Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

> Brood War has a life of lively to live to life of full life thanks to ShieldBattery.

Intentional?

See also Jane McGonigal, who has done some work specifically around those self-defined goal posts.

One reason why AI is being employed for some problems is based on what we know about human problem solving. For instance, a human could come up with a near-optimal solution to the Traveling Salesman problem in under a minute. Long before a computer could get even close. How is that happening? What are we doing that's so special?

Which makes me wonder if we could gamify NP-complete problems and use gamers to come up with better solutions. Like a game to lay out circuit traces, route delivery trucks, or organize a warehouse.

Random reinforcement (giving out not just merit based rewards but also random rewards) keeps people coming back but it's a higher goal than beating a raid boss in a game that 95% of the human population has never heard of.

I get anxious when I've played video games for too long instead of honing a skill or working.

I get anxious when I've been working or cramming info into my head for too long.

It balances out. Besides, it's important to allow yourself rest periods between bouts of learning to allow your brain to consolidate the new information and subconsciously draw inferences and review detail. Otherwise you reach a point when you've bitten off more new information than you can comfortably chew.

I also tend to play games that involve exploration of worlds I will never experience in my own life, mastery of skills that require cognitive precision and dexterity, or philosophical rumination. I find these experiences to be a positive addition to my world and my understanding of people around me.

Now that we are seeing real potential for VR, this is about to reach a whole new level. The line between games and educational tools blend more and more every day. Imagine a war game so visceral that it makes you cry, gives you PTSD, and completely makes you rethink the wars you support. Or full job or skill training courses. The potential for video games to positively impact our lives has never been greater.

> I've found learning and creating to be more fulfilling activities than videogames.

To each his/her own, but to me, video games lost nearly all appeal when I started learning how to program. The only game I still play with any kind of enthusiasm these days is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. But all in all, if I have the choice of spending a Friday night playing a video game or programming, I'll go for programming almost all the time. (And roughly 99.999% of the programming I do in my free time is mainly to learn about something, not to solve some urgent problem.)

I still think video games have a huge untapped potential as devices for storytelling or education or as an artform of their own. But we've only been creating video games seriously for ... what? 30, 40 years? Books and theater have been around for millennia, and it took people quite a bit of work before sublime works of art emerged.

(Although I'll admit I was quite happy to discover that there is an open source clone of Doom, and I spent a few happy hours with it. Great fun!)

I have been a huge gamer but I stopped to play 5 years ago. I started to play on the master system and all the video games on DOS I could find. I started with Wolfeinshtein 3D, Prince of Persia, Another World since then I never stopped to play video games. It was a great way to "reset my brain to neutral" and to have fun while using my intellect and imagination. Me and my twin spent all our money on it, it was our passion and one of the biggest reasons I wanted to be a developer. We had a PS1 and a PC, friends had a N64 and so on. I was able to play on a lot of platforms to a lot of video games. I loved series that everybody knows like the Zelda, or Tekken knowing all the background stories of each character. I played and loved also less known or banned video games (because being violent it was a thing at that time) like Carmageddon, Die Hard, Road Rush, or Dead Ball Zone... Just thinking about doing a list right make me remember all the games I played and loved. I even remember sharewares that I loved that only a few people know like Chaos Overlords or experimental video games like Black and White. I loved that time and these games teached me a lot. But I also sunk a lot of time playing them.

I remember here on HN someone posted an amazing article to explain reverse engineering from the first level to the end boss. And that was really interesting to learn about it from an expert Point of view. You had specifications about different electronic components, he explained different tools he was using... Someone impressed on HN commented about how this was amazing and even more about how he could do all that when him had no time. He came home after a day of coding and plays video games to rest and then sleeps. The author responded that it wasn't as insane as it seemed to have his level (he even did some crazy things in Haskell just for fun for his RE) and he said that all he did was to poke around when he came back home and learn more and more about reverse engineering.

Back in the days video games felt to be made with a lot of love from the developers. Now it's really hard for me to find a game I can really dive down. The world is so much wealthier and the games so limited. Even as a pure gamer we can quickly find the limits of a game. I can only find my happiness in indie video games but they are still limited. The rest is all about graphics, additive designs, marketing, or just meh. (The only games that are relevant to me now are Distant World Universe, Assetto Corsa, and Wargame).

When You cut yourself of video games, other distractions, and open your mind to see the possibility offer by this world, it's like the impression you have when you play Shenzhen IO. You realize that the real world is complex and hard but that make it makes it so much more interesting and rewarding. I took the real course at Stanford in ML and intent to do the one about convex optimization, I learn a lot about law in general, pattens, finance, investment... (In fact my MacBook right now is sitting Chartered Financial Analyst books) and this month I am learning Kubernetes and techs like that even thought I am not a devops. This wouldn't have been possible by being focused on video games.