How a typeform helped over 8,000 people beat video game addiction

“Nobody thinks they’ll become a high school dropout, living in their parents’ basement playing video games 16 hours a day,” says Cam Adair. “But that’s exactly what happens. You’re playing more and more and life starts to spiral out of control.”

Cam quit school at 15 because of his gaming addiction. Then he tricked his parents into thinking he had a job. His father would drop him at the restaurant where he “worked.” And when he drove off, Cam would sneak back home and crawl into bed, exhausted from a sleepless night of gaming.

“You notice your friends are getting ahead in life. They’re going off to college. They’re having fun. Meanwhile, you’re falling behind. You’ve wasted another year. You know you have so much more potential, if you only had the motivation.”

And that’s scary. After falling into depression, Cam decided to quit playing games cold turkey. That was 10 years ago—and things have changed.

Game over

Cam used his experience of recovering from addiction to help other people like him. He founded Game Quitters to provide the kind of advice that wasn’t available to him when he decided put down the controller.

“When I finally had enough, I looked online for information and instead of help, I found a bunch of shitty advice like ‘study more’ or ‘hang out with your friends.’ As if any of that would actually work,” said Cam.

So he posted an article online How to Quit Playing Video Games FOREVER, where he shared his story. The article blew up—attracting more than 1600 comments to date—and Cam realized there were thousands of people in the same position that he was.

“Nobody else seemed to be doing it, so I launched Game Quitters for all of us.”

Game Quitters is designed to help people escape gaming addiction. It’s full of inspirational stories from people who’ve sorted their lives out. It also offers a paid-for program called Respawn—a series of video guides to help people overcome their urge to game.

But how do you know if you need to quit games for good, or just hide the GTA disc for a bit?

Diagnosis: Gamer

Game Quitters uses a Typeform quiz to help people assess whether their hobby has become unhealthy.

The quiz is aimed at gamers, as well as concerned parents, friends, and relatives. Give it a go yourself here:

The quiz asks for a gamer’s email address and follows up by offering Game Quitters’ paid program, thanks to a ConvertKit integration via Zapier. Read more about how to set this up here.

“We’re not a replacement for a professional assessment. But our quiz allows anyone to become more informed about their situation. We hope this either relieves people’s worry, or encourages them to take positive action.”

Achievement unlocked: Lead Generator

Before Cam launched the quiz, Game Quitters was averaging 15 new email leads per day. With the quiz, that number jumped to 22. But Cam had bigger plans.

“At first we had the quiz hidden in our navigation bar or buried within other content. That all changed one night in June, when were slated to have an article published in the New York Times the next day. We knew we’d get a lot of traffic from it, so we frantically redesigned our homepage in six hours to put the quiz front and center.”

And what happened?

The results blew Cam away. With the initial NYT traffic bump, some days they were getting over 150 emails from the quiz alone. But what about when traffic returned to normal?

Why choose Typeform?

Cam says Typeform ticked all the boxes he was looking for:

• It’s easy to use
• It has the features they need to build a great quiz (including Calculator and Logic Jump)
• It integrates with other software (like ConvertKit via Zapier)
• It looks great

“The clean and elegant design appeals to me much more than other survey tools I’ve used or looked into in the past,” said Cam.

His only regret? He had the quiz idea on the back burner for too long before finally making it.

“Creating and deploying the typeform only took a few hours. Looking at results from the past few months, I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner! Imagine how many people we could have helped if we’d implemented it a year ago.”

“Don’t make the same mistake.”

Inspired? Here’s what to do next

As Cam tells it, an engaging personality test can help you quickly build an audience with little effort. To get going on your own:

• Check out this step-by-step guide on how Cam built the Game Quitters addiction test and connected it to his CRM.
• Grab this personality quiz template, and get your test running even quicker.

Got a typeform that’s helping you or your business? We’d love to see it, maybe even feature it as an inspirational case study. Let us know all about it here.