I can’t listen to music or TV or whatever while reading, either, or conversely, I find it hard to truly appreciate music unless I’ve focused on that and that only. But yeah, games are a different beast in a lot of ways, especially the ways they engage multiple tracks of our processing.
While I was reading that article I was served with a ME:A ad. Talk about irony.
I do understand the draw of gaming. It is actively competing for my leisure time, the time I spend on playing games is time not spend on e.g. reading a book.
But behind all this, and I think the article failed to mention 2 other factors, and half addressed another: 1. the “great depression”, 2. the changing nature of work, and 3. changing nature of games.
- The doghouse economy means that people are underemployed or unemployed, regardless of intention.
- And money nowadays don’t necessarily come from sitting in a workplace 9-5. A successful streamer/youtuber can earn lots of money not leaving his/her house. Even a not so successful streamer/youtuber can survive. It is just a matter of making money out of your gaming time, rather than leaving the money on the table for someone else to pick it up.
- some games nowadays are psychologically designed to be addictive. It is not Super Mario Bros in SNES, where games sometimes induce rage quits (I certainly did, back in the days). It is Candy Crush, or WoW where you are induced to spend money to game. The author wants someone in the economy or society to give people these kind of helping hand to induce them to stay in the real world rather than in virtual world. In the fairy-airy Obama world, no helping hand is forthcoming. And now we expect one in a Trumpian manipulative world? Are you kidding?
I think it is a matter of course that the time spent on playing game can be spend more meaningfully elsewhere, like curing cancer or whatnot. But where is the opportunity to do other meaningful things? The general economy, society and politics are turning towards placating the disgruntled with video game (i.e. soma) rather than giving them real opportunities. Video game is the modern equivalent of bread and circuses.
The original red flavour is the best. I used to put one on each finger and then bite them off, oh the good old days.
I think the reason that it is more natural to worry about time wasted on video games and than about time wasted on movies or television or whathaveyou is that video games more closely resemble work. In a video game, you’re putting effort into achieving some thing. When you watch a movie, you’re just… absorbing. Put another way, a game is more relatable to everyday life because everyday life is more than just watching, it’s doing. And games are doing. So–the question becomes–what are you doing with your time and effort? And what could you be doing instead?
I don’t think this is a frivolous question. Every gamer should be concerned with it.
I advocate my right to be useless.
I think it’s a generational thing. Video games were not mainstream for a long time. The generation above me. those who don’t play themselves, still considers it a toy while adults can enjoy television and movies. If you don’t equate video games to the time spent listening to music and television because you see it as something teens grow out of you’re going to be harsher about it.
There are video game addicts, just like gambling addicts, and then there are those who just choose to spend their free time playing games. Now that i work 40-60 hour work weeks, I feel fine spending my time playing games, board games, movies… whatever. I am, by my society’s definition, productive, but when I played a lot during the recession when I was unemployed, I felt awful… and it didn’t matter that it was video games or TV or whatever. The problem during that time was there were no jobs… not the existence of video games.
I said this elsewhere here on Qt3 that I’m coming to the idea that what is important isn’t whether or not a game is “good” by some mechanical standard but meaningful. I really was shaken when listening to Three Moves Ahead during some Paradox episode for Crusader Kings 2 and the panel of reviewers, each of whom had I think over a thousand hours in the game, couldn’t immediately come up with off the top of their head hundreds of pages worth of stories and actually had to try hard to think of any specific anecdotes at all. I also look back at my time playing games like Civilization and wonder how I can spend one or two hours and yet hardly have accomplished anything at all and worse have no memory of the experience a short time later.
I think while gamer self loathing is very real and the examples of gamers chosen in the Economist article showing gamers unemployed by “choice” and dependent upon others to feed their gaming habit (which incidentally would be problematic regardless of which activity preoccupies their time) was done to show gaming in the worst light possible, I don’t think anyone would argue that someone who watched TV over 8-10 hours a day was a good thing. I also think we can agree that many games are actually designed to be addictive and have objectively few socially positive features. If I spend 1000 hours of my life, and hundreds or thousands of dollars, playing Clash of Clans, I really do think most people would agree that I’ve wasted my time and money and the only way this is not true is excuse by comparison.
