I tried quitting video games cold turkey shortly before starting university. At the time, I was a huge Diablo II and Broodwar player. It was probably all that I ever did or thought about on a day to day basis during highschool. At lunch, my friends and I would hang out on Battle.net in the computer lab and then again, after school, probably from 5pm to 11:30pm every day (with 11:30pm to 1am dedicated to school work). I was pretty much obsessively playing these games to the point that my schoolwork started to suffer as well as relationships with parents and siblings. I'd get into daily fights with my parents about how much time I was spending online.... luckily I was somehow able to keep my grades pretty decent and got accepted into a good university.
During university it was League of Legends every day. After graduating, I racked up almost 4000 hours of Team Fortress 2 in a two year period in addition to a few thousand hours of World of Tanks.
I can honestly say that I regret all of it and I now look at my 'hours spent playing X' Steam statistic in shame. The thing with all of these games is that time spent playing them is a sunk cost, not an investment. You will never get it back. You will never acquire any returns for your time except for the immediate gratification you receive while playing it. And your real life problems won't just go away but will probably just get worse for lack of attentiveness.
If you are consciously aware of these facts and that is what you are after, then great! But I think many people get sucked into the addictive side of video games unwittingly. It's just a fact that most of these games have been psychologically designed to keep you playing for as long as possible -as long as you keep playing it, you can retain that sense of fake fulfillment and defer whatever reality you were trying to escape from in the first place. Day after day passes by in the blink of an eye because your brain gets put on auto-pilot, and those hard realities never get any easier. "Achievements", ladder ranking, collecting digital pixels... it's all just so meaningless in real life. These things turn people who might otherwise have followed their natural curiosities or be great producers of things (be it code, reading, writing, art, music, etc) into mindless consumers craving that next fake reward. And to me that is a pity.
I wish I could have spent all those hours developing my real life interests instead. All told, I'm probably behind by 5-6 years in terms of technical proficiency and just maturity-wise compared to the peers I look up to the most. I have nothing to make up for those deficiencies except perhaps an overactive adrenal gland and some mild social anxiety.
Video game experiences are, by their very nature, virtual and transient. Would you not rather spend your time honing a skill or producing something of real value (that doesn't end when the servers shut down), something to look back fondly upon when you're older? The only game worth playing is the game of life.