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> 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 creat
by NeverFade 6y ago
> 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.
- mrob 6y agoDoom 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.
- NeverFade 6y agoLet's not kid ourselves: the vast majority of people who play highly popular FPS games are not modders. They just play the game. This is especially true for the current generation of gamers who are often playing on consoles lacking any modding capabilities.
- partyboat1586 6y agoThe 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.
- NeverFade 6y agoYes, 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".