious, the WHO, in 2018, declared “gaming disorder” a diagnosable condition under three conditions:

对于不认为游戏成瘾很严重的人，世卫组织在2018年宣布在以下三种情况下可诊断为 “游戏障碍”：

• It’s a pattern of behavior for at least 12 months where gaming is out of control.这是至少12个月游戏无法控制的行为模式。
• The behavior pattern has to show an “increased priority given to gaming,” and gaming has to take precedence over different interests and activities.行为模式必须显示“给予游戏的优先级增加”，并且游戏必须优先于不同的兴趣和活动。
• There has to be behavior that affects someone’s relationships, education, or occupation必须有会影响某人的人际关系，教育或职业的行为

Ultimately, gaming controlled my life and showed me that I have to be careful because I will always be an addict. There are times where I lose control again — at the beginning of the pandemic, I played Civilization a couple of days for 10 hours on end, neglecting all my daily tasks and obligations at work and home.

最终，游戏控制了我的生活，并向我表明了我必须小心，因为我永远会上瘾。 有时候我会再次失去控制力。在大流行开始时，我连续几天玩了《 文明》 ，持续了10个小时，却忽略了我在工作和家庭中的所有日常任务和义务。

I have greater self-control than I did when I was 12. But the feeling that I need to play “just one more turn” or “just one more quest” is something I felt in MapleStory that I need to catch myself doing.

与12岁时相比，我的自我控制能力更强。但是，我需要在MapleStory中感觉自己需要“再转一圈”或“再完成一个任务”，这是我需要抓紧自己做的事情。

I am working on myself in a lot of ways. I’ve been actively pursuing going back to therapy and my confronting some childhood trauma. I’ve matured, but I always have to be careful that I don’t fall into the same gaming traps that I used to.

我在很多方面都在为自己工作。 我一直在积极寻求恢复治疗的机会，并面临着童年时期的一些创伤。 我已经成熟了，但是我总是要小心，不要陷入以前的游戏陷阱。