You know you need to take a break from gaming when...

[Mafoobula]

I got a shiny new gaming laptop recently, and to celebrate, I purchased a bunch of the games that I couldn't play until now. At the moment, I'm binging on Mass Effect 2. After playing for about 5 straight hours, I took a break because my stomach told me it was well past lunch time. And dinner time. One of my battle buddies noticed me and asked me about showering or something (deployed US Army, btw) and for a fraction of a second, my mind super-imposed the conversation option wheel thing below him.
I didn't play anything at all for the rest of that night.

Also, I used to play World of Warcraft. I can almost stop right there.
It got to a point where, when I saw something expensive I wanted, I thought to myself, "some questing and grinding should get me... Oh god dammit."

 

[RedOniBlueOni]

after my friend bought Heavy Rain, three of us got together and took turns playing levels doing all the little arbitrary quick time events it takes to do mundane things in the game. after 5 or 6 hours of this it got to the point where I started seeing prompt buttons in front of my eyes as I walked up the stairs to the main floor.

When I stood in the shower, an arrow prompt told me to turn the faucet a certain way in order to make the water turn on. and so on and so forth. I realized that I had played way too much damn Heavy Rain and it was putting goo into my brain.

Thankfully, the strange button and arrow prompts stopped in about a day and half.

 

[Telperion]

In preparation of having an entire weekend for myself (my gf being away on a business trip), I cooked, cleaned, hoovered and washed dishes on Thursday. On Friday Deus Ex: Human Revolution was preloaded and ready to play on my PC. The next time I slept was on Saturday evening, although I did catch a catnap around Saturday noon. I kept myself fed, relatively clean and took regular breaks every six to seven hours. I even showered on Sunday morning after sleeping for about eight hours straight.

By Sunday afternoon I was very busy cleaning house and making sure all the evidence of my self-abuse were gone before my gf came home. I read an article about an art event, so I could convincingly talk about it with my gf on Sunday evening. I had a really good weekend, and my gf will never know what I really did from August 26th to 28th 2011.

 

[Images]

Quite often when I sleep through an alarm and am late for an appointment as I frantically get ready I hear this in my head.

 

[C-Mag]

Hmmm....

Well there was that one time after a Fallout binge (no I won't tell you which one) where for the briefest moment I thought I should quicksave before going down the stairs. Not for any particular reason, I had just gotten into the habit of saving my game often for no good reason.

This might not count, but the year just isn't complete until I've looked to the side of the page on a book to scroll down, or ran my finger over the text trying to copy paste it.