Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

1843magazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 535 posts

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#71

Post by TOMDM »

ocschwar wrote: post #47
TOMDM wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting conclusion you have come to. Is this because you believe people playing these games are not able to separate the fantasy of the game from real life? If so, what differentiates them from pornography?

6 hours of running around a fantasy world, rescuing damsels in distress who fall out of their dresses and embrace you. Or 10 minutes watching real people having sex, knowing those people use aliases so that after the camera shuts down and the paper towels come out, they can go and live their own real lives. That's the difference I see.

I think you underestimate peoples abilities to comprehend what a game is.

I think Princess Zelda's flirtatious tendencies are about as formative to real relationships with women as call of duties role in informing me on gun violence is realistic. They are clearly fantasies with no bearing on reality, that's the appeal of escapism focused games.

I think the issue comes about when people don't have any other experiences to form real expectations of the world around them.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#72

Post by peckrob »

I've watched this happen to my friends.

One that I graduated high school with in particular comes to mind. We all played video games back then. Half Life, Goldeneye, Starcraft, Everquest, etc. He was a smart guy, driven, usually made better grades than me (I was lazy in high school). Took a job at an medical supply company after graduating from high school intending to work for a few months before starting college.

Well, when it came time to start school, he tried to balance work, school and an ever increasing amount of time in front of the TV or computer playing games ... and failed. Dropped out of school after one semester. Got an apartment with a couple of his coworkers where they would mostly play games when they weren't working. I went over a few times. It was depressing to watch. You really want to say, "Dude, is this really what you want to do?"

Spent seven years working that same job stocking shelves and spent the rest of the time drinking and playing whatever the newest game was that month. He'd message me at like 12am asking if I was playing anything and I'd be like, nope, studying. He'd type "LOL" (back in the AIM days).

When World of Warcraft came out, he was instantly drawn into the WoW universe. He'd stay up all night playing. Broke up with his girlfriend because he was playing WoW literally every waking moment. Started being late to work, eventually lost his job and lost his apartment (I'm guessing his coworkers asked him to leave when he couldn't pay rent). Moved back in with his parents and still, just ... gaming. All the time. He'd just spend whole days sitting in front of WoW or some other video game. For three years that was all he did.

Eventually, his parents had to SHUT OFF THEIR INTERNET and have an intervention to reach him. Obviously I don't know the full story of what happened, but after that he did start to pull it together.

Got back into school at 29 and just recently graduated with a business degree. He's managed to "stay clean from games" (his exact words, BTW) for the last seven years. I can't imagine what an immense struggle that must be considering how ubiquitous they are now.

All told he lost more than 10 years of his life.

The whole time I'm looking on at this and thinking, if he was drinking, we would call this alcoholism. But what do we call it when it's video games?

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#73

Post by nitemice »

_m8fo wrote: post #52
65827 wrote: post #19

I really like this read, something just smells off about blaming young people for "wasting years" on video games. We've got a horribly stacked real life "game" where the boomers and elites have horded everything and fucked future generations, blaming an individual for dropping out and not wanting to really participate in that trainwreck is being dishonest at best.

I completely agree with the sentiment, but isn't your own comment being dishonest? There's plenty of land in the United States, and plenty of cities that have hardly been met with the "hoarding" you mention. That being said, living in Boston, MA, I totally feel what you're saying (literally, most of the houses here are expensive, even in crappy areas).

The same is true out here in Australia.

Places like Melbourne and Sydney are crowded and expensive, but the cheaper properties are all out in rural areas, where your choice of employment is slim, especially if you made the "mistake" of training in any tech sector job.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#74

Post by karmajunkie »

sandworm101 wrote: post #50
65827 wrote: post #19

I really like this read, something just smells off about blaming young people for "wasting years" on video games. We've got a horribly stacked real life "game" where the boomers and elites have horded everything and fucked future generations, blaming an individual for dropping out and not wanting to really participate in that trainwreck is being dishonest at best.

