Tbh video games with your friends is pretty much the same as drinking together but without the alcohol.
Equally fun, good for social bonding, but without the adverse health effects or hangover.
Singleplayer games on the other hand are useless, I'd say the equivalent of binge watching tv shows.
This feels like sensationalism. You could make the exact same argument for music, books, films or TV - it is an artistic medium. A game can be a complete waste of time, and equally it can be an enriching and educational experience. Blindly sticking them all into one category is naive.
Agree partially - however, comparing games to books is really apples to oranges. Games are a high degree more addictive, and the major problem are not the artistic story-driven games but the engineered-to-addict AAA’s.
for certain kinds of TV the analogy might hold, for film or reading it's harder to see.
As the article points out games fit very well into what it calls 'limbic capitalism', using reward mechanisms of the brain to keep people engaged in repetitive tasks. If you go through the list of the most popular games, very few are artistic in nature.
This isn't really true for reading. Okay, sure you can write erotica or fan-fiction, but culturally everyone knows that this is garbage essentialy. Going and picking up a (challenging) novel is relatively hard work, which is why reading that kind of fiction is on continuous decline.
The difference between games and everything else you listed is that games are interactive. This has a huge impact on how powerful the psychological rewards are. The point is that games offer simulated experiences that give a false sense of accomplishment.
On the other hand, maybe the interactivity of games means that you are using more of your brain than you would be in passive consumption.
I tend to think that, say, a month spent in competitive gaming at night is better For your mind than a month spent binge watching Seinfeld at night for the second time.
If digitally induced dopamine spikes are a concern, why isn't porn at the forefront of the discussion? Erectile dysfunction has roughly doubled in young men over the past decade and some research attributes it to online porn. https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/
Are you sure it isn't actually at the forefront of the discussion? Because I remember reading quite a lot of stuff during the past 2-3 years on the effects of porn on young adults.
The article focuses on "fake fitness": the false sense held by gamers that their gaming activities promote fitness and success in the real world.
The article aims to show that this sense is indeed false.
Porn consumers don't generally share a sense that porn consumption improves their real-world fitness and success. You could make a separate argument against porn consumption, but the "fake fitness" argument the article makes doesn't apply to porn addiction.
Most people who like books, films and TV, consume these media types passively, i.e., they are less immersive and hence perhaps less dangerous. With _creating_ music, I'd argue the situation is similar to martial arts: it requires discipline, and actually social skills if you want to be relevant. The same is true for many "e-sports". However, I agree with Rogan more or less, because there are just too many games that are too dull and too many young males who waste their time with them. Based on my personal experience, I would say most of my time spent gaming as a teenager was wasted, but playing music actually taught me important lessons for life. For me the social aspects, as well as the "mastery" aspects of gaming were just too simple, too simulated.
These insights may be trivial, but still important to experience first hand and early in life (let me highlight that I was never an excellent or successful musician, though):
* Having solid basic skills in a profession is crucial; in contrast, almost nobody really needs a virtuoso. Practically, nobody needs a rock star or diva.
* Always be reliable, even if others are not (don't pay back unreliability by being not reliable yourself). Be the one who is on time and does his homework. (In contrast, in school I learned that what technicality qualifies as homework often does not pay off.)
* Continuity is key to get a decent chance to succeed (again, in contrast school taught me that you can make things up as you go along, as long as you are somewhat talented).
To relate to the topic: the problem with many video games is that reliability and continuity come effortless. You simply need to go online and play. In contrast, as an amateur musician, I had to make sure I have the right gear, plan the transport without owning a car, make sure I can get into a rehearsal room regularly, find the right people to play with (the ones who have the connections that are needed to actually get a gig) et cetera.
Just like in "real" sports, many personalities in "e-sports" make a point of being douchebags. Some make a point of being a nice person.
> For me the social aspects, as well as the "mastery" aspects of gaming were just too simple, too simulated.
I agree, in multiplayer games "mastery" relates to improving mechanical skill, i.e. getting better at mashing specific button sequences as fast as possible or getting better at flickshots. These take a lot of time to get marginal improvements (e.g. improving your aim just a little bit beyond your personal baseline can take thousands of hours). In singleplayer and RPG games, "mastery" happens on the character and doesn't require anything from the player beyond either repeating some action a large number of times (e.g. picking locks to improve lockpicking skill) or simply allocating "skill points" awarded by advancing the game.
> I agree, in multiplayer games "mastery" relates to improving mechanical skill, i.e. getting better at mashing specific button sequences as fast as possible or getting better at flickshots.
This is an incredibly shallow analysis. Most competitive multiplayer games have important strategic elements too. Positioning, knowing when to engage, effective team communication, countering opponent strategies, etc.
Don't mistake this for defending video games, but you can't expect a productive discussion when the strawmen stood up are so absurd.
Well, yes, obviously, but I'd counter-argue that the training regimes used for these games tend to focus on the mechanical side, while tactics and strategy are improved through playing matches. And even that part is called "The Grind" for a reason.
What do you think NBA players are doing? Lots of individual training with a few 5-on-5 matches sprinkled in. Muscle memory is extremely important for being effective at all kinds of sports and activities, so most training regimes incorporate rote drills to build and maintain a solid foundation.
Unless you're making a critique against games at large (physical and video), I'm not sure what you're getting at.
It's their job, which they get handsomely compensated for. Wasting away thousands of hours grinding Dota or CS:GO is the job of very few people, while the grand majority of gaming addicts are simply wasting a significant chunk of their life.
Sure, more can be said about it than "games = bad".
But at the same time, the difference between the things you list is the level of fulfillment. Or, in other words, how you feel about your time spent doing that thing 5 or 10 years later.
Even though I have good memories in some games, I don't look back on my time in World of Warcraft and think "yeah, that's definitely how I'd spend that time if I had a do-over." Meanwhile, my time spent learning language, meeting up with friends, and writing short stories are expenditures of time that I'm proud of.
Games usually suffer from two things:
1) Games tend to be cheap entertainment on the Netflix and Twitter and heroin side of the fulfillment continuum.
