Video Games and Porn Addiction - Connection?

I think people who are not (and have never been) gamers are less prone to P, or at least it's a bit more "difficult" for them to get into that at first.

In my experience (22+ years of PMO and gaming combined), these two "passtimes" (let's call them that..) are so closely related it's no wonder many people indulge in both at the same time. We spend hours on end sitting in front of our screens, for a heavy gamer it's an easy slip to just change his activity and start looking for P :

- He's already using his favorite tool that puts all the information in the world at his fingertips : it's there, available easily
- He's probably somewhere with no one around (because who likes to sit besides a gamer if not another gamer) and where no one is going to want to bother him (because disturbing a gamer while he plays is a potentially dangerous prospect as you may know) : no one will ever know it happened
- He already has the mindset that allows to interact with stuff that ain't real (well the videogame itself is real, but the characters, stories, concepts, worlds that it contains aren't) : there's no harm or nothing weird using fake stuff
- He's used to spend many hours in his (usually) very comfortable chair : I can do this all night long, keep'em rollin'

=> there's no stopping him but his own will to not get his dopamine fix this way. It's soooo easy for him.​

And like you said, this (sought/endured) isolation is a fertile ground for the addiction. It's a vicious cycle where using brings isolation that craves using that creates more isolation etc. I'd say gaming is the "perfect" sister activity for heavy P users. Probably a marker to look for in someone's behaviour (granted their life has free time for that, I can hardly see a father with a fulltime job and kids and a wife being very involved in gaming AND P)

 

I doubt there is research, since researchers seem to shy away from the porn subject for some reason (taboo I guess), but I believe it. Not only does the environment of a serious gamer make it easy, but when I get lost in the video game, my willpower is completely absent, so when an urge arises I usually offer little to no resistance. And there are many games with sexual content these days. Lots of triggers.

 

Oh yeah, that too...

 

As a gamer myself, i find that the social isolation and everything else is not caused by games, but much rather games offer almost a ecological niche to exist in. A defined space where you can exist without much interruption and focus your partial/full attention to the tasks in hand.

The biggest crutch i find personally is as a result of boredom with a activity (from linear/narrowly open ended games, where you've run out of ideas to tread upon) meaning that the usually dormant thoughts of PMO suddenly rise with enourmous force to fill the void. Gaming can be repetitive, so it requires creative, outside thinking/information digging types to find new challenges for as long as needed.

I am by nature disinterested in the world what some people could call my peers live in. I look from the outside in as has been the case for a while. Aloof maybe, but clubs, partying etc. dont rock my boat, enjoyable at time sure but i couldn't handle having them even in successive months, people who used to know me commented on me being dug into my phone or technology/books. No wonder, because we both considered each other to be stone-dead boring mutually. As different as bonobos from chimps, to the untrained eye the same but with distinctly different behaviors and interests.

I bother only because i know sometimes i can't do it all by myself, and again, by nature am a social creature that fares poorly with little actual contact. (I also can't talk about other people than myself because of my underlying condition, in that i have little/negated empathy so its not my place to talk about how other people feel and i can't programme myself to even if i wanted to, i have to really concentrate.)

 

gaming can condition someone to seek artificial stimuli whenever they feel the need to (boredom or isolation being prime examples), so in essence one that is already conditioned to gaming (and I mean a LOT) is prone to addiction to porn as well, I suppose one could say the same for any form of artificial stimulation (drugs, social media, gambling, etc.) however gaming is closely related for the reasons @TheFutureMe stated so it may be worse than the other types.

 

I used to play a lot of Battlefield 4..I would "windows key" out of game to browse a page of porn flicks and then flip back to the game for a few kills until I died and back to porn...so I wasn't playing seriously lol...and sometimes edging during gameplay