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The simplest way to test out the effect that a game has on you is to just stop doing it and not substitute the time you would have spent doing it with anything else.
The dis-ease or discomfort that arises from the resulting lack of stimulation can indicate the degree to which that gameplay is actually suffering's cause..

Are we crabs in a cooking pot oblivious to the ever-increasing water temperature?

It is not necessarily the game that is the problem but how we relate to it.
I have long felt that the right "livelihood" of the 8FP's wheel while true, might have been a better support structure for all the other spokes on that wheel if it was re-labeled instead as appropriate "interactions" or relationships.

@Jeroen said:
It has everything to do with disenchantment — with realising that what games dangle in front of you as a reward is little more than sociological and mythological convention, a thin selection of noughts and ones making up a digital asset of something that has a much richer appearance in your mind. Ultimately you realise there isn’t anything of value in nearly-all games. I added the ‘nearly all’ as a nod to @person’s Dungeons and Dragons game nights.

Understanding what there is of value in games is therefore key. I think it can be broken down into five categories, as follows:

• Entertainment: games are an entertainment, it passes the time and keeps the mind busy
• Stories: games tell stories, with all the usual elements of myth and character
• Game mechanics: games teach you resource management, precision, trading pieces, etc.
• Confidence: games teach you confidence and competence, allowing you to practice for life
• Social interaction: games can teach you about social interaction, theater, play

Once these areas lose their hold on you, you may find yourself losing interest rapidly. There are other entertainments, other and better ways of telling stories. Confidence you may find you have enough of. Game mechanics is a very wide area and ultimately devolves into numerical puzzles, and social interaction through games can stay fresh for a long time.

So when I say there isn’t anything of value, I mean in an ultimate sense. You know what they say about the Dhamma — that it is good in the beginning, good in the middle and good at the end. For games there is a slightly different perspective, that games are good for a beginning player, stay fun for a long time, but ultimately you reach a point of being done with them (or you get totally wrapped up in addiction).

That point in the end, when you begin to see through the illusions to the little puzzles the game is made up of, that is where you become disenchanted. The puzzles ultimately have no value to you.

@Jeroen said:
It doesn’t feel to me like I am trying to ‘deny or suppress’ either the analytical engineering side or the games design side of my past, I am merely choosing to reframe them from a spiritual perspective. I’m acknowledging that neither is potentially as healthy as they appear, the analysis is a ‘destructive dry scientific examining method’ and the game design is an ‘entertainer’.

To me this seems like a pretty negative reframing and not necessarily spiritual. There is the technique of looking at the negative aspects of unhealthy desires to reduce cravings. Like bodily fluids or corpses for physical attraction.

I think where I come from is that people have a varying array of innate dispositions, such as introversion/extroversion. Rather than an extrovert framing their disposition in a negative light to help them become more spiritually introspective they'd be better off finding spiritually and meaningful ways of being extroverted as a path. Such as connecting with dharma groups, doing outreach, that sort of thing.

I think you need to look for healthy, spiritually aligned ways to express this longing. For example there are people with psychological backgrounds who use games as a therapeutic method for healing and development of others.

The thing is, this longing for games I am interested in because it energises and motivates me. I watch a video like this Nintendo one and I think “oh wow, that’s cool, look at those awesome ideas”. It literally sparks something inside me, perhaps some dopamine echo.

Which is what my point here is about. Rather than trying to not be analytical, embrace that aspect of yourself and find a healthy, spiritually minded outlet for it. Not for the past but for the present and future.