2) It's too easy to sink a lot of time in games, and they tend to dominate your mind when you're in them. You mention music, but people aren't just sitting at their desk from 6pm to 4am listening to music. Most hobbies don't grip you like that. It makes it easy to neglect other things in ways that, say, an addiction to hiking does not.
As a former big gamer myself, I think most people are stuck in the trap of games and only a small fraction of people are doing something particularly fulfilling with them. But my point wouldn't be that games = bad, but rather: beware.
For example, on the other hand, there was a time when I was only gaming to play online with my best friend who had moved across the country. That was some fulfilling gaming. But I wouldn't be surprised if most people were like me and found it very hard to strike a healthy balance.
> A game can be a complete waste of time, and equally it can be an enriching and educational experience.
There are a few exceptional games that encourage creativity and arguably provide some education. However, the majority of gamers have been playing roughly the same FPS that provides the same basic violent catharsis since Doom came out 27 years ago.
For this vast majority of gamers, games are just mindless fun which neither aims for, nor achieves, any sort of meaningful self-improvement.
> You could make the exact same argument for music, books, films or TV - it is an artistic medium.
Most popular entertainment, just like the aforementioned FPS, is just mindless diversion catering (or if you will, exploiting) our baser instincts and propensity for addiction. That applies to all forms of popular entertainment: games, TV, films, and even books.
The point of the article is that games - unlike films or TV for example - promote a sense "fake fitness". Nobody believes that they acquire some valuable fitness by binge-watching Friends on Netflix. However, gamers do tend to hold a false belief that they are gaining some valuable skills out of the huge amounts of time they spend playing popular video games.
RPGs for example directly exploit this delusion: your character gains many valuable skills, and by falsely identifying with them, you feel a sense of accomplishment even though all you did was mindlessly grind some braindead "quests" and your odds of surviving in a real combat situation are just as bad as before - worse, probably, because your fitness has deteriorated from so many more hours of sitting on your couch mashing buttons.
Doom is one of those exceptional games that encourages creativity. Doom was the game that popularized modding, and people are still making new maps for it today.
The sad part about it is many of the people who naturally achieve stuff in videogames could also be successful in life with a little therapy to overcome their avoidant personalities.
I know people who were heavy into WOW and decided to make life the real grind. They have done very well for themselves.
Yes, the basic traits that lead to video game addiction are actually beneficial in most real-world scenarios:
Identifying challenges, focusing on them, engaging in behavior that overcomes them, persisting in that behaviors until signs of success manifest, and then feeling rewarded by these signs of success.
These are all traits that really do tend to lead to skill-building, self-improvement, and success when applied in REAL contexts.
The problem with video games is that they create an ARTIFICIAL context to exploit these traits. It's not you who improved your fighting skills by mindlessly mashing that button 20,000 times - it's your avatar, a fictitious being. But games are set up so that you will feel the sense of accomplishment.
Games is conditioning our generation to gain the rewarding sensations of fitness, self-improvement, and survival success from trivial activities that are merely dressed up to appear challenging and "masculine".
Watch a few young gamers. Note how they behave - not how they describe themselves - and you will see he is right.
Now, for most people it's just a phase. But there are a few that keep that mentality for the rest of their lives and then get frustrated when they are not getting anywhere outside their computers (their "battlestations").
Can you point to any recent philosophy books published from men sitting on porches? Most of those conversations die as soon as everyone goes home for the night.
It is a bit like saying playing chess doesn't get you better at anything but chess.
There is a bunch of aspects to video games, that you improve e.g. hand-eye coordination, strategical thinking under pressure, team play and just general reaction time to name a few that come to my mind.
> Video games are a real problem. You know why? Because they’re fucking fun. They’re real exciting, but you don’t get anywhere… you’re going to waste your time
Programming is also fun and exciting. And if you're real good at it, you just get to do even more programming ...
It takes a certain individual to persist through hours of head scratching to figure out you're missing a semicolon, derive pleasure from it, and then coming back for more.
We're all a bunch of borderline masochists, if you think about it...
Agreed, I remember at Univ in a different degree my classmates were playing games for fun while I was programming for fun. Turns out you DO get somewhere with programming though, chances look like 9 out of 10 people who program for fun can do it professionally, while only 1 in something like 10k-100k who game can do so professionally (totally made up stats, just want to show the order of magnitude I feel of "getting somewhere").
I think the interpretation of "you don't get anywhere" is the crux. There are a few games I've put a few hundred hours in, and those hours were mostly fun and exciting. I gained skills in the game, some of which are transferrable to other things, but most of which aren't.
If I was to put the same time into a new programming language, I'd have gained a different set of skills, again some transferrable and some not. I think most people judge the second set of skills as more worthwhile than the first (maybe because it is tied to employability, and is seen as more "age appropriate").
Another aspect is that programming isn't designed to be addictive in the way some games are. Something like World of Warcraft seems designed specifically to hook into the part of the brain that rewards grind. In the moment, WoW is very compelling. But looking back on what was accomplished, I don't feel particularly positive about it. Compared to a programming project with a similar time commitment, in the moment it is on average less compelling probably, but the achievements are more satisfying in retrospect. Somehow this makes programming seem more worthwhile (though maybe I have just internalized the societal standards from above, and that's why I feel more satisfied with the programming projects).
I'd argue that fulfillment is the variable here and it seems to be what you're describing.
Spending a weekend on a programming project for fun can almost feel like the height of self-actualization to me. A pure intellectual challenge that makes me feel good and gives me a real proving ground. And I almost always look back on it and am proud of my effort even if I don't accomplish what I wanted.
Meanwhile it's too easy to spend empty, unfulfilling time in games. My time in World of Warcraft was wasn't self-actualization but more narcotic entertainment. It was less challenge and more empty feelgood treadmill. It felt good at the time, but not a year later. And it was addicting and easy in a way that programming (creation, exertion) is not. Even when I got into add-on development (which produced some fulfillment), that was only a small fraction of my time spent playing.
