Mad Skills
By Manny Vazquez, M.S., LMFT
June 13, 2026
Imagine a place where you can do anything you want to do. Would you like to play any sport as the G.O.A.T (the Greatest of All Time)? Would you like to fly? In this place you can. Would you like to fight and beat the Red Hulk, or Superman, or Batman? How about all three of them? At the same time?
Say you want to go on a quest to conquer the world? Or you want to fight in the worst skirmishes in the history of the world? Or, maybe you want to meet George Washington or Abraham Lincoln and actually fight alongside them? Do you want to fly in space? Land on the moon? How about landing on Mars? Are you perceiving where I am going with this? What if I told you the place where you can do all this is a real place?
I am talking about the world of video games.
Believe it or not, I have been playing video games since at least 1980, for over 46 years! I remember when video games were very rudimentary. The first video game I played was Pong. Who here remembers Pong? Basically, it was a video game version of tennis. It was a basic premise, but the game was very hard to control and play, I remember.
In 1984, video games had really started to take off. Some of my favorites included Pac-Man, Galaxian, Galaga, Donkey Kong, and many others. My friends and I would spend hours playing video games at 7-Eleven, bowling alleys, or arcades, even, many times, getting into trouble for coming home late.
All video games at 7-Eleven or in the arcades were 25 cents to play. For $1, I could play for a long time because I was fairly good at most of my favorites. It was cheap entertainment, and as with anything good that mankind invents, too much can be harmful.
In 1984, I became the sports editor of my junior high school newspaper, and I would write articles for all the different pages because our teacher wanted us to have a well-rounded experience in writing.
That year, in that class, I wrote an opinion piece that asserted that video games were acting like a new drug for some of my peers. Some kids, I wrote, were doing all sorts of things to get money to play video games. Believe it or not, one of my friends stole a lot of money from his Dad so that we could play video games. And many of my peers did many other things like that to be able to play video games.
For many men and women today, video games continue to be a problem. Some people never grew up and spend hours in their Parents’ basement on their video game consoles, acting like adolescents. The worst story I ever heard happened in Japan, at an Internet cafe, where a young man passed away in front of the computer where he was playing video games because he didn’t eat or drink anything for days.
Yes, video game addiction is a real thing. I’ve had young clients for whom video games seem like a terrible obsession. They would do anything to play, and I mean, anything. And I’ve had Parents take away all electronics from their children, which is a bad idea.
From what I know about addicts, you can’t just suddenly take away the object of their addiction. What you will do is create a raging monster, and I’ve seen this happen with many young people who are addicted to video games or addicted to anything, really.
Video game addiction is very hard to understand by someone who has never had a video game addiction, or really, who has never had any other type of addiction. To many people, a video game addiction seems silly.
People who are well often do not understand those who aren’t well. And perhaps that is the bigger problem that we have, that people with addictions (video games, drugs, alcohol) are often dismissed, their problems minimized by those who do not see the addictions and problems in their own lives.
In my 24 years of counseling experience, I have learned how to resolve any addiction, even video games. I’ll give you an
example, and this is not magic, by the way. Hypothetically speaking, say you smoke 20 cigarettes a day; as your therapist, I would say try smoking 19 for a while. Eventually, go down to 18, then 17, then 16, you get the picture. Depending on how long you decide to do this, eventually, you will be down to one cigarette a day, and eventually, you will stop smoking cigarettes. What you just did was wean yourself off cigarettes. I actually helped someone stop smoking in three days. True story.
The thing is that when you are ridding yourself of a bad habit like smoking or even video games, you have to replace that bad habit with something positive. For example, in the case of video games, I tell Parents, as you help your child cut down on video games, buy board games that he or she can play with you and the family. Enroll them in a club or a fun class, like photography or drawing. Take them out to Starbucks or other fun places. Do stuff with them so that video games lose their allure. In other words, replace the video games in their lives with something positive, if you indeed believe that video games are harmful.
I do believe, however, that video games can be a positive thing, too. On my PS5 console at home, I have baseball, soccer, some puzzle games that I play with my Wife Laura, football, and yes, all the old classics that I played when I was a kid. The thing is, I am not a video game addict. I can take it or leave playing video games. They do not interfere in my life. I would much rather do fun things with my loved ones than play video games. Almost anything can be a healthy outlet. But taken to extremes, even the most fun things can become addictions.
Oh, by the way, the title of this blog, Mad Skills, is actually a tribute to one of my favorite video games. I wanted to name this blog, Madden Skills, after my favorite football video game, but then you would have known what I was talking about at the outset, and my statement to you regarding the addiction to video games would not have surprised you at all.