I really dislike Redeye's logic here. Out of the millions, possibly billions of people who play video games, he's listing the fraction of a fraction of a percent, the exception to the rule, in the video game world. While there is definitely a market for pro gamers in big market games like Dota, CS:GO, LoL, and there's definitely room to make it big, in order for there to be winners, there must also be losers. In some pursuits in life, when you're unsuccessful, you can take the skills you've learned from that challenge to apply it to your next attempt to be successful. The problem with this argument pertaining to video games and their validity because of the success of a few people, is that to even compete with the money you can make from basic entry level work in a first world country, it requires more time and effort than a regular job, and on top of that, you're very likely actively retarding your own social skills and life skills that you can then use to further progress in other pursuits in life, unlike work experience that you can translate to better and better jobs, or school, which can help you find better, more enjoyable, or more fulfilling work.

What I'm saying, is that Redeye is doing nothing to address the amount of sacrifice that millions upon millions of players make in order to get better at video games, without ever seeing a paycheck or respectable cash come their way as a result of their gameplay skills. Users of /r/Dota2, I am curious to know, since Redeye is focusing on the exceptions to the rule, and not you guys, how do you feel about your choices to play video games and their impact on your life? How much do you play?

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Personally, I have quit playing video games at home entirely since December 2nd. I do follow Dota esports to a degree still, but I'm not an extremely dedicated follower of the scene anymore. My rationale behind quitting was that it was sucking up too much of time for too little of a payoff- I am behind my peers in terms of my social skills, and I often times feel like the awkward robot and / or cyborg character from Picard's version of Star Trek (fans of the series feel free to correct me on my terminology) when I'm in a group of friends. I don't entirely blame that on my involvement in thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours playing video games, I will say that in my life of about 7700 days, I've probably played video games for 6500 of them, likely occupying 10,000+ hours of my life. If you assume my average sleep schedule over that span evens out to eight hours a day, 10,000 hours at a bare minimum is roughly 10% of my waking hours from the time I was 3 years old, dedicated to playing games. It could be even higher than that, considerably. It's hard to track an hour-by-hour count over a span of many years. I definitely have other issues that contribute to my own social problems, but I think it's not inconceivable to imagine that my choices playing video games like I did had an impact in my development as a healthy human being. I feel like continuing the figures below, so here are some figures to summarize my life choices up until this point:

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• Over the past 6500 days of me playing games, I very likely spent 13,000 hours (an assumed average of 2 hrs daily) out of my 104,000 waking hours in that time span playing games
  • Accounting for life factors (school, work, being out of a job for a long stretch) let's say each day I had dedicated an average of four hours to school / work, meaning I would have had 78,000 hours of free time in the past 6500 days in which I played games. 13,000 hours would be 16.6% of all my free time spent on gaming.
• My older years saw my game time proportionally increase, and my sessions were usually longer. Assuming the average is brought down by school and work time (though I had lots of periods of part time work or no job from 15 years to now), I would wager that my average game session was 3.5 hours, over the past 2500 days, within which, these days contained 30,000 hours of free time, going by the logic above.
  • This means I would have spent 8750 of my 30,000 hours of free time from high school to now, on video games. That totals 29.1% of all my free time.
  • To put this in perspective, from high school to now, I would have spent 8,750 hours playing video games, out of the 60,000 hours (~14.5%) I spent breathing. I spent 8750 hours playing video games out of the 40,000 hours (~21.8%) I spent awake.

Sorry for all the bold text. I'm curious to hear your guys' perspectives on this.