I don't think the point needs to be that one is always good and the other is always bad. But my advice to my former self and young people would be to beware of games. Ideally we all have a creative outlet that gives us real fulfillment. Even if you get sucked into games, hopefully it can redeem itself as a creative outlet rather than leave you in a narcotic-like rut.
I think Joe's comments make perfect sense if you see it as a letter to his former self and thus young people in general. I just remember when I was a heavy gamer, I hated acknowledging that yeah, I kinda am wasting my time, and it's not fulfilling. My parents were right, but it's a hard pill to swallow when it's one of the only things you've found that excites you (and you've stopped looking).
On the other hand, I think a lot of life advice is too hard to apply and better experienced yourself. Sometimes you just have to spend a year in an MMORPG in your teens, quit it, and then think "yeah, what a waste of time that was." And you learn a good lesson about how you want to spend your time. The danger is that I have two friends in their 30s who never quit, and it shows. Never had girlfriends, never traveled, slave to games, seem miserable -- and it's hard for me to see how they are setting themselves up for life fulfillment. And I think that matters.
That's all I have to say on the topic. To avoid spamming my PoV any more in these threads, this was my last one.
> jiu-jitsu might offer a person physical fitness, excitement, confidence, and new career opportunities
Jiu-jitsu definitely wins on the physical fitness. Video games win on the lower chance of brain damage from concussions.
Video games can certainly offer excitement and confidence.
I am not sure what new career opportunities jiu-jitsu offers in any meaningful quantity. If we are talking about "jiu-jitsu" instructor jobs, well, there are video game trainer jobs and video game tester jobs as well.
The problems people have with video games come from gamers not meeting societal expectations for their gender and preferring to do something else.
Your use of the word "boy" explains everything. All of these anti video game articles are basically accusing gamers of never growing up to be good providers, which is the social expectation for the male gender.
The games certainly appeal to the masculine fantasy, but the people who play them are hardly considered masculine.
I say boy because I literally see parents being proud when their little boys play games. They are literally happy about their kids doing gender right.
It is different in adults insofar it sux for partner when he is playing all the time while she is dealing with kids and all that boring stuff.
But outside of the addiction situation, male gaming in adults is accepted as being dude doing dude activities. Trying to pretend that you massively popular hobby is making you outsider is ridiculous.
Brazilian jiu jitsu (which is what Joe Rogan practices) is a grappling art. It does not involve any striking of the head at all. Concussions are exceedingly rare, I’ve never heard of anyone getting one.
Yes. It is like with anything else - fun for some time is good for you.
When you become so obsessed with fun that you pull multiple all nighters, are failing in the school due to no effort spent on it, are unable to relate to non gamers or worst are getting moody irritable and yelling around, then it is no longer good for you.
You get exercise and some level of mind-body training. That raises it above the most frivolous of time wasting at least. I think you can get a lot out of most media as well, but it doesn't necessarily have the same default utility as physical activity.
A less dramatic way to say that self defence skills are quite useful, and can extend your lifetime if you do not happen to live in a civilised country.
How deep have you gone on a physical activity/sport? I would posit the depth simply isn't there in those vr games.
Beat saber and DDR might be ok but the skill / coordination element isn't quite the same as learning various techniques well in a martial art (or sport like tennis/soccer)
DDR can be crazy hard! If you try to reach a good level you definitely are at the level of exercises and techniques of a more general sport. Also, it doesn't have to be virtual versus real world, for example I found Ring Fit: Adventure on Switch to be a very good introduction to running, fitness, or yoga depending on the exercises that you select. It's a very fun way to setup a casual sport routine that you can then expend in something more serious if you want to.
Yeah I mentioned DDR cos at a high level it probably is getting much closer to sport. Ring fit looks good I wanted to get it actually. I bet it must be useful during lockdown!
The problem with DDR is that holding onto the bar is accepted competitively. I didn't know that when I played, and as the ignorant scrub[0] I was I got good enough to pass a 10-footer without touching the bar. That certainly required a high level of coordination. But it was also doing it wrong, and I think it's a failure of game design that the correct way to play is essentially just tapping buttons with your feet.
Funny you should mention! I'm a juggler of a decently high level. I'd say the coordination required to do advanced tricks with 3+ things of various shapes is pretty high. Not much of a workout, though it does wear on your joints a lot. I used to practice jiu jitsu for several years as well, and it's a great sport, but I'd say it's more cerebral - less hand/eye coordination, more patience and planning, with short bursts of speed/power.
I'd argue the coordination element is pretty high with beat saber. It requires rhythm, speed, and accuracy. The fact that I'm a juggler and still can't beat expert+ songs without practicing them repeatedly (and have only done so for a few) after several months of playing speaks to how quick, practiced, and coordinated you need to be. Definitely more of a workout as well. I also used to play DDR in high school and could beat every song in that game; but that was after many nights of playing for hours, drenched in sweat.
Spending free time for enjoyment can’t be considered a waste. Don’t violate the golden rule and the hobby is fine. The only person who cares that your hobby is healthy is you. Don’t disrespect others. Martial arts is even worse by this metric because gamers don’t insult other peoples’ hobbies as often.
> Spending free time for enjoyment can’t be considered a waste.
I don't think we actually believe that. We don't say that about something like heroin or masturbation.
Also, your future-self doesn't necessarily agree with that either. Give your future-self a say in how you spend you time today because they're the one who has to live with it.
"Time enjoyed while wasted wasn't time wasted!" tends to only be something present-you says to conveniently justify spending time in ways that will turn out to be unfulfilling with high opportunity costs.
Those things are often coupled with addiction, is self-destructive. Addiction from lack of a balanced life is an arguably preventable downward spiral.
If you want to say video games fall in the same category, I would argue video games are to heroin as caffeine is to amphetamine. Additionally, things that people get addicted to are not the issue, but rather the life around the things that people are addicted to are the issue. Just look at the use of cell phones in the contemporary world.
On future-self: My future-self already makes my decisions. If they choose to appreciate art (as video games are) on a Sunday or repair some electronics older than me, or go on a walk, none of those things are wastes of time. The mere supposition that they are is obnoxious.
