I've found learning and creating to be more fulfilling activities than videogames. That's not to advocate against gaming, or to generalize all games, but I've thought about how much time I spent playing games in the past and if I was happy with what I gained from it: I largely was not. I felt as if I was lacking in skills that I wished I had, and believe I could have learned in that time. I'm happier with myself after cutting down greatly on gaming, and I wonder if other people share the same joy of learning that I feel or if it's an unpopular perspective.
Add.: What I believe causes a game to feel unfulfilling is if after the game is finished the player, and the world, is (nearly) unchanged. If there's nothing to show for it. No new philosophy, no useful talent, no object created, nothing to share with others. Most games are equivalent in their impact to a bad reality TV show, a distraction from progress, a time sink, a void.
I find that videogames fill my "brain in neutral" space very nicely. If I'm just not in the mood to read, or get out, pick up some new skill or polish an old one, hang out with friends or do something productive (and sometimes you truly want to do nothing)... I find that videogames are a nice choice. I especially enjoy combining them with unabridged audiobooks that I might not otherwise bother reading/listening to otherwise.
The trick is to make sure that you resist the temptation to allow that empty time (like empty calories) to dominate your life. It's like ice cream... a little is great stuff, but don't make eating it the center of your lifestyle.
By basing your choices on feelings (i.e. "not in the mood") you are likely to go with the path of least resistance. If instead you choose to do what you prioritize by conscious mental effort you are likely to feel more rewarded in the end. For example, if you decide that learning photography is important and you spend hundreds of hours practicing you will be more satisfied than if you spent those hundreds of hours playing a game. At least you will feel that in retrospect. In the moment, perhaps the game will seem more satisfying. But most people find more fulfillment in practicing a skill or hobby.
This is a surefire way for people to burn out on something. If you never allow yourself mental downtime, then everything you do feels like work. If it's not meant to be work, then it's a hobby and if it's a hobby then it needs to actually allow you to unwind. Some people do surprisingly complex things for this, but the mistake we tend to make externally is view the accomplishment as "work" or something they really need to achieve - rather then something they devote idle brain-time to.
It'll burn some people out. I can't just read/learn or create things and see it as some kind of stress relief.
You'll feel accomplish and all great things but that's ain't relaxing at all for me.
Playing magic the gathering, just turn off my brain and watching a good tv show either comedy or scifi is my way to blow off steam. Video games can make me angry sometime or frustrated. Mtg can be challenging in term of stress and require thinking skill but I've learned to not over think it and play with my gut. My buddy who I play against over thinks and stress out often in mtg, it's enjoyable for the guy but after several rounds at his cube his brain is mentally exhausted, this rarely happens to me. He often chastize me for not reading the card carefully... though, I just kinda remember them if I play often with the cube a lot. Hell I thought one card had flying cause the creature seems to be hovering in the art once. Bad play mistake. While our style are different I we're pretty much tie in term of deck building skill set and winning rate.
Decisions about priorities should be considered carefully. If the outcome isn't fulfilling, perhaps the choice was made on the basis of what others expect rather than what truly pleases. If a hobby is something you really enjoy it will not feel like work.
Games can be enjoyed in their own right as well. If we play for pure enjoyment and can otherwise balance our lives then they are certainly a means to unwind.
> If a hobby is something you really enjoy it will not feel like work.
Sorry, that's just not true. There are lots of interesting, rewarding hobbies that do feel like work, in the sense that they require a fresh mind capable of bearing a high cognitive load to engage in them. When my mind is fresh you're right, those hobbies are very satisfying to spend time on, but my "fresh" timeslots are mostly devoted to my actual job (phd) these days, which doesn't feel like work either much of the time.
Be careful, your attitude is a road straight to burnout.
> If you never allow yourself mental downtime, then everything you do feels like work.
What makes you believe that what reedlaw described is not to be considered mental downtime? I have made quite the opposite experience: when consciously reflecting and deciding about my mental downtime in advance, it turns out to be the most recreative. It's worth noting that I made bad experiences with: tomorrow from 7-730 I will be reading/running/cooking/medidate/watching an educational video for recreational purposes. The way to go for me is to predefine a set of activities which I support based on a principle. When in the situation for donwtime, I then choose from this set.
How do you just pick up a project from a set like that? Typically if I put something on a list, it's not motivating enough for me to want to do when I have downtime unless I really want to work on something.
Many mentally challenging activities I'll start spontaneously, but it's typically small ones with direct, achievable goals, like write a little scraper in a new language or reverse engineer a single mechanism of an application.
I only have a few times a week when I have downtime that I feel like I can pick something off a list. The rest of my downtime I want something to do - and that's where games come in - and I'm quite glad for them, because without them I'd spend much more time watching TV, reading junk political threads on reddit, etc.
I guess the key here is that this list is based on principles and not just a list of activities I would consider advantageous to have done in some sense or another.
