Isn’t Wumpus quite wealthy? Like 8 figures?
What a loser.
I made a pretty good career out of being a mentally ill loser so…silver lining?
I’m not fat.
I feel like this thread-res is going to be the premise for the next Sam Barlow game.
What a dumb study, everyone knows playing videogames makes one go commit unspeakable acts of violence, and unspeakable acts of violence are well known to be an excellent form of cardio.
Checkmate!
And, what if I’ve recently lost weight and won some things? Ha! Take that, Uncle Barthalemue, or whomever you are claiming to be today, which can change radically moment to moment, but is still definitively relevant to your chosen purpose! HA, I say!
The real downside to stuff like this though is that there is legitimate research being done, and which needs to be done, on the effects of all sorts of digital/screen-mediated activity across all areas of society. BS hyperbole and outraged retorts make it harder to both get these studies done and get them taken seriously (when they are done properly).
Of course, the serious work on this sort of thing is usually very un-click worthy, being actually scientific and stuff.
I am also on the lower end of BMI
But that’s not the point, building things that matter is. Who wants to change the world? Oddly enough, I have a relevant story here.
I was part of a Denver area Quake clan circa 1999 founded by this very very nice (shocker) Canadian guy who I am still friends with and still lives in the Denver area, I just had lunch with him actually as we took a little family vacation there last week. We compared notes on how everyone in the Quake clan eventually did in life, and some of the outcomes from that group of early online gaming enthusiasts, all guys, were… very, very poor. Like “in prison for life” or “no longer with us” poor. 😓 It was a vast, wide range of both good and bad outcomes. I’m not sure what that means in terms of “video games make you X” but it definitely made me reflect.
Prior to this, about 2 months ago, I hired a local (to them) private investigator to track down a particular Quake clan member I was close with circa 1999, also Canadian, who had an extremely rare name whose last known job around 2005 was working as a web developer for a particular Canadian city government, but as of today was absolutely nowhere to be found on the internet, as if he had dropped off the face of the planet! That fascinated me. How the hell can you be in tech, have a super unique name, and simultaneously have zero internet presence? There’s no way – it has to be intentional, and difficult, to have no digital footprint.
In the process of doing this we wrote up a shared google doc of all the outcomes for all the clan members we knew, and it was surprisingly therapeutic. We printed it out and mailed it to our old Quake clan mate the PI tracked down, the one Quake clan member who seemed to intentionally disappear … even in the google doc we apologized for doing the PI thing… but hey, we missed him, and just wanted to see how he was doing. Our intentions were good. And even if he doesn’t reply (I suspect he won’t), the act of putting together this shared story had way more power than I ever thought it would. It was worth it. Storytelling is how we make sense of what’s happening to us.
Plus, now I can cross “hired a private investigator” off my bucket list. So I got that going for me, which is nice.
I seem to recall you were a private investigator here at one point. ;-)
@wumpus !
If that’s really you and not some AI or hacker pretending to be you it’s good to see you again, welcome back! I sincerely hope you are well and things are going good for you my friend.