> "I don't think we actually believe that. We don't say that about something like heroin or masturbation."
A better analogy is between video game addiction and gambling addiction. Nobody denies that gambling addiction is a medical phenomenon despite being not being caused by drug dependency.
(As an unrelated aside, the trifecta is Asian-style gacha games, which combine video game addiction, gambling addiction, and borderline-pornography addiction into one neat little package. Small wonder they draw in whales despite usually not being very good in terms of game mechanics.)
We don't say that about something like heroin or masturbation.
This is a great point as well. Not everyone who plays video games makes a hobby out of it. A key part of a hobby is a sense of pride and accomplishment which the hobbyist enjoys by showing off their hobby to others. For example, a stamp collector showing off their collection to non-collectors and collectors alike.
Many gamers either have no interest in showing off their gaming accomplishments to non-gamers or otherwise have an aversion to doing so. Some, however, specifically do consider their gaming to be a hobby. My favourite example is the speedrunner LackAttack24 [1]. He specifically identifies speedrunning as his hobby and he makes extensive spreadsheets documenting his goals as well as his progress. He also happens to hold quite a number of (current and former) world records [2] in the Legend of Zelda as well as a few other games.
He's also very good at budgeting his time appropriately so as not to take away much time from his family and job as a developer. This hobby-life balance is another piece of the puzzle.
your future-self doesn't necessarily agree with that either
I think this is bang on. I would even go so far as to say that what you're doing is not a hobby unless you believe your future-self would be proud of the time you spent. Now some people do abandon their hobbies and later look back with regret, but I doubt they anticipate this at the time they're practicing the hobby.
gamers don’t insult other peoples’ hobbies as often
That’s not been my experience. From what I’ve seen, gamers insult anyone and everyone who doesn’t fit in with them. They also insult each other as a form of bonding, though the tone is way less nasty than the one they reserve for outsiders.
Do you have substance to back that up? We have a public figure MMA fighter and video game player shaming one hobby and praising the other. Do we have a single instance of a gamer public figure shaming some other hobby?
Now you’re moving the goalposts but the answer is still yes. I’ve seen plenty of popular streamers on Twitch shaming people for playing other games or for non-gaming related hobbies such as IRL streaming, ASMR, etc.
There have been many public scandals on this topic, sometimes with Twitch even banning these streamers. Try spending some time in the chat of popular Twitch gaming streamers. You’ll see some absolutely toxic behaviour. I’m honestly surprised that people on HN would be unaware of this stuff.
If you have some objective metric then feel free to put it forward. “I see X on on Y all the time” is completely unsubstantive. Just one instance to make your point is all I am asking.
I made an assertion from experience which I thought was common knowledge. Apparently that's not the case. The information is out there if you're really curious. I'm not going to do the research for you though (just Google "Twitch streamer banned"). You wouldn't be convinced by it anyway.
People who self-identify as gamers seem to be a minority subset of people who play video games (even if we'd filter by time spent, skill level, ...). The latter seems to consistently face-palm at the idiocy of the former, and avoids identifying as "gamers" for that reason.
Overall my experience matches yours, people who outwardly identify as "gamers" are often toxic individuals, certainly more so on average than people who don't express that group identity.
Multiplayer games often have very toxic or extremely toxic communities and players regardless, some more than others (e.g. CS:GO or GTA:Online have absurdly toxic playerbases, other titles less so).
I wouldn't write off Joe Rogan so easily. He's actually played his fair share of video games. His personal life story is also quite inspiring as he is clearly someone who has dedicated himself to self improvement.
On a personal level as someone who has easily sunk probably ~20-30k hours (as measured from game timers over the years)
into video games of all kinds of genres, I have to say nothing can come close to the enrichment or happiness I have experienced from practising martial arts.
There is something that compounds from simultaneously getting stronger and fitter while also learning a skill, all while being taught self-discipline and peace.
I have encountered meditation in kendo (mokuso), muay thai and taekwondo. (EDIT so the benefits associated with yoga can loosely also be conferred to a high quality martial arts school)
You can learn many lessons from videogames - my obsession with minmaxing and exploiting mechanics no doubt prepared me well for a kind of edge-case oriented software mindset. Games like DMC/MH/Dark Souls teach you patience. PvP games at a high level teach you about competition and mindreading/anticipation. Team based games can teach you communication and coordination.
But games are also extremely stimulating and the dopamine hit is too "cheap". There's also something to be said about incorporating your entire body into whatever hobby or exercise you do. The payoff is greater and isn't so easily substituted.
Doing something does not give you authority to bend principle. Additionally, he doesn’t seem qualified to be an authority on anything.
Your points are more well constructed than his, and I am not discrediting the merit of physical activity or mental health maintenance, just the idea that free time should be spent entirely on those things is a violation of the golden rule.
“Video games are a real problem. You know why? Because they’re fucking fun. They’re real exciting, but you don’t get anywhere… you’re going to waste your time.”
The claim was made that video games are (entirely) a waste of time.
> the idea that free time should be spent entirely on those things
Maybe I missed the reference about entirely avoiding? We all do things that are entirely useless. Giving them up entirely isn’t the point. Dialling them back if they’re too large a part of waking hours is.
Video games offer a safe space for healthy aggression. Testosterone levels are insane in teen years and it seems that every other healthy outlet for aggression has been discouraged in society. Games are fine as long as they do not become an addiction. It's too easy to get sucked in and get used to a safe environment where mistakes have no downsides, zero physical activity is had, and a somewhat toxic culture can exist.
I feel that maintaining a balance of physical activity can help temper young men in those years. For my own experience wrestling and MMA were a good outlet for those feelings. Of course the micro concussions probably didn't help me out much, but now I at least know that getting punched in the head regularly is a bad idea. Which, on paper, should have been more obvious.
The "cathartic" exercise of aggression may lead to more observations of aggression later, even if the exercise, such as pillow punching, was randomly assigned.
Well this is a surprise; I thought Rogan was marketing primarily towards the young man demographic?