So there are two arguments; one, establishing whether or not games in and of themselves are bad, which is an old and long hashed one, but where we would agree there are thresholds beyond which more or less consensus would be found and which the Economist article assumes and sets up, and two, that games are being taken up by people left out of the modern economy as their primary source of socialization and accomplishment. And that is itself a far, far more complicated argument than the one presented here, one about the digitalization, virtualization and simulations of modern consumer society and which gamer culture is a part of. How far different or similar is gaming than millennials dressing up and going out to eat in order to situations for selfies so as to appear interesting to their Instagram followers rather than the enjoyment of the experience itself? Are people playing multiplayer games to socialize significantly different than teenagers spending hours peering over the social media of their choice? How do we decide which games are guilty of deliberately creating addicting content vs games whose content is unintentially addicting? Are Firaxis and Paradox as bad as Supercell and EA? Does the naturally addicting nature of successful games unintentionally give feedback to developers that innocently pushes them to make games even more addicting by expanding upon design paradigms players respond favorably towards?
Personally I find the connection between the economy and nerd culture predictable, and one that’s often unconsciously raised by non-gamers in a begrudging sympathy towards these “pathetic” subjects of their articles. I remember reading an article written about D&D around the time of the Lord of the Rings movies, somewhere on the Atlantic or Slate or similar, explaining this ‘strange niche activity’ about Elves and Orcs and 20-sided die and it’s relationship with Tolkien’s world, and the best they could do for the subject was paint D&D players as drop-out weed-addled hippies, because that’s the closest positive stereotype they themselves could understand or relate to.
Wouldn’t that be recreation, though? “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest” and all that?
Or do you mean spending 1000 hours all in one block?
Absolutely. in the end, only the individual can really decide whether the activity is worthwhile or not. Now, if your gaming is dependent on someone else supporting you, that person can certainly withdraw support if they feel the activity is not worthwhile, but that’s quite different than saying, categorically, that the activity is in fact worthless.
And Enidigm also makes a good point about the complexity of the question when you get into the broader social and cultural landscape. Hyperreality, simulation and simulacra, Integral Reality and the like.
This article is ridiculous. It’s a bit absurd to link a decrease in employment rate to an increase in video game quality. He hasn’t even proved a casual relationship. What happened to correlation =/= causation? Could it be possible that maybe, there are many other reasons that the employment rate would drop? lol.
I thought it was an interesting article, and it raised some good points.
However, it is yet another in a long line of articles that have failed to reduce the optimism I have in today’s youth.
I’m 56 years old, so I should theoretically be one of those that says, “Spot on!”
And I suppose I would be saying that if I saw any of these examples for myself.
Maybe it’s just the area of the country I live in, but I haven’t met anyone like these people mentioned in the article.
I know many young people, and am acquainted with many more, and while most of the males I know do game, none of them are sitting on their asses 8 hours a day playing games. I can’t think of one that plays more than 2 hours a day on average, most of them maybe an hour. And no one I know plays games every single day.
I don’t doubt that these people do exist; I just haven’t met them. Which tells me that they exist, but in small numbers.
Most of the youth I know (of that age) are employed, or are going to school. They’ve proven to be intelligent, helpful and friendly when I’ve encountered them in their working situations. There are exceptions to that, but overall, I remain optimistic about our youth. They are not much different than I was at that age. Gaming is just another form of entertainment to them, as far as I can see.
I read this on Kotaku:
So someone who is apparently a professional writer about video games seems compelled to apologize for his game playing. This stuff is just too entrenched to fight.
I had to reread that a bit more carefully because I thought he was saying he had spent 180 hours playing games in one week.
Hey maybe he was in a time-space discontinuum. WHY YOU SO JUDGEY??
I teach college kids, most of whom are male. Really, they are a pretty damn cool bunch, and I’m fairly optimistic about them.
I think you’ve mentioned your classes before. How many young women are in those classes?
I tried going outside and having friends for many years. Then I realized it’s all bullshit and it sucks, and that 99% of the people sharing this planet with me are awful garbage people that I never want to see ever again. The video games are a nice safe option. I don’t go outside and bother anyone, and they don’t bother me. Suck it, article.
That’s actually a problem we’re trying to address. Our school is about 60/40 male/female, or about exactly opposite the usual ratio for higher ed in the USA. And our retention and persistence to graduation rates for men tend to lag those of women. Our school focuses on majors that are historically male dominated,though all of these majors are making major efforts to broaden diversity, with some success.
Depending on the class–the scheduling of some majors means I get clusters of students all from the same program in my general education classes–I’ll have anywhere from three or four to ten or twelve women out of a class of about 20-24 students. Our classes don’t get any bigger than about 24-26 except in odd cases.
A bigger issue is students of color, where our efforts at recruiting a much more diverse student population are still very much a work in progress, though again over the past fifteen years or so that I’ve been there we’ve made a lot of movement on that.
I remember one thing that really appealed to me (a nearly lifelong resident of painfully white bread Sevierville, TN) about Boston University when I was applying there was that it was described as the “UN of schools” in terms of diversity.
I guess I never realized that there were no African or Central/South American nations in the UN. . .