Gaming: OUR CIGARETTE???

I recently did an assignment for a class, and it called for me to give an average of how many hours of video gaming do I participate in. I came up to a whopping ten hours! I thought I was gaming too much giving how much school work I was and could have been doing instead of being in front of a console. The article posted says each of its 25 million users play Xbox 1 billion hours a month. With the stats given in the article, it really puts the fuss and fight from parents and skeptics in perspective. When reading this, I was disgusted at how much time we as humans spend wasting time when there are things that could be addressed and are more urgent and important. Video gaming is neither urgent nor important. This also asks the question: How would our social lives change with 10 hours a week given back to you?
I wonder about that question from time to time. Would our relationship with our family be closer? Would that extra two hours spent with our loved ones help it to grow more? Could my faith grow? I believe all of this could be possible, or it could result in a negative. Could games be our stress reliever in order to help cope with the daily grind? Could gaming be “our cigarette”? Could gaming be our electronic bliss and coping mechanism?
Another question is and if we had this extra time, how would we really spend it? On another wasteful task or would we actually hunker down and get things that ARE IMPORTANT done?