Per other comments, lumping an entire medium "video games" into one and trying to label it "good/bad" is the laziest possible form of cultural criticism. Criticise individual works, or patterns of behaviour instead. You could target gambling/gatcha, or the abuse that players hurl at one another (also a problem in traditional sports!)
Rogan was utterly addicted to quake when younger. To the point where he had a high speed t1 line installed at a time when that cost an awful lot.
Having watched the podcast he discussed it in, I think he was more worried about the kind of default usage people slip into, where all their free time is effectively consumed by gaming as he experienced himself.
I don't know why this has become such a hot-button issue. I figured it was quite well established that video games are synthetic goals, and have always been tied to escapism. That is not to say that they are inherently wrong. Unless you are playing competitive games on the highest level (Dota, CS:GO), your charisma and looks are a greater predictor of your success in YouTube and Twitch than anything else.
Almost all goals in modern society are synthetic. That's the core of Ted Kaczynski's argument for destroying it all. But most people see no problem with synthetic goals, which is a good thing when the alternative involves the death of billions.
Other than basic survival and sex, all goals now and in history are and have been "synthetic." It's irrelevant and certainly not new or noteworthy. Of course most people are ok with it. They've been ok with it since the dawn of civilization. Ted was just a whiny little bitch having an existential crisis who wanted to murder people for pleasure. His ideas were extremely stupid, delusional, and hardly new or interesting. The alternative is not the death of billions. The alternative is for scumbags like him to just shut the fuck up or kill themselves before they start murdering people based on their extreme stupidity and delusions.
As a reply to the main quote: if we are talking in absolutes, then yes, playing video games could be a waste of time as you probably won't gain any skills that are useful in the real world, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to have fun and unwind in a fantasy every now and again, as long as you realize that it's just that - a fantasy.
> For some young men, gaming plugs a psychological gap left by the loss of a certain kind of masculinity, a loss sometimes blamed on feminists, who are accused of creating a feminised society that leaves no space for men. But in fact, the so-called ‘crisis in masculinity’ is a consequence, not of feminist campaigning, but of societal affluence — a miracle of the modern world, but one that has inadvertently produced a lot of frustrated and aimless young men, now directing their pent up energy towards a hobby that offers fake fitness but which, unfortunately, given the addictive nature of ‘limbic capitalism’, is more likely than other hobbies to become all-consuming, damaging the gamer’s health and repelling potential sexual partners.
This article definitely needs a bunch of [citation needed] tags. I'm a gamer myself and know plenty of gamers, but none that play video games to feel more masculine or which blame feminists in some way for this alleged "crisis in masculinity".
From my experience, these fantasies that the article mentioned: "a soldier, gunslinger, warrior, gangster, or heavily armed survivor in a post-apocalyptic hellscape" are more about us being able to live out fantasies without consequences the same way we would live them out by reading a fiction book, and not necessarily to somehow prop up our masculinity through them, though there might be some men that need that.
What's up with that weird tangent about feminism? It's not like no feminist ever noticed the bottled-up toxic masculinity in some gaming communities and started analysing that.
Do more sports is definitely one of the more naive "solutions" I've come across.
Yes, mostly useless. Though from my perspective, as a young male that has played video games quite a bit, it has made me curious about certain useful skills. At some point, you'll start playing with the game, modding it, or hosting servers for your buddies, or making cheats. I've learned scripting with Lua because I wanted more. Sure, you won't become a linux admin by hosting a Teamspeak and WoW server, but it will get you closer.
Would assume generalizations are bad to make here.
Video Games have:
- Thought me more English than I could ever learn in school especially TALKING (non-native)
- Started many projects for me that helped me later on from learning programming to analytical thinking and strategy
- Learn to work in teams and become part of a community, even though I still had the weekly sports activity and school etc also
- Got me into PC hardware and MS Windows with great detail to optimize my experience
- Made me "escape reality" without waking up with a broken bone somewhere next to the road
Guess there were many more points, some of which I maybe wouldn't attribute towards gaming but where indirectly affected by it.
But I can also see how other generations might have a different experience. You might no longer need to tinker with your OS and hardware to get a great performance.
Creating large spreadsheets to calculate game specific actions and derive decisions is also not needed for many games.
So I guess saying video games are bad is way too generic, as it is to say drinking is bad. Depending on the usage and what you get out of it.
I am more than happy to not have taken jiu-jitsu classes and I would also challenge if that had made it any better for me compared to gaming.
> So I guess saying video games are bad is way too generic
That's not the argument being presented. No one is talking about people who play 10-30 hours per two weeks, which is not an unreasonable amount of time for a hobby. This is largely about people who spend 60, 70, 80, 90 or triple digits per two weeks in games.
For the same reason I don't listen to the Kardashians for advice, I am not going to listen to an obnoxious MMA dude for life advice.
Clearly many humans have too easy a life (myself included) when we seek to fill our time with meaningless drivel produced by others who also have too much time.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadSingleplayer games on the other hand are useless, I'd say the equivalent of binge watching tv shows.
As the article points out games fit very well into what it calls 'limbic capitalism', using reward mechanisms of the brain to keep people engaged in repetitive tasks. If you go through the list of the most popular games, very few are artistic in nature.
This isn't really true for reading. Okay, sure you can write erotica or fan-fiction, but culturally everyone knows that this is garbage essentialy. Going and picking up a (challenging) novel is relatively hard work, which is why reading that kind of fiction is on continuous decline.
I tend to think that, say, a month spent in competitive gaming at night is better For your mind than a month spent binge watching Seinfeld at night for the second time.
The article aims to show that this sense is indeed false.
Porn consumers don't generally share a sense that porn consumption improves their real-world fitness and success. You could make a separate argument against porn consumption, but the "fake fitness" argument the article makes doesn't apply to porn addiction.
* Having solid basic skills in a profession is crucial; in contrast, almost nobody really needs a virtuoso. Practically, nobody needs a rock star or diva.
* Always be reliable, even if others are not (don't pay back unreliability by being not reliable yourself). Be the one who is on time and does his homework. (In contrast, in school I learned that what technicality qualifies as homework often does not pay off.)