Those principles ought to be chosen as to align with my convictions and expectations from life. So you could say that I know that this list is the intersection of things I consider worthy doing (and immediately have a well-formed reason for their worthiness at the back of my mind) and recreation.
When a moment for recreation has come, there is nothing that makes me question whether I should do something from the list or not because I am reassured that I have thought of this sufficiently in advance to determine the best for me.
I believe the essence of what you're saying is true, but I dispute the overall reasonableness of what you describe.
The vast majority of video games are either built around the principles of addiction, or require a tremendous amount of time in muscle memory training.
What you're describing seems like describing how enjoyable it can be to smoke one cigarette a month. (assuming that actually felt good). Could be true- but the odds are certainly stacked against people attempting that behavior.
I don't think a tremendous amount of time in training is mutually exclusive with brain-in-neutral activities. It's a question of what your goal is with the activity, and how you approach it as a result of that.
My friends and I play Overwatch. It's a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling, and if we wanted to compete professionally, sure, we'd have to spend a ton of time in focused training.
But we don't. We just hop on voice chat, play in Gold/Platinum against people of similar skill level, and we have a good time with it. Sometimes we'll pick up new strategies, we learn different characters, our aim and game-sense probably improve, but that's all secondary to hanging out and enjoying the game.
None of us are ever going to be competing in Master / GM / Top 500 tiers, and the amount of time it'd take to train and get better is immaterial to us because none of us want to.
I smoke a cigarette or two about once a month on average, typically when attending a party.
Not only is it quite pleasant after I've had a beer or three, but they're the ultimate social hack for introverted nerds. Are you at a crowded bar/party where it's impossible to have a proper talk with someone? Step outside for a smoke, and you can instantly have a nice, low key conversation with the other smokers. Lulls in the conversation aren't awkward cause you can just go back to taking drags; and once you're done, you can keep talking if you like the person- or have the perfect excuse to head back in if you don't.
As a non smoker, reading this just makes me feel depressed.
So you use smoking cigarettes as a crutch when making real conversations with the non-smokers inside gets hard? Then you fill in gaps in conversation with more smoking? Most people cope with those naturally occurring conversation gaps without breathing in smoke.
Serious question - Are you, as you stand out there with the party going on behind you, slightly repulsed by the fact that you connected with someone because you're both doing the same disgusting habit?
The whole scenario seems so absurdly sad, and certainly not something I'd "highly recommend" to anyone.
I've always tried and failed to keep my smoking habit to occasions where I could enjoy the smoking.
I wouldn't "highly recommend" trying it, because very few people can keep it at that level. I couldn't, and my way of quitting was to remember all the other ones I smoked. To this day, on the rare occasions where I crave smoking, I'll just remind myself of the nausea, the bad throat, the smell, the dizziness and whatever else the other ones, the ones I would smoke after the good one, would do to me.
Would you say the same about drinking? Because in the scenario we're discussing, they seem pretty analogous to me: potentially addicting habits that are (to varying degrees) socially accepted, and make having conversations easier.
His ice cream analogy was on point. There are plenty of video games which dont match your criteria. The ones that do (albeit the majority of mainstream games) become popular for obvious reasons, but one can even enjoy those in moderation if they have the mental skills to do so (like the people who can smoke cigarettes ocassionally and not become addicted).
You can build the skills necessary to play games over time, and of course it greatly depends on the games you play. I would tend to stay away from pure time sinks like MMO's, and I've lost the taste for 2D fighters. That said, I've been playing FPS' since FPS', and those skills wake up whenever I play for more than ten or twenty minutes.
I don't see a correlation with cigarettes, which offer you nothing beneficial, are physically addictive on the level of heroin, and are one of the leading causes of human death.
> False. They're a bit above alcohol; heroin is much higher.
I realize this is anecdotal, but I feel the need to point out that my father, a veteran ER doctor of over thirty years, has said more than once that based on his experience of patients, he thinks it is easier to quit heroin than nicotine.
Nicotine is quite often used as a form of self-medication - it's helpful for people with all kinds of issues, from depression to adhd, to weight control.
Even among doctors, there is very little knowledge on the subject of why people take up smoking, and usually it's assumed it's just a matter of bad habits.
So, if someone uses nicotine as an unwitting way of self-medication, it will indeed be extremely difficult to quit without fixing the core problem.
To some extent it's like calling SSRIs "hard to quit", because people who begin taking them often never quit, even when side affects are worse than those of nicotine.
Perhaps because people who are addicted to nicotine are likely to also have addictive personalities, whereas anyone can easily get addicted to heroin.
Kind of like how in WWII the British improved the survivability of their bombers by increasing the armor in the places returning aircraft weren't damaged, theorizing correctly that those were the places the planes that didn't return were hit.
