Everything in moderation. Video games can eat your life but so can anything else, it's all about how much self control you have. I still play a lot of games because, hey, I have to do something with my spare time (and having spare time is essential), and I find it to be one of the more engaging things I can do. Not to mention multiplayer games are the only way to do anything with a lot of my friends, as they live in different states.
An additional thought on this is that not only my own time went into games, but my competitive spirit did too. After dropping games, my hunger for being competitive and becoming more skilled did go into computer science, and my rate of improvement and excitement shot up with it.
Playing videogames, I used to have thoughts like, "It'd be cool you could level up like this in the real world to become uber powerful by just training a lot like this". It turns out you can [in our industry].
I still do enjoy videogames a bit, but not with any sorts of long term thinking with it. It acts as the chill-out activity now.
I don't even try to play multiplayer games anymore, as within moments I get the feeling of time wasted. I do however, from time to time, play single-player games (like Portal, or Modern Warfare series, or more recently, Bioshock) for their artistic / story value. The best games have stories much better and deeper than most of the movies, so I find them important intellectually and artisticly.
I'm not sure if this is up your alley, but, the game 'Spec Ops: The Line' is one of the most intellectually stimulating games I have played in a long while.
Spec Ops: The Line is one of the first games I've really seen traverse from the collection of descriptors we normally use for video games (childish, immature, time waster, brainless fun, etc) into the realm of what I'll call "deep media". I'll define deep media as the collection of literary and artistic work which is created not with the primary goal of entertainment, but with conveying an outlook or a perspective of the world.
Spec Ops: The Line is not a pretty, nor particularly fun game, but by golly is it good.
Spec Ops: The Line is not a pretty, nor particularly fun game, but by golly is it good.
That's probably a good indicator of deep media. Not whether something is entertaining, or was created for entertainment, but whether it can be considered good regardless of entertainment value (ignoring technical value, which is generally only useful to a small subgroup of consumers).
SpaceChem is awesome, I played it a lot on PC and also now on tablet (it's more playable with mouse, though).
Also worth checking are all other games by Zachronics Industries (maker of SpaceChem)[0] - I particularly liked "The Bureau of Steam Engineering", where the goal is to route steam via pipes, valves, etc. inside a mech to make it fight other mechs.
I would probably be thinking the same thing right now if all I knew about was mindless, addictive games like World of Warcraft, League of Legends, or Call of Duty. I fully agree that pouring hundreds of hours into games like that will "eat your life" and give very little back for the small fix of short-term enjoyment. I've seen it happen to friends.
However, there are several ways to enjoy video games these days that involve a community and are much healthier. And I am not talking about a massively multiplayer game where the "community" is really just another gameplay element pulling you in. I'm talking about an external community that draws you to actively participate, to enjoy the game for something more than what it is at face value. This comes in many different forms, and I think most people would be hard pressed to say that they are "eating the life" of anyone. Maybe I can just list a few of them and let you decide:
1. Speedrunning community. I list this first because it's my favorite. Speedrunners revitalize games old and new by practicing and playing them to almost complete technical perfection. The communities are large, positive, supportive, and full of energy. Both speedrunners and viewers get to enjoy games they already loved in a completely new way, and engage in a meta-competition that is much more tangible and community-oriented than numbers on a screen beside user IDs. There are large communities in both Japan and the US/Europe (though the two don't interact much). The Japanese community generally interacts in the form of videos posted on Nico Nico [1]. The Western community has a forum and video site at Speed Demos Archive [2]. To give an example of the size and positivity of SDA, in particular, they run several marathons a year like this one [3] that draw thousands of viewers and raise tens of thousands of dollars for charity.
2. Indie game development. I don't think I need to say a lot about this; this community interacts enough with HN for its vitality to be clear enough. Even for lone developers, the creative aspect makes this a healthy pursuit.
3. Romhacking community. This is related to the indie game development community in spirit, but on a much more casual level. Using tools built to quickly make levels for games like Sonic and Super Mario World, members of these communities make completely new games out of old engines and assets. These new games - called "romhacks" because of the way they are made - are often posted on forums or at sites like SMW Central [4] or Sonic Retro [5]. It's a very unique kind of community that draws together creativity and games. This one is also related to #4:
4. "Let's Play" community, probably the youngest of these. Much like speedrunning, this community aims to revitalize games by playing them in an entertaining way and publishing the videos (which are then called "Let's Play"s or LPs). These videos were usually posted on forums like Something Awful, but increasingly these communities are centered on Youtube. Very often the games played are indie games or even romhacks.
Edit: There is also a community related to #1, the Tool-Assisted Speedrun community [6] that aims to play games to literal technical perfection with the benefit of tools like savestates, frame-advance, and recording provided by emulators like zsnes. Such tools are obviously frowned upon in the normal speedrunning community.
I don't know whether you'd classify enjoying Interactive Fiction as "gaming", but if you did, it'd definitely fall under the "indie" label. The community[1] is quite vibrant, and the games (which are no longer commercially viable, of course) are even better and more literary than they were during the commercial heyday of the genre. If you haven't touched a text adventure in a while (or haven't experienced one ever), play "Slouching Toward Bedlam"[2].
The interactive fiction community has also produced one of the strangest useful programming languages of all time, Inform 7[3].
Those things eat your life if you allow them to. Yes, having self-control while gaming is really hard, but I've found succss in that area to some extent. I fix slots throughout the day for gaming. And I MOSTLY follow them.
I only gave up video games because my favorite game got shut down...Tanarus - anyone ever heard of this game? It was run by Sony Online Entertainment during the last years of it's existence but it was put out by Verant Interactive in the mid 90's...probably one of the most addictive "FPS" tank games of it's day...was fun as hell
I played a bit of Tanarus but never excelled at it. I was however much better at Infantry, and kept up with the game from when I was in 3rd grade up until early college
I got really good at it lol..it did have a steep learning curve though, I remember when I was in 5th and 6th grade, it was literally my life, I sucked so bad when I first started so I would play from the time I got home from school until I went to bed every day for over a year...my summer was spent playing all day...and I ended up getting really good at it, and it was at that time that the player counts started going down by the time I got to highschool...was a fun game while it lasted though
I don't think I can give them up entirely. I find them to be a valuable pastime and an occasional source of inspiration. I have always had a tendency to limit myself to putting any real time into a few (2) big games a year. The number of games that I find worthy of my time also diminishes as I get older.
If I hadn't done that, I'd still be stuck in front of a game somewhere.
Those things will eat your life.