> Part joke part truth: become a game developer. Since I started to make games I spend much less time playing them. Also sometimes I just have to play more diverse set of games to use them reference for my game design job.

I played an unhealthy amount of video games through college, to the point where it affected my grades, and for a few years after graduation. My first job was not in game development, but was extremely gaming-adjacent (3D graphics drivers), where end-of-day QA-testing our latest software improvements would often turn into office-wide Quake deathmatches. I tried the "queue of interesting things" you mentioned, but sadly realized the other things on the list were also problematic: films, tv series, anime, etc. are just another form of "media consumption" which was the root addiction. At some point, I staged a self-intervention and admitted that media consumption, including video games, would not improve me and would not make me an interesting person. Coming to this realization helped me to set all that aside and start doing more meaningful things like dating a girlfriend (later marrying), going back to school for a graduate degree, switching to less passive hobbies, and so on. It also enabled me 20 years later to not get involved with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all those other pointless media-consumption time-sucks that we have today. These days, I have so many worthwhile things going on that I literally have no time for a gaming or media addiction.