If a person with an addictive personality gets on heroin, they're probably visiting the ER very few if any times before they hit the morgue.
Huh interesting. Thanks for the datapoint. Fwiw, nicotine has never been problematic for me. I dated a girl who smoked for 3 years, and she'd smoke around me all the time- and while i indulged in it every once in a while, i never felt like i HAD to smoke. Biological things at play, most certainly.
Fair enough... if you're schizophrenic and medicated, by all means vape or take nicotine in some form. There is still no real argument for smoking though... it's the worst way to handle something that is already mildly hazardous.
Edit: By the way, for an appreciation of "A bit above alcohol", check out an inpatient alcohol detox clinic sometime... it is no joke at all.
That's a pretty dark view of computer games. It's a popular media type like any other. You have all ends of the complexity spectrum, from undisputable art on one end to poorly-concealed skinner boxes on the other end.
People who appreciate computer games as a serious hobby will tend to enjoy games on the complex end of this spectrum. These games are no more built around the principles of addiction than a good book, or a physical activity like skiing.
> The vast majority of video games are either built around the principles of addiction, or require a tremendous amount of time in muscle memory training.
Well, define "vast majority of video games." Certainly that's true if we mean F2P phone games. For a lot of others I am not so sure.
To be fair, when it comes to those F2P phones games, I would start to agree with the cigarette analogy... those are just skinner boxes with coin slots.
Some of those can be pretty fun, but when you get to the point that paying for it seems at all tempting it's time to take a different approach - the way which involves a decompiler, a debugger and maybe Frida too.
When free to play becomes pay to win, writing your own cheats is the more fun and rewarding option.
I went through that phase too, but deep down it was guilt- and anxiety-driven. Once I accepted that life is too short to learn everything or be the best at everything, and that I'm already really good at the things I care about and learn a lot at work anyway, I'm quite satisfied to spend free time playing games.
EXACTLY! There is value in realizing that one is wasting time, but viewing a leisure activity as a waste of time simply because it doesn't result in advancement is not healthy.
Personally speaking, the important thing has been learning to recognize when I'm in a productive mood vs in a gaming mood. These fluctuate all the time depending on various factors. But I no longer feel like I should be working when I play games or vice versa. It's quite refreshing.
I feel like a lot of people desire validation and achievement as short-term feedback. When we go through middle and high school, you can find achievement in short-term feedback on academic assignments, or in extracurricular activities where competitive matchups are rather frequent. (The American focus on short-term "A for Effort" grading is debatable, in this context.) Then you go to college or the real world, and suddenly the goalposts become much further away, all eggs in a nebulous basket: academic research that takes years to gain the next level of credentials, career progression, dating, financial stability. Learning requires you to subconsciously justify self-designed goalposts - you have to set your own goals for when you can be happy with what you've learned - and that's just as nebulous as the real world.
I think many gamers would envy, and aspire to, your ability to have confidence in self-set learning goalposts. But rather than despair at not being able to do so, if they can sit down on their couch and be spoon-fed goals, a process to get there, and Steam Trophies when they do... and they are truly legitimately happy (a local rather than global maximum, to be sure, but who ever achieves the global maximum of happiness anyways?)... who's to argue against that?
Efforts like Khan Academy and Duolingo understand this dynamic; they break things down into achievable interim goals, with flashy rewards as you progress. But it's hard for serious learning apps to reach the mental intensity and dopamine release of, say, a successful boss fight. A company that can figure that out would do a lot of good for humanity... but why wouldn't they just be a game studio instead?
See also Jane McGonigal, who has done some work specifically around those self-defined goal posts.
One reason why AI is being employed for some problems is based on what we know about human problem solving. For instance, a human could come up with a near-optimal solution to the Traveling Salesman problem in under a minute. Long before a computer could get even close. How is that happening? What are we doing that's so special?
Which makes me wonder if we could gamify NP-complete problems and use gamers to come up with better solutions. Like a game to lay out circuit traces, route delivery trucks, or organize a warehouse.
Random reinforcement (giving out not just merit based rewards but also random rewards) keeps people coming back but it's a higher goal than beating a raid boss in a game that 95% of the human population has never heard of.
>Which makes me wonder if we could gamify NP-complete problems and use gamers to come up with better solutions. Like a game to lay out circuit traces, route delivery trucks, or organize a warehouse.
I've struggled so much with video games over the years. I have probably spent a significant percentage of my life playing a huge variation of games. By far the most destructive was MMORPG (Dofus) because it meets so many desires at once and can be engaging for so many years (reaching max level on this game was a multi year journey). Others can be finished or played enough to satisfy and allow me to come up for air, like a good book or TV series they all eventually finish no matter how engaged you might be for a short period.
I've also found different games appeal at different times, I think they each answer different desires and I can often guess what I'm lacking by the kind of game I want to play - achievement, confidence, socialising, artistic outlet, aggressive outlet etc..
