Hey Hero. Your willpower has been losing this fight, and that's not a character flaw. It's a rigged encounter: billion-dollar studios, behavioral scientists, and infinite patience, all pointed at keeping you in the game. So we're not fighting fair. We're changing the map, making the game harder to reach than the alternative, so the path of least resistance finally runs somewhere good.
Because look around your place for a second. The console under the TV. The PC in the office. The laptop in the bedroom. The phone that follows you into every room in the house. Every previous attempt to keep this under control was made inside an environment built for playing, where every room holds a spawn point for the next urge. That was never a fair fight.
So this is a step-by-step guide to locking down every device you own. Fair warning: some of these moves might feel extreme. That's okay. You're not destroying anything. You're putting it out of reach for 90 days. Budget one evening for the whole thing, about the length of one session of the thing it's replacing. Best trade you'll ever make.
Nothing has to be sold, smashed, or deleted forever. This is a quarantine, not an execution. Everything here is temporary and reversible: you lock things down for one 90-day run, and at the end you decide what comes back, with you holding the controller. (Want to go scorched-earth and sell the gear? Allowed. Never the entry fee.)
Don't own it? Pre-completed. If a device or a box doesn't apply to you, check it off and keep moving. Gear you don't have is gear that's already locked down.
You won't tick every box perfectly. Nobody does. Lock down the big ones and you've already won the hard part. How high you crank the difficulty from there is your call.
Run these five moves and you've got a real wall up. The rest of this guide is the 100% route. Come back for it this week.
Five moves, about an hour. An hour tonight beats a month of willpower checks.
A block you can switch off in a weak moment isn't a wall. It's a suggestion. And the System is very good at talking you past a suggestion at 11pm. Every move in this guide gets dramatically stronger the second someone else holds the key: the password, the PIN, the cable, the console itself. Hand it to your accountability partner, a roommate, a parent, anyone you trust to be a little bit annoying about giving it back.
This is why it's dangerous to go alone. Bring your person.
It also settles the question you'll keep bumping into: block it, or delete it? One rule:
When the block is locked behind something you can't flip off yourself. A deleted app is one reinstall away. A locked block is a wall.
If there's no locked blocker holding the line, get the temptation off the device entirely.
That's it. You'll see it in action all the way down. Don't overthink it.
Most devices climb the same ladder. Only drop a rung if the one above is genuinely impossible. Not "ugh, I don't want to" impossible. Actually impossible. Each rung is a difficulty setting for the game's ability to reach you.
The whole device leaves the building. Hand it to a family member or friend to guard until the reset's done: a sacred artifact placed in an ally's keeping, under strict orders not to return it no matter how convincingly you negotiate on Day 9. Strongest move in the game. Take it if you can get it.
Can't hand off the whole thing? Hand off (or straight-up toss) the power cord. A console with no power is a very expensive paperweight, and a replacement cord runs about twelve bucks with a few days' shipping. That shipping delay isn't a bug. It's three days of built-in friction standing between an impulse and a slip. Slightly unhinged. Completely effective.
Seal it in a box and exile it somewhere genuinely annoying to reach: attic, garage, the shelf you need a chair for. The upgrade: store the power cord somewhere separate from the device. Now caving means two digs instead of one. A box isn't a wall, but it buys you thirty seconds of "…is this really worth it?" In those thirty seconds, the autopilot loses.
For the stuff you literally can't remove (the work PC, the phone you actually need) we don't move the device. We cage what's on it. Locked blockers, restrictions, friction timers. Full sections below.
PlayStation, Xbox, Steam Machine, Switch, handhelds, VR: whatever you own that exists purely to play games, this section is for all of it. The good news: these are the easy targets. Unlike your phone or your work laptop, you don't need them for anything. No mercy required. Just run the Ladder:
MARKED N/A. GEAR YOU DON'T OWN IS ALREADY LOCKED DOWN.
