the game

 At the beginning of my partner's preoccupation of a mobile game, I found it, to be frank, beneficial. We had less random arguments as she was busy and didn't pick any idle fights. The house was more peaceful. This seemed to be a typical short lived new activity or something similar to obsession with tennis on TV during tournaments. Nothing out of ordinary. Some time later when the activity lasted longer than usual I started to worry a bit but still expected it to end any day. Then when the game started to gobble too much of our money I tried some gentle conversations. At $600 mark there was remorse and I thought the problem was solved and that she finally saw what was happening. At $2000 mark, a few months later, there was denial and excuses. At this point I was really worried. The money is not a problem here (not the main one). The amount of time sunk into a mobile game is. I tried some gentle suggestions like "imagine what you could have painted in that time" or learn etc. Nothing affected the situation. The tipping point for me was when she couldn't pick up our daughter from school (when she called sick) because there was an event in the game. Luckily I work from home so I was able to step in and pick her up. At what point, a game becomes more important to real life? How do you make the other person see the problem? This is no longer sane. I'm out of my depth here, again. No idea how to handle it and help her. First time in my life I sneaked onto her phone to look at the screen time stats. Just to confirm I'm not making it all up, maybe the game is only a small part. The reality was hard to accept. 100h per week just for the game. This is more than double of what we spend working and work takes over our lives quite often. How common is it to hear complaints that someone is always working and not spending enough time with their family? This is 40h maybe 50h per week with some overtime. Not even close to 100h. What do I do? On one hand I believe that as long as one is happy it is up to that person to decide how to spend their time but on the other I can see that this is unhealthy addiction and that the developers of the game did a really good job sucking people in. If we know someone has a gambling problem, should we intervene and help? they are happy with what they do, aren't they? Who am I to dictate how others should spend their lives? But... there is "but". what if I care about the other person and I think she is lost and needs help? how do I help? I fear that no matter what I do I will become even more of enemy number one and not only I will not change the situation but make it worse.