Perhaps in this way we can use games to realise things that we are lacking in our life so to find more constructive outlets or better life balance - or perhaps games are a beneficial occasional outlet for things like aggression.
Isn't improving at the game an enjoyable end in and of itself? Getting really good at chess has few extrinsic benefits but nobody's embarrassed about it. Why is getting really good at Street Fighter or whatever any different?
It is! When playing with other people. I find multiplayer (played locally with friends in the same room) games really fun. I used to also enjoy playing alone, or online, but nowadays the level of story telling doesn't grip me so all that's left is the challenge of the gameplay and as I got older, it feels like I am just figuring out the designer's underlying blueprint.
My game is Daytona USA. My friends and I developed our skills over the course of years, dropping $40 on 40 races as often as we could afford to do it. We played against each other frequently, and against a larger group of maybe a dozen people who we met there. All of us shared the techniques we learned with each other.
Every once in awhile we would run into someone who would beat us. I remember one guy in particular. His driving was better than average, but to us it was basically garbage. Yet he was consistently beating us on the Advanced course. (It was infuriating, because the game would have the players select the course, but would always default to the easiest course selected. He couldn't touch us on Expert and new it, so always chose Advanced.) So I observed him for awhile, and I learned that he was absolutely killing the final curve of the course. I figured out how he was doing it, showed my friend, and we never lost to that guy again.
We were good. We handily beat a rather famous NASCAR driver one morning. His skills didn't translate. One friend left the state for awhile and came back bragging how he won a Daytona USA tournament. We destroyed him by a matter of about ten seconds (then showed him how we were doing it). Everyone who beat us had their techniques analyze and assimilated and never beat us again. And yes, I'm bragging, but my point is, our muscle memory and technique was basically perfect by the end. But we kept playing and it kept being fun.
The game was no longer about technique, or muscle memory. We all had that down. It was now a chess game. We had the same pieces, and we had to decide how and when to use them. The game was no longer trying to hit the turn perfectly. That was a given. The game was to figure out when to pass, whether to take a cheap shot, whether to slow down because someone is drafting and you want a third player who is more aggressive to come and take shots at him, etc. etc. Planning was basically the entire game at that point.
So, while Street Fighter is NOT my game, but I imagine for high level opponents, it's very much a mental game, too.
Fighting games have a large dexterity component, but actual game high level players are playing is very rock-paper-scissors-like. The important skills to win are having a strong understanding of what the payoffs of both players' options are in many situations, predicting your opponent's decisions based on their tendencies, and trying not to be predictable.
That's not really true; execution is a factor but playing mind games with your opponent and deep knowledge of what they can do is important to high-level play. Saying Street Fighter is about muscle memory is like saying being a quarterback is about throwing a ball. But sub out Tetris or something if it makes you feel better about the analogy.
Sure but Street Fighter is a very specific type of game.
Take something like Civilization that requires tons of research, planning and critical thinking. Those types of skills are more applicable to other things outside of the game.
I think the difference is just in status: being an excellent chess player gets you respect from a more respectable-looking crowd than being excellent at Street Fighter. Neither gets you quite as much widespread adulation as being good at golf or Formula 1 car driving, while both get you more than being good at Candy Crush. But ultimately they're all just games.
I get anxious when I've played video games for too long instead of honing a skill or working.
I get anxious when I've been working or cramming info into my head for too long.
It balances out. Besides, it's important to allow yourself rest periods between bouts of learning to allow your brain to consolidate the new information and subconsciously draw inferences and review detail. Otherwise you reach a point when you've bitten off more new information than you can comfortably chew.
I also tend to play games that involve exploration of worlds I will never experience in my own life, mastery of skills that require cognitive precision and dexterity, or philosophical rumination. I find these experiences to be a positive addition to my world and my understanding of people around me.
Now that we are seeing real potential for VR, this is about to reach a whole new level. The line between games and educational tools blend more and more every day. Imagine a war game so visceral that it makes you cry, gives you PTSD, and completely makes you rethink the wars you support. Or full job or skill training courses. The potential for video games to positively impact our lives has never been greater.
I also tend to play games that involve exploration of worlds I will never experience in my own life, mastery of skills that require cognitive precision and dexterity, or philosophical rumination. I find these experiences to be a positive addition to my world and my understanding of people around me.
Care to share some of your favorites? I'd be curious to check them out.
For a good recent psychologically engaging game, try Firewatch[2].
A spattering of other favorites: Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, the Jak and Daxter series, Antichamber, Dishonored, Skullgirls, all of the 2D Mario titles, Final Fantasy Tactics, Smash Bros, Minesweeper, Dwarf Fortress, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2
>>What I believe causes a game to feel unfulfilling is if after the game is finished the player, and the world, is (nearly) unchanged. If there's nothing to show for it.
