Five tips on beating video game addiction If you are a true video games addict, you could be playing for upwards of 24 hours a week. Think of it instead as a seventh of your week, three eight-hour sleeps (a generous amount of sleep a night by anyone's measure), or 16 football matches. World of Warcraft: easily one of the most addictive video games ever That should make you realise all the brilliant other things you could be doing with your time. 2) Read a walkthrough of the game This might sound counterintuitive, because you are reading something about the very game you are addicted to, but it will almost certainly ruin the game for you and kill the addiction. Once you have read a step-by-step guide on how to beat the game, the fun of discovering new things and finding what happens next is completely finished. The game should become much more boring, as it will no longer hold any surprises, and the game will be over for you. 3) Find some cheats In a similar vein to the last piece of advice, search out some of the best cheats a game has to offer. Be it flying a tank on Grand Theft Auto, or unlocking so-called "God modes" on James Bond Goldeneye, where you can summon any weapon in the game, cheating is guaranteed to break your addiction. It may take a while for the novelty of turning around the turret on your tank and taking off a little bit of time to get old, but once it has, the challenge of the game will be non-existent. And once there are no longer any challenges to a game, it will become boring faster than you can artificially boost your health. If you a feeling really advanced, use a memory editor like ArtMoney, which means that when your game is running, you can manipulate any numeric value in the game. Money, health and points will be at your mercy, rendering the game instantly less enjoyable. 4) Look around: are your friends real, or virtual? This is not to demean people who make friends playing video games online, or assume the character of the game they are playing so fully that their friends are virtual people. But it should not take long after asking this simple question to realise if you are a video game addict, the ratio of real to virtual friends will have slipped dramatically in favour of the latter. If you still do not feel like you are missing out, take roughly 22 minutes out of your gaming schedule to watch an episode of Friends. The next time you play a game, you should crave real human contact like never before. 5) Start playing games with your friends, not alone This may be tricky if having asked the question to number four, you find that the answer is you have no "real" friends left, but it is worth inviting friends round to play video games with you, or go to their house. Although you will want to play for as long as is possible, providing your friends are not addicted, there will come a point where they get bored, and they will force you to do something else. This should at least moderate the period of time you play for, and allow you to gradually reduce it over time. And if none of these five work, watch this rather zaney behavioural psychologist below.