<long winded rant> Games, to a degree is escapism of course. When I dropped out of college and sat at the back of a public library, I saw all types of values as

<long winded rant> Games, to a degree is escapism of course. When I dropped out of college and sat at the back of a public library, I saw all types of values as I spent so many hours in so many different games. Learnt about communicating only the important details in first person shooters (FPS) and learnt about sacrificing my character to save my carry in MOBA [2] games like leauge of legends and dota 2. Though no one outside gaming communities generally care about such things. I get called lazy and get told that I am wasting my life away fairly often. A game like dota 2 has roughly 500k player playing at any given time. about 3x more for leauge. Thats 500k * 24 hours a day spent collectively as humans on a game on any given day. So billions of hours a week is not a bad estimation. There is a tedtalk video that talks about the hours as well.[1] I often this about this in the back of my mind when people talk about universal basic income (UBI) and unemployment. I think the future generation will find it natural to put in large hours into games and it won't be seen as negative. Games are also asylum for some though, i've met some really awesome people but people who were clearly in very bad places mentally. Some have spent years in game collecting and achieving stuff that will have no meaning to anyone outside of the game but means the world to them. (Sadly one killed himself after his account got hacked and all this stuff was gone). Therefore, I wish people approaching from the outside of specific communities trying to talk to these people and talk about issues would sometimes take a little time to look at the culture before going off on stuff like "bikini armor" [3] (female character with `impractical` armor) or video game violence or toxicity[4] in gaming community. Yes these all might be problems and we'd all like to address it, but trying to confront a population who's already withdrawn from reality to varying degree is not the best approach from my point of view. </ long winded rant> [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_online_battle_arena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_online_battle_aren... [3] https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrC_DIHRIqO5bjPogGrZraS4fOEDvDd8okN78nSA9szeauLme5dw https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrC_DI... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2v9zqf/top_10_most_toxic_game_communities/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2v9zqf/top_10_most_...