Maybe in a tangible way nothing has changed, but for me, when I finish a good RPG or RTS, I feel like I have inhabited a different world for a short time. I come out of games like that with fond memories of how the combination of the story, game mechanics, music, characters, etc all made me feel. To me it's just as real and satisfying of a memory as going to the beach with my wife and son or completing a difficult programming project. Every game has a unique feel in my mind: Super Metroid feels different than Baldurs Gate which feels different than Mass Effect. I wouldn't trade the time spent on making those memories for anything.
I can relate to you. Ten years ago (with 20 yo) i was playing WOW and skipping college. Before that, i was playing competitive Counter Strike and doing bad on high school.
Today i look back and think: if i studied and worked more, i would be much far by now. Probably rich. I´m creating an online business where i have to learn and create every day. And yes, i'm very happy doing it and not playing anymore (one year now).
But, what if ... ten years ago, playing World of Warcraft would lead me to a rich life today? What if it paid well to be a Counter Strike player?
I suspect i would be even happier. But that's not the truth of the world. Yet.
>if i studied and worked more, i would be much far by now. Probably rich.
Or not. Maybe at the same place in life. Studies are not as important as a defining criteria for your life as sociocultural group, or class. I wouldn't get too hung up on it if I were you, what's done is done.
>What if it paid well to be a Counter Strike player?
If you're a pro player, sure, it does. There are regular tournaments with $1m prize pools, teams like Virtus Pro pay their players generously. There's money in it, if you can manage to be in a top 16 European team. Or top 4 North America because of level discrepancies. That's around 100 spots.
Whenever I think that maybe I could have had a better life if only I had done X, it always falls apart on closer examination. It wouldn't have been better, it just would have been different. I still would have been me, and that person just isn't cut out to be independently wealthy, or famous, or influential, or even noticed. In this kind of civilization, I'm a nobody.
In the end, it hasn't mattered whether I was good or bad at my job. The world simply does not care whether I pursue sloth or aresteia. It would have kicked me in the teeth just as hard if I was a driven genius or just a lazy smartass. You leave a lot of opportunities on the table when one of your major life goals is to not be the same sort of exploitative asshole that you have always hated dealing with.
So I have played video games, still play them, and don't feel even an iota of guilt or regret about what else I could have been doing instead. And I read escapist fantasy/sci-fi novels. And I indulge prurient interests. And I eat too much candy, and don't exercise enough. For me, working hard has always paid off about the same as coasting. If ever I lift a finger to do better for myself, someone comes along and eats up my efforts, leaving me with a pile of tasty crumbs. They're nice, but probably not worth all the effort and sense of moral outrage.
If the world wanted me to do more with my life, it wouldn't have filled itself with parasitic and predatory humans.
> For me, working hard has always paid off about the same as coasting. If ever I lift a finger to do better for myself, someone comes along and eats up my efforts, leaving me with a pile of tasty crumbs.
How so? Let's say you try to kick ass at your job (let's assume for a second that you're a software developer), learn the newest/hot technologies, do some side projects and move to a hot tech hub. Unless you've already done that, you can easily double/triple your salary in a matter of a couple of years. That's not crumbs.
Another example - working out. It's amazing how much more women are interested in me now that I have modicum of physique (and I'm FAR from the Men's Health models). That's also not crumbs.
The requirement that I move away from my home eats up an awful lot of my not-specifically-work-related efforts. Gain salary. Lose contact with existing friends and family. Pay extra salary in inflated housing costs, food prices, and taxes. Maybe also commute longer.
I have had annual performance reviews that say I kick ass, some that say I am just "meets expectations" in all categories. Either way, I only get a 2% salary increase. The jobs around here don't pay extra for superior competence.
The limiting factor on my nookie is spousal libido. My exercise and fitness levels have no observable effect on it. Nothing I have ever done seems to have an observable effect on it, actually.
I feel like a mime. No matter what direction I go, my nose smushes up against that invisible wall, and I can't find where it ends, so I can get past it.
It's probably not the world. It could be just me. The walls might be of my own creation, and now I just live in the invisible box I have built for myself.
But it could also be that I am surrounded by Homo economicus, and I am already standing at the local profit maximum. Nobody cares about who I am or what I do, so long as they can make the maximum amount of money from me. Nobody really wants the sprockets in their machine to grow extra teeth.
I am not wealthy enough to buy change with money, not depraved enough to buy it with blood, not eloquent enough to buy it with words, and not clever enough to buy it with new technology.
So not without violating my own ethical code, I can't. And if I compromise my own ethics, the change I create will not be for the common good.
It is not my world, anyway. It still belongs to those acting under the precept "might makes right". The systems of control still rest easy upon the foundation that humans are easy to murder, and their corpses are easily forgotten. In video games, protagonists can slaughter their way across a whole state, and get little more than little red, white, and green numbers for it. In reality, if you change the world, it might not be for the better, and you and everyone else will have to live with the consequences.
