I lost a lot of seventh and eighth grades to video games, and the final departure from them entailed smashing Starcraft 1 and Brood War CDs in my driveway, in front of my friends, who were telling me "not to waste the CDs." But I needed to do something cathartic, and in my case smashing the discs helped me go cold-turkey.
I guess there is still a chance that playing those games gained you some super powers, similar to Karate Kid washing the cars.
There are also a lot of ways to waste time. Few people seem to make good use of it, so perhaps again it is not really Computer Games that are to blame?
I think a lot of people were playing sports, or practicing an instrument, or learning how to deal with the opposite sex (or maybe even the same sex), or reading. . . all of them, to me, more viable activities than Starcraft, at least at the level I played.
I wrote about it a little bit more here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/from-the-departmen... .