How play turned into work, and work nearly killed me.

by SuperSanne1234

Here's an article for your site, it's the least I can do! I can't thank you enough!

How play turned into work, and work nearly killed me.
"Uh oh, only a few more minutes before I miss my train! I have to run and... OH CRAP! I FORGOT TO DO MY DAILIES!!! Better do 'em now or I might forget again!"

Sound familiar? If you don't live in the Netherlands (where the train is like our second home), just replace "catching the train" with "dental appointment", "school" or the name of that great movie on TV you had really wanted to see, but forgot about because you were watching the spiffy flash animation that went with the advent calendar. And of course you had to find that stellar constellation to finish the altador plot. You hated searching for it, even with the help sites it still drove you mad. But you knew you had to hang in there, the plot prized would surely be worth it! Rare avatars maybe? A shiny new sidebar perhaps? Who knew, maybe they'd even release a couple of cool items like an Altadorian Paintbrush or a Darkest Faerie Attack Pea... Real life could wait!

I think the Altador plot sparked something in me earlier. I slaved for days behind the computer generating star charts, finding my spellbook and having tiresome fights with the janitor. I was bored out of my skull: go to the janitor, the archives, the astronomers club, hall of heroes... over and over again. Rinse and repeat. When I was fighting against sleep while trying to fix the water plant, a little voice in the back of my head started to nag. 

"Don't you have homework?"

"Nah, it's summer" I replied, mentally shrugging my shoulders. I couldn't move them in real-time: what if my fingers slipped of the keyboard right when the bakery finally restocked?!

"Don't you have something else to do?"

Again, the answer was no. In the Netherlands, people who study to learn a profession, usually go to a school in a different city and go by train, which our government pays for as long as we don't quit. My friends come from other cities: we meet at school, but it's very hard to meet during vacations and weekend, because of the travel distance and the money. The government only lets students travel for free on weekdays (there are exceptions, but I wont go into that). By the way, sorry for my bad English, I have no idea how to translate our school system. You have to go to school until you're 16 years old. After that, you can go to a different school and learn to be a doctor, designer, builder, teacher... stuff like that. It's not mandatory to continue to study, but if you don't do it, you can only get crappy would-you-like-fries-with-that jobs that no one wants. Besides that, it was July and my friends were on vacation anyway, so I had to entertain myself. 

To be honest, there were a few things I wanted to do. It was absolutely gorgeous weather outside, a rare feat in the ever cold and rainy Netherlands. The sun was shining, it was 30 degrees Celsius and people were walking outside in their swimsuits! Yes, sunny weather has a rather funny effect on the Dutch. Not on me, though. I used to love it, but for some reason I couldn't handle it anymore. It was too hot! Too bright! I was melting! Quick, Igor! Close the blinds!!!

There were also a few games I loved to play on my playstation 2. Star Trek Elite Force and Dragonball Z Budokai. I never had much time for those because of school end-of-year exams but now I had summer vacation! I also had a bunch of fanfics I wanted to finish writing (including a StarTrek/DBZ crossover, hehehe)! I wanted to draw fanart and maybe even a comic to go with my fanfic! I wanted to follow photoshop tutorials! I wanted to read books! I wanted to finally learn how to make a cool music video! I wanted to play DDR! I wanted... I wanted... I wanted... Oh well, it didn't matter. I had to finish the Altador plot first. It had been bugging me for weeks, and I HAD TO FINISH IT. I succeeded, but regretted all those hours I could've spend on those other things I had been craving to do for Jhudora knows how long. The regret and the nagging voice instantly vanished when I got the plot prizes. I finished it. I did it. Me. SuperSanne1234. Proudly I looked at the trophy at my userpage, and then went off restocking. I was only going to do it for a little while, really! And so what if I did it all day? If neopets was what I enjoyed, than shouldn't I allow myself to play as long as I wanted, even if it was the entire day? It was half-price day, a unique opportunity! Besides that, it was vacation, who cares how I spend MY free time? If this is what I wanted...

Later I realized it was not what I wanted at all. I am a member of fanfiction.net and deviantart.com. Every once in a while I checked those sites and marveled at the great fanfics that were updated on a weekly basis and the torrent of new artworks made by my favorite artists. Where did they find the time?! I had not updated "Beam me up Goku" in months! I had not uploaded a new piece of Star Trek or Dragonball Z fanart since... wait a minute, I had not uploaded my art at all! How did they do it? The answer was simple: it's not what they DID do, it was what they DIDN'T do: wasting their time on Neopets, slaving away for a baby paint brush while vaguely remembering that they were supposed to be having fun.

For me, relaxing play turned into hard work and I craved the rush of getting a rare item during a restock, or satisfying the compulsory need to do my dailies. The rush kept me going, it was all about adrenaline and the thrill of the hunt: "wow, I can't believe I finally got the packrat avatar!", "yeah, I won the auction! In your face, slowpokes!", "hurry, hurry, why won't this $#%@ page load?!"

I didn't play games for fun: I played for the neopoints. I didn't do my dailies because I wanted to, I did them because I had to. They weren't entertaining: they were chores. I HAD to do them!

I got headaches from sitting behind the screen for so long. My hands and feet were cold and I had trouble sleeping. I wasn't addicted, though. Oh, no! I ate dinner in front of the computer, but not ALWAYS! I still watched some tv every now and then and visited other websites too. I also never stayed home for neopets on my friends birthday or ignored my family or something like that. This made me better than the addicts, didn't it? Yes, my grades were slipping a bit, but I was just a tad over exhausted. Relaxing was important too, and Neopets was relaxing. Right? RIGHT?! Yeah, I played a lot, but I wasn't like *those* losers...

My health started to suffer. I gained weight, got more and more headaches and I forgot my medication. That's right, I have meds that I need to take regularly. I have ADHD and it's important that I take a new pill before the old one wears off or the symptoms return amplified (it's called the rebound effect: have you ever seen those poor kids who's overly paranoid ("CHEMICALS! OH NOES!!!") parents only allow them medicine on schooldays? If you ever spot one: RUN LIKE HELL!!!). I *forgot* them sometimes which made me feel horrible because I could feel the ADHD chaos that used to cloud my mind slowly creeping back in. However, even though I could feel them starting to wear off, I couldn't bring myself to go to the kitchen and take my next dose. The shops were about to restock!!! Combine untreated ADHD symptoms with an already lousy immune system and only 6 hours of sleep a night and you get me, stumbling through the house looking for Ritalin and painkillers while wondering why the world seems to be spinning. I looked like I had been painted Grey: bleak, bags under my eyes and hair that looked like there were things living in it. Maybe I'm overreacting, I don't know. But I have the unnerving feeling that, if I kept this up long enough, neopets could have killed me. Just how close did I get to that, before reading this site and finally waking up from this horrible nightmare? I really don't want to know...

SuperSanne1234


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