* Continuity is key to get a decent chance to succeed (again, in contrast school taught me that you can make things up as you go along, as long as you are somewhat talented).
To relate to the topic: the problem with many video games is that reliability and continuity come effortless. You simply need to go online and play. In contrast, as an amateur musician, I had to make sure I have the right gear, plan the transport without owning a car, make sure I can get into a rehearsal room regularly, find the right people to play with (the ones who have the connections that are needed to actually get a gig) et cetera.
Just like in "real" sports, many personalities in "e-sports" make a point of being douchebags. Some make a point of being a nice person.
> For me the social aspects, as well as the "mastery" aspects of gaming were just too simple, too simulated.
I agree, in multiplayer games "mastery" relates to improving mechanical skill, i.e. getting better at mashing specific button sequences as fast as possible or getting better at flickshots. These take a lot of time to get marginal improvements (e.g. improving your aim just a little bit beyond your personal baseline can take thousands of hours). In singleplayer and RPG games, "mastery" happens on the character and doesn't require anything from the player beyond either repeating some action a large number of times (e.g. picking locks to improve lockpicking skill) or simply allocating "skill points" awarded by advancing the game.
This is an incredibly shallow analysis. Most competitive multiplayer games have important strategic elements too. Positioning, knowing when to engage, effective team communication, countering opponent strategies, etc.
Don't mistake this for defending video games, but you can't expect a productive discussion when the strawmen stood up are so absurd.
Unless you're making a critique against games at large (physical and video), I'm not sure what you're getting at.
It's their job, which they get handsomely compensated for. Wasting away thousands of hours grinding Dota or CS:GO is the job of very few people, while the grand majority of gaming addicts are simply wasting a significant chunk of their life.
But at the same time, the difference between the things you list is the level of fulfillment. Or, in other words, how you feel about your time spent doing that thing 5 or 10 years later.
Even though I have good memories in some games, I don't look back on my time in World of Warcraft and think "yeah, that's definitely how I'd spend that time if I had a do-over." Meanwhile, my time spent learning language, meeting up with friends, and writing short stories are expenditures of time that I'm proud of.
Games usually suffer from two things:
1) Games tend to be cheap entertainment on the Netflix and Twitter and heroin side of the fulfillment continuum.
2) It's too easy to sink a lot of time in games, and they tend to dominate your mind when you're in them. You mention music, but people aren't just sitting at their desk from 6pm to 4am listening to music. Most hobbies don't grip you like that. It makes it easy to neglect other things in ways that, say, an addiction to hiking does not.
As a former big gamer myself, I think most people are stuck in the trap of games and only a small fraction of people are doing something particularly fulfilling with them. But my point wouldn't be that games = bad, but rather: beware.
For example, on the other hand, there was a time when I was only gaming to play online with my best friend who had moved across the country. That was some fulfilling gaming. But I wouldn't be surprised if most people were like me and found it very hard to strike a healthy balance.
There are a few exceptional games that encourage creativity and arguably provide some education. However, the majority of gamers have been playing roughly the same FPS that provides the same basic violent catharsis since Doom came out 27 years ago.
For this vast majority of gamers, games are just mindless fun which neither aims for, nor achieves, any sort of meaningful self-improvement.
> You could make the exact same argument for music, books, films or TV - it is an artistic medium.
Most popular entertainment, just like the aforementioned FPS, is just mindless diversion catering (or if you will, exploiting) our baser instincts and propensity for addiction. That applies to all forms of popular entertainment: games, TV, films, and even books.
The point of the article is that games - unlike films or TV for example - promote a sense "fake fitness". Nobody believes that they acquire some valuable fitness by binge-watching Friends on Netflix. However, gamers do tend to hold a false belief that they are gaining some valuable skills out of the huge amounts of time they spend playing popular video games.
RPGs for example directly exploit this delusion: your character gains many valuable skills, and by falsely identifying with them, you feel a sense of accomplishment even though all you did was mindlessly grind some braindead "quests" and your odds of surviving in a real combat situation are just as bad as before - worse, probably, because your fitness has deteriorated from so many more hours of sitting on your couch mashing buttons.
This is especially true for the current generation of gamers who are often playing on consoles lacking any modding capabilities.
I know people who were heavy into WOW and decided to make life the real grind. They have done very well for themselves.
Identifying challenges, focusing on them, engaging in behavior that overcomes them, persisting in that behaviors until signs of success manifest, and then feeling rewarded by these signs of success.
These are all traits that really do tend to lead to skill-building, self-improvement, and success when applied in REAL contexts.
The problem with video games is that they create an ARTIFICIAL context to exploit these traits. It's not you who improved your fighting skills by mindlessly mashing that button 20,000 times - it's your avatar, a fictitious being. But games are set up so that you will feel the sense of accomplishment.
Games is conditioning our generation to gain the rewarding sensations of fitness, self-improvement, and survival success from trivial activities that are merely dressed up to appear challenging and "masculine".
Watch a few young gamers. Note how they behave - not how they describe themselves - and you will see he is right.
Now, for most people it's just a phase. But there are a few that keep that mentality for the rest of their lives and then get frustrated when they are not getting anywhere outside their computers (their "battlestations").
He knows of what he speaks.
It's paintball, but you don't get exercise, don't learn about moving your body in space, don't get the same thrill, or the bruises.
Your wins in Call of Duty only last until they shutdown the servers.
Nassim Taleb's work is definitely driven by discussions had over wine and squid ink pasta.
I mean come on.
Teetotalers have spent a lot of history trying to stop men from drinking on their porches.
There is a bunch of aspects to video games, that you improve e.g. hand-eye coordination, strategical thinking under pressure, team play and just general reaction time to name a few that come to my mind.
> Video games are a real problem. You know why? Because they’re fucking fun. They’re real exciting, but you don’t get anywhere… you’re going to waste your time
Programming is also fun and exciting. And if you're real good at it, you just get to do even more programming ...
We're all a bunch of borderline masochists, if you think about it...
