Ask HN: I am a good developer but have a serious gaming addiction

This is just my personal opinion but I'd take away gaming from my life if I were in your shoes. Actually, I WAS in your shoes once. I was addicted to gaming and would spend hours and hours in front of my laptop or xbox 360 trying to repeatedly do levels to get a good score. I was almost clinically obese until I realized I had to do something to improve myself for the future.

The thing of it is is that gaming doesn't really add value to my life as a developer/career person (unless you make money out of games). I have a serious case of addiction to whatever hobby I partake which is why I ditched gaming in favor of my new fitness endeavor.

Bodybuilding for me has immensely created a better psychological effect in terms of getting things done. In order to see results, you'll have to be patient and work smart (not hard) towards your goals. You can't just go to the gym and lift random weights and expect ground breaking results from a lack of planned training. You need to log everything including your meals, your training volume, and condition EACH day.

With that, I've incorporated those learning experience to my work. A business cannot grow if you have no plan to begin with. Questions like, in order for this thing to make "gains", what "training" methods should I look for? What "nutrition" will this need in order to fully maximize its potential?

Bodybuilding for me has become similar to how one would manage one's career or business. You take care of it, it takes care of you.

TLDR: Ditch gaming. Go fitness/bodybuilding.

Maybe you could meet with a friend, somewhere where you don't have a gaming computer. The friend could help you stay on track.

Otherwise at least go somewhere without a gaming computer - co-working space, cafe, library...

Perhaps the client can offer you a desk in his office?

tldr: Gaming is like calorie free sweetener, a job is like a (sometimes bland) hunk of roasted meat. If you focus exclusively on 'fake' achievements you might quite literally end up starving.

What job would you like to have? What do job ads for that post require in terms of technical skills and provable ability? What are some people that have jobs of that sort and what are they able to code, what technologies do they know, what is their work process?

Where are you in comparison with people whose career you would like to emulate? Avoid "I'm bad they're good" use more specific language: "They can write full stack PHP CMS-lite apps and deploy them to AWS with chef and manage all Ops tasks associated with keeping that app functional."

That's still vague but it gives you a list of research goals and some clear, real world ways to test that you've achieved them. Get yourself closer to that person's level of knowledge, as you advance adjust your current summary of skills and experience and upgrade jobs.

Write your own skill/tech tree and monitor where you are on it. See http://www.dungeonsanddevelopers.com/ for inspiration, though I think it's not that well themed(who cares about +10 strength, where do I record the +10% Bash Script writing speed I gained last week?)

On a more philononsense note:

Games are awesome because you get to achieve your goals. They are pavlovian systems optimized to tickle the part of our brains that enjoys creating a desire and then satisfying that desire.

Life is fundamentally about uncertainty. No model of your career path and the value of your labor is going to get within the ballpark of Civ's precision. Single player against the AI at lower difficulties you can have strategies that will win you the game every time, deterministically. With life there are just too many variables to make such strong predictions.

Imagine trying to think of a good strategy for winning a 50,000 game-year long Civ game, with a technology tree that's not set in stone(both in terms of the tree and in terms of each node) so investments made in a prior game might have different effects if made in this one. The tech tree is also 50 times larger. That's an encyclopedia just to get a grasp on what it is! Plus undiscovered nodes are oftentimes clouded in fog of war! Plus paths sometimes snap while you're on them due to the AI researching a different branch!

Fundamentally the pleasure of a game is that it gives you goals to strive for that are achievable and that you achieve constantly and steadily. Life will never give you that certainty of 'leveling up'. BUT! remember that game achievments, unless you are actually a pro gamer, produce no value for those around you and no value, beyond happiness hormones, for you.

It's quite literally a behavioral drug, mimicking useful human behavior.

Been there. Unreal Tournament (facing worlds FTW) nearly ruined me. I was playing so much I was in the top 5 on ngWorldStats for 3 months and lost sleep if my rank went down.

Fortunately after about 9 months my graphics card blew up leaving me with a shitty ATI Rage Pro which was useless for anything other than work. I didn't have enough money to buy another card.

Within a month of being forced not to play games, the urge went away.

Haven't played anything other than Sudoku on an old Nokia and minecraft with my kids since.

Go cold turkey. Just do it. Hurts for a couple of weeks but after that the world will open for you. Also stop reading books and motivation stuff - these people are just selling you an ideal. Only you can fix it.