And how many of those boomers have themselves slipped into the alternate realities of drugs and alcohol? If you are going to distract yourself, videogames are better than drinking. The remark in the OP about the father having to change a baby while playing a game is telling. That father could put his gaming on pause. A generation ago, how many fathers in similar situations were catatonic with a bottle in one hand? Ra…

I read that same passage and wondered who was paying attention to the kids? Great, Dad's got some buddies who will lay down some cover while he changes a diaper. What's the kid get out of that deal?

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#75

Post by [deleted] »

xor1 wrote: post #40

>Game designers often deploy a technique called “dynamic difficulty adjustment”. In many games, the software assesses a player’s skill and rebalances various attributes of the game accordingly, to keep the game fun and manageable for those of less ability. Gamers early in their careers, or who are simply struggling to pick up the skills necessary to succeed, are given a helping hand; their world might be more generou…

[deleted]

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#76

Post by projektir »

hdra wrote: post #62
ocschwar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what scares the shit of me regarding UBI. I don't mind paying for it even if it does keep young men immersed in a fantasy world. But I have a daughter. And she will be surrounded by men whose idea of women will be shaped by game characters that fail the Turing test but have big tits. I guess for her first birthday after puberty I'll have to get her a taser.

I don't believe in the idea that the video game itself is the source of the negative influence rather than the community surrounding it. Video games from the pre-internet era was just as marketed towards the males as the it is right now, but the toxicity level is higher than ever in today's "community" focused gaming. Overwatch is a good example of this. I applaud the developers for making such a diverse and stereoty…

> Video games from the pre-internet era was just as marketed towards the males as the it is right now, but the toxicity level is higher than ever in today's "community" focused gaming. Overwatch is a good example of this.

That's generally a problem of competitive PvP games. DotA 2 has a similar problem - love the game, can't stand the people that play it. On the other hand, Destiny's community is pretty nice.

The toxicity level in cooperative or single player focused games seems fine to me.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#77

Post by ocschwar »

autokad wrote: post #23
ocschwar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what scares the shit of me regarding UBI. I don't mind paying for it even if it does keep young men immersed in a fantasy world. But I have a daughter. And she will be surrounded by men whose idea of women will be shaped by game characters that fail the Turing test but have big tits. I guess for her first birthday after puberty I'll have to get her a taser.

when i go to comic con, you see many women who look like they fit what the comic book would look like. most are not hard, just dont be over weight. men however, even men you clearly see they spend most of their time in the gym could never even remotely fill out many male fantasy characters.

What scares me about both settings is 1. the way comic fans freaked out about things like Marvel casting Nick Fury as a black man for the movies, and 2. Gamergate.

Both cases had thousands of people freaking out about the details of their fantasy world being changed. And I'm freaking out about having to share a planet with these people.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#78

Post by ajross »

ganfortran wrote: post #57

That is how you got alt-right. Bad job market and on the other hand portrayed as oppressor and reminded to check your own privilege. Video game is just the surface of the underlying illness. It is cheap(per hour), and accessible source of pleasure.

You're saying... feminists invented sexism?

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#80

Post by Untit1ed »

graeme wrote: post #48
wallace_f wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a real possibility, but consider thinking about it this way: Many jobs do not provide (marginal utility > income) to society, and many even produce negative marginal utility. Everything from utility companies to the financial sector to government to even academia has a heck of a lot of perverse incentives and corruption. Over half a century ago John Maynard Keynes--one of the most influential intellectuals to sh…

> Many jobs do not provide (marginal utility > income) to society, and many even produce negative marginal utility. What are some examples of this? Why are people paying those workers?

A lot of middlemen roles - real estate agents, recruiters etc fall into this. The role starts out with utility (instead of selling your house yourself get someone experienced to do it!), but as using a middleman becomes ubiquitous and is maintained with rent seeking (you can't list on this real estate site unless you're a registered RE agent), there's no reason for them to do anything more than the bare minimum.
Post reply on HN