If I was to put the same time into a new programming language, I'd have gained a different set of skills, again some transferrable and some not. I think most people judge the second set of skills as more worthwhile than the first (maybe because it is tied to employability, and is seen as more "age appropriate").
Another aspect is that programming isn't designed to be addictive in the way some games are. Something like World of Warcraft seems designed specifically to hook into the part of the brain that rewards grind. In the moment, WoW is very compelling. But looking back on what was accomplished, I don't feel particularly positive about it. Compared to a programming project with a similar time commitment, in the moment it is on average less compelling probably, but the achievements are more satisfying in retrospect. Somehow this makes programming seem more worthwhile (though maybe I have just internalized the societal standards from above, and that's why I feel more satisfied with the programming projects).
Spending a weekend on a programming project for fun can almost feel like the height of self-actualization to me. A pure intellectual challenge that makes me feel good and gives me a real proving ground. And I almost always look back on it and am proud of my effort even if I don't accomplish what I wanted.
Meanwhile it's too easy to spend empty, unfulfilling time in games. My time in World of Warcraft was wasn't self-actualization but more narcotic entertainment. It was less challenge and more empty feelgood treadmill. It felt good at the time, but not a year later. And it was addicting and easy in a way that programming (creation, exertion) is not. Even when I got into add-on development (which produced some fulfillment), that was only a small fraction of my time spent playing.
I don't think the point needs to be that one is always good and the other is always bad. But my advice to my former self and young people would be to beware of games. Ideally we all have a creative outlet that gives us real fulfillment. Even if you get sucked into games, hopefully it can redeem itself as a creative outlet rather than leave you in a narcotic-like rut.
I think Joe's comments make perfect sense if you see it as a letter to his former self and thus young people in general. I just remember when I was a heavy gamer, I hated acknowledging that yeah, I kinda am wasting my time, and it's not fulfilling. My parents were right, but it's a hard pill to swallow when it's one of the only things you've found that excites you (and you've stopped looking).
On the other hand, I think a lot of life advice is too hard to apply and better experienced yourself. Sometimes you just have to spend a year in an MMORPG in your teens, quit it, and then think "yeah, what a waste of time that was." And you learn a good lesson about how you want to spend your time. The danger is that I have two friends in their 30s who never quit, and it shows. Never had girlfriends, never traveled, slave to games, seem miserable -- and it's hard for me to see how they are setting themselves up for life fulfillment. And I think that matters.
That's all I have to say on the topic. To avoid spamming my PoV any more in these threads, this was my last one.
Jiu-jitsu definitely wins on the physical fitness. Video games win on the lower chance of brain damage from concussions.
Video games can certainly offer excitement and confidence.
I am not sure what new career opportunities jiu-jitsu offers in any meaningful quantity. If we are talking about "jiu-jitsu" instructor jobs, well, there are video game trainer jobs and video game tester jobs as well.
The problems people have with video games come from gamers not meeting societal expectations for their gender and preferring to do something else.
Your use of the word "boy" explains everything. All of these anti video game articles are basically accusing gamers of never growing up to be good providers, which is the social expectation for the male gender.
The games certainly appeal to the masculine fantasy, but the people who play them are hardly considered masculine.
It is different in adults insofar it sux for partner when he is playing all the time while she is dealing with kids and all that boring stuff.
But outside of the addiction situation, male gaming in adults is accepted as being dude doing dude activities. Trying to pretend that you massively popular hobby is making you outsider is ridiculous.
https://www.grapplearts.com/cauliflower-ears-in-brazilian-ji...
When you become so obsessed with fun that you pull multiple all nighters, are failing in the school due to no effort spent on it, are unable to relate to non gamers or worst are getting moody irritable and yelling around, then it is no longer good for you.
Duh.
What’s the discussion to be had here? Just one biased talking head trying to raise the way he spends his free time above others.
> What’s the discussion to be had here? Just one biased talking head trying to raise the way he spends his free time above others.
Being good at killing people is very good skill to have if somebody else is trying to kill you.
Beat saber and DDR might be ok but the skill / coordination element isn't quite the same as learning various techniques well in a martial art (or sport like tennis/soccer)
[0] http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub
I'd argue the coordination element is pretty high with beat saber. It requires rhythm, speed, and accuracy. The fact that I'm a juggler and still can't beat expert+ songs without practicing them repeatedly (and have only done so for a few) after several months of playing speaks to how quick, practiced, and coordinated you need to be. Definitely more of a workout as well. I also used to play DDR in high school and could beat every song in that game; but that was after many nights of playing for hours, drenched in sweat.
I don't think we actually believe that. We don't say that about something like heroin or masturbation.
Also, your future-self doesn't necessarily agree with that either. Give your future-self a say in how you spend you time today because they're the one who has to live with it.
"Time enjoyed while wasted wasn't time wasted!" tends to only be something present-you says to conveniently justify spending time in ways that will turn out to be unfulfilling with high opportunity costs.
If you want to say video games fall in the same category, I would argue video games are to heroin as caffeine is to amphetamine. Additionally, things that people get addicted to are not the issue, but rather the life around the things that people are addicted to are the issue. Just look at the use of cell phones in the contemporary world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
On future-self: My future-self already makes my decisions. If they choose to appreciate art (as video games are) on a Sunday or repair some electronics older than me, or go on a walk, none of those things are wastes of time. The mere supposition that they are is obnoxious.
A better analogy is between video game addiction and gambling addiction. Nobody denies that gambling addiction is a medical phenomenon despite being not being caused by drug dependency.
(As an unrelated aside, the trifecta is Asian-style gacha games, which combine video game addiction, gambling addiction, and borderline-pornography addiction into one neat little package. Small wonder they draw in whales despite usually not being very good in terms of game mechanics.)
This is a great point as well. Not everyone who plays video games makes a hobby out of it. A key part of a hobby is a sense of pride and accomplishment which the hobbyist enjoys by showing off their hobby to others. For example, a stamp collector showing off their collection to non-collectors and collectors alike.