I know I could change the world. I have even identified some means of doing so. But when I assess the likely effectiveness of those means, the only ones that even cause a momentary shimmy on the global change-o-meter involve horrific atrocities. And in many of those scenarios, I cannot escape angry retribution from somebody. Changing the world is a punishable offense.
So I'll just eat the bread and watch the circuses, and try not to attract too much attention from the sociopaths, thanks.
It is sad that we measure it terms of our material wealth. There is plenty positive to be said about creating material wealth over all. Not that it is the only possible objective either, of course.
This is why I like games with a beginning & end, and an actual story.
The first keeps you from sinking unbounded time with it, and the latter actually can be enlightening, informative (ie, bringing in mythologies or historical context), and ethically challenging. Stuff like endless PvP matches or MMO grinds never held much appeal to me.
Sure, but these things aren't mutually exclusive: you can learn and create and play videogames too. Not every waking moment has to be productive. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, etc.
As with most things, the key is moderation: finding a balance where you're getting enough relaxation/leisure to keep yourself happy, while not dedicating so much time to it that it completely takes over your life.
Thanks for this. I was hoping someone would cover the obvious: games are fun! Why is that we feel the need to justify fun? Isn't fun (a form of happiness) what we are all striving to be able to have more of?
> Isn't fun (a form of happiness) what we are all striving to be able to have more of?
No, we are not all striving to have more happiness (although some people surely are). So long as you don't circularly define happiness as "that feeling you get when you accomplish your goals", then most people have at least some goals besides happiness, and some of us explicitly advocate that many or most goals should not be happiness related.
Fair enough. "All" was a poor choice of words. I would be the last (more hyperbole) person to tell anyone how to live their life.
Also, I failed to mention why I replied to the parent post: the mention of moderation. I think if you are listening to how you're feeling, you can (one can) tell when a life strategy isn't working. The important things in life will make their demands known.
Games are fun, until some dude in Path of Exile hands out free items because he'll delete his account after his wife divorced him for playing 24/7. And such.
Sometimes we feel the need to justify fun because it takes away from otherwise productive time we would have had.
In the past year, I've racked up more than 400 hours playing RimWorld, well over two weeks just playing that. I'm sure I could have found something more useful and interesting to do than that.
I think considering this as a zero sum exchange is pretty unhealthy. Different activities have very different trade offs. Why is lesuire time considered unproductive? Does everything need to obviously contribute to something you feel is productive? Can lesuire activities contribute to productivity?
Personally I think spending time playing games, reading, watching tv and other activities are essential to remaining productive. Not least because they are all interesting input to consider things in different ways. But also because they give me space.
I agree, I enjoy playing Civ, but realizing the absolutely astronomical amount of time I've sunk into it and all the things I could have done instead has really turned me off from it. Maybe it's an age thing; once you realize half your life is gone, wasting time like that seems less attractive than it once did.
I'm not sure we should beat ourselves up over what we did in our leisure time. Could we be "better people" by spending our leisure time better? Perhaps. Maybe we just need a break now and then.
Some people like listening to music while doing productive things, some like watching TV.
I play slow online turn-based games when at home doing really boring work. I can context-switch, engage my creative mind for 15-30s, and jump back into page 57 of the design doc I'm reviewing.
As for intense gaming sessions, I have young kids = unless it's appropriate for them (more and more the case as they grow up) I don't have time for it.
Nothing exceptional, mainly mobile CCGs or card-based games that exercise my math processing.
Games like Hearthstone, Ascension, Sword & Poker, Carcasonne along with a bit of SF4 Volt. Turns need to be done in at most 1m or games should be done in 2-3m max.
What I learned from activities related to being a gamer, decades ago:
- Built my own computer from parts, and squeezed more performance out of it through overclocking and tuning mostly everything that could be tuned
- Learned about networks, power grids and basic event planning setting up LAN parties
- Built a website for my team. Learned to program with PHP and to manipulate images
- Made many contacts, many of them software engineers, including the ones that got me my first jobs
- Lots of team related administrative tasks like screening and recruiting players for my team, creating strategies and tactics with fault tolerance in case of events such as missing players or reduced network connectivity
All this before I turned 18. All these skills and connections turned out to be incredibly valuable later on when I went through financial hardship during college, my former teammates showed up with job offers for programming jobs, which helped to sustain me and my family.
This is a feeling I've recently come across as well. While playing ARK: Survival Evolved, I came across the ARKServers.net server page, which shows the Steam name and play time of players on the server, to generate interest. I started scraping this into an Excel spreadsheet, and combined this with player ingame names, and also their tribe names. This gave me a basic report of tribe strength on the server, which I could share in my tribe's Skype chat.
