"successful" league weaning
About a month ago, I installed Windows on dual-boot in my laptop with the sole purpose of installing and playing League of Legends. It turns out that, much to my surprise, I have to force myself to play when I want to kill some hours. I think I might have finally reached a point in my life where I'm... done with League?
You've probably heard of League of Legends, although you may not know much about the MOBA genre. It's a type of game where two teams compete to claim the other's base, advancing through a map with smaller objectives that make reaching the enemy base easier. The maps are usually always the same, but there's a variety of characters each player can play, with their own roles, and patch notes constantly change the already varied scenarios that player classes and characters introduce within the stable map.
I started playing League very casually in high school and stopped during undergrad, only picking it back up shortly before the 2020 lockdowns because my life had slowed down significantly in terms of responsibility. It's a demanding game: Even in non-competitive game modes, enjoyment of the game is hard without a baseline level of knowledge and competence, there's hundreds of characters to play, each with their own skillset which is used in different ways depending on the role they are played in within a team. I absolutely adored it; I was never particularly good at controlling my mouse and keyboard with precision (what is known as micro), although for a while I was surprisingly competent, but I had a very good sense of the map and the overall game state, which secured my team many victories. I'm also (and of this I'm not yet bored of) a League eSports fan, I love spectating games and seeing particularly competent players navigate the current meta and coordinate plays.
There was a point in my life where League became my default hobby: When I had some downtime but no energy to play, I would do deep dives into the theory of the game. I would play three or four games a day almost religiously, did so for four years. I occasionally also spent money on cosmetics when I wanted to treat myself to something because at the time they were relatively cheap and it felt like a good investment, since I used them and I didn't have anything else I wanted to spend money on.
Many times in those four years I would realize that I was investing way too much of my time in a community that almost conflated your skill as a player with your worth as a person, that I was paying for rental pixels because it had completely absorbed any other interests I had. I even tried to reduce the time I spent playing to avoid eye strain once my sight loss became disabling. I failed every time.
I honestly don't know what changed this time around; I had to uninstall Windows from my laptop a little over 9 months ago because the demands of W11 as a system were too large for my old pal. Severance's second season was a big distraction, but I don't think at any other point it would've been enough to pull me out of the League spiral. I've tried to be more social outside of League circles, which I believed may have broken some of the attachment; it really is so much nicer to talk to people outside of an environment that presupposes a competitive attitude, even outside of the game, with conversation prompted by care for the person instead of merely common interests.
At any rate, every single time I've sat down to play this month, whether I won or lost, regardless of the skill I felt I was displaying, the game felt rote and profoundly boring. It wasn't a lack of challenge, I certainly am far from good these days due to a lack of practice, but even thinking of putting in time to practice for ranked feels... pointless. I'm practicing something I don't enjoy for an acknowledgement of my skill in an extremely niche set of abilities when there's a world out there filled with actively enjoyable activities that I find much more enriching, that I'm much more willing to spend time on without it feeling like time wasted.
I still worry that I will find myself back in the spiral, but it's the first time I have an actively negative association with the act of playing and not merely the consequences, so I hope it'll stay that way. In the meantime, I'll look for things to fill my time with that make me feel curiosity and competence in a much more solid way.