Many gamers either have no interest in showing off their gaming accomplishments to non-gamers or otherwise have an aversion to doing so. Some, however, specifically do consider their gaming to be a hobby. My favourite example is the speedrunner LackAttack24 [1]. He specifically identifies speedrunning as his hobby and he makes extensive spreadsheets documenting his goals as well as his progress. He also happens to hold quite a number of (current and former) world records [2] in the Legend of Zelda as well as a few other games.
He's also very good at budgeting his time appropriately so as not to take away much time from his family and job as a developer. This hobby-life balance is another piece of the puzzle.
your future-self doesn't necessarily agree with that either
I think this is bang on. I would even go so far as to say that what you're doing is not a hobby unless you believe your future-self would be proud of the time you spent. Now some people do abandon their hobbies and later look back with regret, but I doubt they anticipate this at the time they're practicing the hobby.
[1] https://www.twitch.tv/lackattack24
[2] https://www.speedrun.com/user/lackattack24
That’s not been my experience. From what I’ve seen, gamers insult anyone and everyone who doesn’t fit in with them. They also insult each other as a form of bonding, though the tone is way less nasty than the one they reserve for outsiders.
There have been many public scandals on this topic, sometimes with Twitch even banning these streamers. Try spending some time in the chat of popular Twitch gaming streamers. You’ll see some absolutely toxic behaviour. I’m honestly surprised that people on HN would be unaware of this stuff.
Overall my experience matches yours, people who outwardly identify as "gamers" are often toxic individuals, certainly more so on average than people who don't express that group identity.
Multiplayer games often have very toxic or extremely toxic communities and players regardless, some more than others (e.g. CS:GO or GTA:Online have absurdly toxic playerbases, other titles less so).
On a personal level as someone who has easily sunk probably ~20-30k hours (as measured from game timers over the years) into video games of all kinds of genres, I have to say nothing can come close to the enrichment or happiness I have experienced from practising martial arts.
There is something that compounds from simultaneously getting stronger and fitter while also learning a skill, all while being taught self-discipline and peace.
I have encountered meditation in kendo (mokuso), muay thai and taekwondo. (EDIT so the benefits associated with yoga can loosely also be conferred to a high quality martial arts school)
You can learn many lessons from videogames - my obsession with minmaxing and exploiting mechanics no doubt prepared me well for a kind of edge-case oriented software mindset. Games like DMC/MH/Dark Souls teach you patience. PvP games at a high level teach you about competition and mindreading/anticipation. Team based games can teach you communication and coordination.
But games are also extremely stimulating and the dopamine hit is too "cheap". There's also something to be said about incorporating your entire body into whatever hobby or exercise you do. The payoff is greater and isn't so easily substituted.
Your points are more well constructed than his, and I am not discrediting the merit of physical activity or mental health maintenance, just the idea that free time should be spent entirely on those things is a violation of the golden rule.
The claim was made that video games are (entirely) a waste of time.
Maybe I missed the reference about entirely avoiding? We all do things that are entirely useless. Giving them up entirely isn’t the point. Dialling them back if they’re too large a part of waking hours is.
I feel that maintaining a balance of physical activity can help temper young men in those years. For my own experience wrestling and MMA were a good outlet for those feelings. Of course the micro concussions probably didn't help me out much, but now I at least know that getting punched in the head regularly is a bad idea. Which, on paper, should have been more obvious.
Per other comments, lumping an entire medium "video games" into one and trying to label it "good/bad" is the laziest possible form of cultural criticism. Criticise individual works, or patterns of behaviour instead. You could target gambling/gatcha, or the abuse that players hurl at one another (also a problem in traditional sports!)
Having watched the podcast he discussed it in, I think he was more worried about the kind of default usage people slip into, where all their free time is effectively consumed by gaming as he experienced himself.
> For some young men, gaming plugs a psychological gap left by the loss of a certain kind of masculinity, a loss sometimes blamed on feminists, who are accused of creating a feminised society that leaves no space for men. But in fact, the so-called ‘crisis in masculinity’ is a consequence, not of feminist campaigning, but of societal affluence — a miracle of the modern world, but one that has inadvertently produced a lot of frustrated and aimless young men, now directing their pent up energy towards a hobby that offers fake fitness but which, unfortunately, given the addictive nature of ‘limbic capitalism’, is more likely than other hobbies to become all-consuming, damaging the gamer’s health and repelling potential sexual partners.
This article definitely needs a bunch of [citation needed] tags. I'm a gamer myself and know plenty of gamers, but none that play video games to feel more masculine or which blame feminists in some way for this alleged "crisis in masculinity".
From my experience, these fantasies that the article mentioned: "a soldier, gunslinger, warrior, gangster, or heavily armed survivor in a post-apocalyptic hellscape" are more about us being able to live out fantasies without consequences the same way we would live them out by reading a fiction book, and not necessarily to somehow prop up our masculinity through them, though there might be some men that need that.
Do more sports is definitely one of the more naive "solutions" I've come across.
Video Games have:
- Thought me more English than I could ever learn in school especially TALKING (non-native) - Started many projects for me that helped me later on from learning programming to analytical thinking and strategy - Learn to work in teams and become part of a community, even though I still had the weekly sports activity and school etc also - Got me into PC hardware and MS Windows with great detail to optimize my experience - Made me "escape reality" without waking up with a broken bone somewhere next to the road
Guess there were many more points, some of which I maybe wouldn't attribute towards gaming but where indirectly affected by it.
But I can also see how other generations might have a different experience. You might no longer need to tinker with your OS and hardware to get a great performance. Creating large spreadsheets to calculate game specific actions and derive decisions is also not needed for many games.
So I guess saying video games are bad is way too generic, as it is to say drinking is bad. Depending on the usage and what you get out of it.
I am more than happy to not have taken jiu-jitsu classes and I would also challenge if that had made it any better for me compared to gaming.
That's not the argument being presented. No one is talking about people who play 10-30 hours per two weeks, which is not an unreasonable amount of time for a hobby. This is largely about people who spend 60, 70, 80, 90 or triple digits per two weeks in games.
Clearly many humans have too easy a life (myself included) when we seek to fill our time with meaningless drivel produced by others who also have too much time.