This section works differently: pick one. These four boxes are the same lock set four ways, strongest first. Take the highest rung you can actually pull off, check that single box, and move on. Every other section in this guide is the normal kind, where you work through every box.
"But I watch Netflix on it." A lot of us do; the console doubles as the living-room streaming box. The honest answer: there's no effective way to lock down only the gaming half of a machine built for gaming. For these 90 days, get your shows another way. Stream on your phone or laptop (devices you can actually lock down, and are locking down anyway), grab a cheap streaming stick, or let the shows wait with the games. The console leaves the picture whole, or it doesn't really leave at all.
Rung 1, no substitutions. The whole device leaves your hands. A garage shelf can't hold something that fits in a backpack, and tossing the cord does nothing when the whole house is full of USB-C cables that fit it. Out of the house, or it isn't locked.
Secretly half a PC. If it somehow stays, it also needs the blocker treatment from the next section. But really: rung 1.
The lazy-but-effective version: pull the controllers and the charging cable. A headset with nothing to hold and no charge isn't tempting anyone.
For a lot of you, this machine is also where you work, study, and run your entire life. "Get it gone" is off the table, so we cage what's on it instead.
MARKED N/A. GEAR YOU DON'T OWN IS ALREADY LOCKED DOWN.
If it's a pure gaming rig (you genuinely don't need it for anything else): lucky you. Treat it like a console and run the Ladder. Hand it off, pull the power cord, box it. If it's your work/life machine, this is the play, in order:
We're building Spawn Camp, a blocker made specifically for gamers, by someone who's been exactly where you are. It finds your games and launchers on its own and locks them down, no folder-hunting required. The day it ships it'll slot straight into this step. Until then, Cold Turkey holds the line.
Your phone never leaves your side, and it disguises its weapons as harmless little time-fillers. And if phone games were never your thing, don't skip this section. Standards have a way of slipping once the console and PC go dark and the urge starts shopping for whatever's left. "Too good for mobile games" rarely survives Week 2. Full sweep:
None of these look like "gaming" while you're setting them up; all of them lead straight back in. Sweep them now, or discover them at 11pm on Day 12. (Don't have one? Check it off and keep moving.)
This is what separates a real lockdown from uninstalling Steam and hoping. The game isn't the only thing reaching for you. There's a whole ecosystem orbiting it, engineered to keep you one tap from a slip. Lock the ecosystem down too.
Block or delete? Same rule as everywhere else: if you've got a locked blocker, block these (it holds). If you don't, log out and uninstall. One less tap is still a win.
For a lot of us, the biggest thing the game gave us was the people: the guild, the party, the squad you queue with every night. That's real, and it doesn't have to be a casualty. But if most of your contact happens in-game or on the channels around it (Discord, the group voice chat, the stream), going dark without a word cuts your lifeline too.
So before you disappear, send the heads-up. Tell them what you're doing, and ask them to stay connected somewhere outside those apps: texts, a group chat, actual plans. One condition: they have to respect the run. A friend who keeps pinging "get on" at 10pm on a Saturday isn't a lifeline anymore; that's the System borrowing a friendly voice.
Thirty seconds, and it does two jobs: the people worth keeping know what's happening (which quietly turns them into accountability), and the "we're queuing, get on" texts stop before they start.
Lockdown complete? Tell one person. Not an announcement, not a crowd: the one person who'll notice if you go quiet. Saying it out loud to someone is what makes a lockdown real, and it hands them the only job they have. Copy the message, fill in the blank, send it.
That's the loadout, Hero. You don't need every box ticked to begin. Consoles handed off, PC caged, phone swept, side doors shut, heads-up sent: that's already a real wall between you and the autopilot.
And one thing the System will never tell you, so I will: none of this has to be perfect. When you slip (when you're human, not because you're weak) it isn't a failure and it isn't the end of the run. A slip is just intel: it shows you which wall needs to be one brick higher. Bring it back to the squad, patch the gap, keep climbing.
Your real life is the main quest. Go play it.