After reading about tracking your Facebook friends on HN, I pressed F12 on ARKServers.net, waited for a request, then right clicked this and copied the cURL link. This returns a JSON payload of user names and play times. I used this as the foundation of a Powershell static site generator, with an HTML boilerplate generating a report every 60 seconds. I registered a domain cheaply with Google and host the site with IIS on my home internet.
I soon learned that any Steam server will return a list of players and play times when queried with the correct UDP packet. The ARKServers site was just running a PHP application called SteamQuery that performs the UDP call and turns it into the JSON payload. I'm still working to port this to Powershell.
After some time, I expanded the website. Now, the static site includes an HTML5 canvas that combines 3 JSON payloads (server, tribe, map) to show tribe base locations on a rotating map background, with player and tribe listed in menus.
The project is pre-3.0, needing bug fixes and a true dynamic map. But making the site has actually been more fun than playing ARK.
I'm in the same boat and it applies to games overall. I do make an exception for when there is a social component to it, such as playing games with friends.
I'm also not advocating against gaming. A game with enough strategic depth can provide that feeling of learning and creativity when you can share and discuss strategy with other players.
I feel like the trend in online gaming overall has transformed the social aspect into a more robotic process---getting auto-matched against strangers who never talk. Part of this might be due to the challenge of managing trolls/griefers. But I don't like to feel like the game has served as a mechanical distraction and not something that made life more interesting for an hour.
> That's not to advocate against gaming, or to generalize all games, but I've thought about how much time I spent playing games in the past and if I was happy with what I gained from it: I largely was not.
I feel the same. I like games and still play them here and there (and enjoy them), but a couple points in the past I was clearly addicted to them. First it was DAoC that was like a second job, and then to a much lesser extent WoW.
I think if you treat games as entertainment/downtime things then they are fine. It's only when they start replacing TV, and then reading, and hanging out with friends, etc... that they really become an issue.
Overall life satisfaction of a middle-class that where people feel as wealthy as the upper-class also seems to be destroying our labor force among the young.
"Nationwide, there are now about 200,000 unfilled construction jobs, according to the National Association of Home Builders. If America were as simple as a lake, builders would just raise wages, incomes would rise and the problem would be over.
But that hasn’t happened. Builders have gone recruiting in high schools and elsewhere, looking for people willing to learn building skills, but they’re not having much luck."
Why would anyone go work on a farm or construction when they could play video games instead?
Yes I suppose it could have nothing to do with the fact that (1) those jobs aren't remotely respected, (2) the jobs pay terribly, (3) OH&S will be treated as a joke, and you can expect to be physically unable to do the work by your mid-30's at which point you're unemployed and unskilled and (4) the work is a wildly unstable source of income.
Every time someone talks about trades paying well, they miss the fact that the whole industry routinely goes bankrupt when there's a drop in demand and prices plummet once people start moving into it.
Short answer: unless you work one of these jobs already, you are really not qualified to be telling other people they should plan to take them.
Tangential to the point: also you'd generally find people who work in those industries play videogames anyway - because entertainment media has very little to do with America's employment situation.
Good point. People do not want to do things with their hands. That's not just games though. I would imaging many people on this site make their money just typing at a computer all day. We build abstract concepts instead of physical things.
Because I deal with abstract complexity all week, I build stuff around the house and do home improvements whenever I get a chance. It's great and rewarding feeling when building something and seeing it done.
> I've thought about how much time I spent playing games in the past and if I was happy with what I gained from it: I largely was not.
I totally identify, and yet somehow I feel that because gaming is such an important part of how I grew up that I would be very sad and never quite myself if I gave it up altogether. To me, a lot of important culture has its roots in video games - characters, storylines, social experiences with other friends, etc etc. It's a definitely time sink, but for me at least, a very important and defining one.
I always found myself unfilled with games. To me if anything it was 'work', to get to the next stage, fight the next boss or whatever. That's not to say I think it's a waste. I think for a lot of people it's a good activity. Personally though, a lot of my energy that would be put towards gaming is either put in my blacksmith hobby which is not at all close to professional, it's just a hobby. That and hunting birds that my labradors compete to retrieve.
>I felt as if I was lacking in skills that I wished I had, and believe I could have learned in that time
I play a fair amount of videogames, but what can I say? I have never felt that way. There are some deficiencies in my life, but the main reason they remain deficiencies is that I'm not even sure how to resolve them.
I suppose I don't care much about learning skills because I know I'll never learn everything there is to learn, so I'll always have to defer to experts in certain domains.
I create, and I also play a lot of games (nowadays more board games). I also now spend a lot of time with my puppy. I get enjoyment out of all of them.
Also, even though I like to think I can create some pretty cool things, I don't see how I could ever create anything as intricate, beautiful, or full of discovery as Jonathan Blow's The Witness. That was absolutely worth the 40+ hours I've spent on it so far.
> I've found learning and creating to be more fulfilling activities than videogames.
To each his/her own, but to me, video games lost nearly all appeal when I started learning how to program. The only game I still play with any kind of enthusiasm these days is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. But all in all, if I have the choice of spending a Friday night playing a video game or programming, I'll go for programming almost all the time. (And roughly 99.999% of the programming I do in my free time is mainly to learn about something, not to solve some urgent problem.)
I still think video games have a huge untapped potential as devices for storytelling or education or as an artform of their own. But we've only been creating video games seriously for ... what? 30, 40 years? Books and theater have been around for millennia, and it took people quite a bit of work before sublime works of art emerged.
(Although I'll admit I was quite happy to discover that there is an open source clone of Doom, and I spent a few happy hours with it. Great fun!)
Have you tried modding or mapping? In high school a large part of my life was spent around learning to map for various games because it felt like a way I could actually give back to the community I was a part of while exploring the creativity of it.
I enjoyed making the content and seeing reactions to it and trying to one up myself then I did actually playing the game. In fact it gets to a point where you've seen enough behind the curtain that it loses a lot of its charm.
I feel lucky that in my high school days of excessive gaming, my game of choice was Garry's Mod, and I was really into modding it and creating new gamemodes for it. This meant that beyond the social connections that multiplayer gaming provides, I also had a "portfolio" of sorts, of all the things I learned and created. I definitely don't regret those hours.
I agree.
But there is one difference between watching a crappy TV show and playing a crappy Video Game:
You are actively engaged in playing the game. No matter how trivial it is.
Of course, if you pick a more challenging game, like an RPG/Puzzle, then the difference grows greater.
I also agree that it is more fulfilling to create something.
Which is the reason why I myself like to create ...
>I've found learning and creating to be more fulfilling activities than videogames.
>I wonder if other people share the same joy of learning that I feel
Yes, but... Most of my learning and creating has been inspired by games. I started with AD&D (pen and paper, not a video game), then historic tabletop miniature games. By middle school, I was reading 1000+ page college-level books about history because the games got me interested. School taught little or nothing about ancient civilizations, the napoleonic era, or the pike-and-shot era. There were also the WWII, Cold-War, and near-future games that led me to learn a lot about geography, geopolitics, and recent history.
By the time I got a PC (still before high school), I was playing some really complex detail-oriented games. There was a lot of paperwork to keep track of game state, tables to do lookups on, and rules details to remember. I learned how to program trying to make things that would ease the paperwork burden and let me focus on the strategy. (Coincidentally, that turned out to be a valuable career skill.) I also tried to make my own PC games, of course. As PCs got more powerful, PC games got better and more detailed (and better than I could make) and I mostly switched to them. Playing simulators like Silent Hunter and 688(I) led me to learn a lot about geometry and such. At the same time I started trying to make PBeM and PBW client software (again, useful career skills involving networking, client/server programming, and data processing/presentation).
As a fan of serious strategy games, I was interested in creating an AI player that could actually handle those types of games (which are exponentially more complex than chess-like games). I read a lot about AI and played around with different types of heuristics and other ideas. Nothing really came of that (yet) but it was very interesting learning about learning and thinking and planning.
Another genre that interested me were economic games like Wall $treet Raider and Capitalism Plus. That led me to many interesting books and movies to try to understand why companies did things like mergers, acquisitions and divestitures, spinoff subsidiaries, holding companies, etc., and how that related to the stock market.
Much enjoyable time was spent drawing illustrations and doing digital art, and learning a bit about 3-D modeling and CAD. That too was largely gaming-inspired, or trying to make art for games. While my skills have atrophied, I'd probably never have gotten as good as I did if I hadn't had inspiration.
Generally, my bookshelves are lined with books about topics that gaming got me interested in. My career is built upon foundations of things that I learned because of games. But I can't think of a single time when watching a new episode of _insert favorite TV show here_, or any other leisure/hobby, has led me to the bookstore to learn more, or led me to experiment with new creations, the way that a new game is likely to do. I'm happy with what I've gained from it.
I find it depends on the game. The Witness was truly challenging and interesting. It really made me think "how do I solve this". I want to play it more.
Things like TF2 and OW are really just re-enforcing muscle memory, and an exercise in "how long can I last all this chaotic audio/visual vomit" (both from the game and juvenile player base).
Pushing near 40, I can understand why people saw them as just noisy distractions when I was a kid: more often than not a video-game is a noisy distraction.
Re-hashes of CoD and other FPS shooters really aren't teaching anything new. It's exercising muscle memory built up 15 years ago playing the first one.
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Add.: What I believe causes a game to feel unfulfilling is if after the game is finished the player, and the world, is (nearly) unchanged. If there's nothing to show for it. No new philosophy, no useful talent, no object created, nothing to share with others. Most games are equivalent in their impact to a bad reality TV show, a distraction from progress, a time sink, a void.