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A link between video games and unemployment

economist.com

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Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#111

Post by soreasan »

zo1 wrote: post #91
JKCalhoun wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Video games are cheap compared to other entertainment. Maybe with the exception of the public library.

Most people do not find value or entertainment in knowledge or reading. So they don't want to go to the library because it's not really a source of entertainment for them. Gaming on the other hand, probably engages them a whole lot better.

While I agree that gaming is very engaging, if you visit a library you'll be caught off guard how many people are there every single day. Now I will acknowledge that many of the people at my local library are kids playing games on the library computers, however there are also lots of people that genuinely enjoy reading and the other activities hosted at the library.

Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#112

Post by posterboy »

posterboy wrote: post #106
dominotw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

millions of people smoking marijuana for the placebo effect? ok. read this https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/science-says-weed-ma... You think it's being perceived to chemo patients for the placebo effect? https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side-effects...

No, I'm not gonna read that and I'm still going to call bullshit. Neither did I claim any reason for anyone to smoke. Nor does the rest of your comment make any sense. > perceived prescribed > chemo patients are we still talking about stimulation or in fact about the opposite? You just said chemo patients want to feel their pain intensified, if I got that right. I'm sure you are looking for a stimulating conversation…

To restate my point, there is no intrinsic quality in dope that would boost creativity and sensibility, quite the opposite actually. Only once the effects start wearing down, a relative increase will be felt.

Most people are just expecting something out of doing it so they become convinced to have achieved something and that might actually be the case to some degree, but mostly it appears bigger in hindsight than it actually was because of clouded judgment.

Edit:

The consequence is that people get exited anyway and exhaust that because of numbing effects until much later after the fact.

Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#113

Post by notyourwork »

slg wrote: post #55
dimitar wrote: post #30

Video games are cheap compared to other entertainment. I can buy a good enough PC for $400 and I can clock almost an infinite amount of game-time on it with friends all over the world. Most other activities - playing pool, eating out, bars, most sports, vacationing - cost a lot more per hour of possible entertainment. So if you don't have the money and you have the time you should choose activities that provide the m…

Not only are they cheap, but the nominal price of video games hasn't budged much in something like 30 years. AAA titles have always hit the market in the $50-$60 dollar range since the days of the NES (and maybe earlier, but that is before my time). It isn't surprising that video game companies have introduced additional revenue streams with DLC or microtransactions in order to counter inflation in both real dollars…

I am not sure I agree with this statement. I remember new PS1 games retailing for $39.99, I remember PS2 games retailing for $49.99. It wasn't until the ps3 generation were games $59.99.

My friends and I always joked about how each generation games went up $10.

Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#114

Post by jacquesm »

fsloth wrote: post #89
J-dawg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't been able to find it, but I remember a comment here on HN by a guy who basically said that gaming saved his life by helping him to zone out during a period of severe depression. I guess it's a form of mindfulness, in a way.

I'm pretty sure Kerbal Space Program was the lynchpin upon which my sanity hung during a pretty dark period some time ago induced by a serious medical condition of a close family member and sudden passing away of few others during a period of two years.

That's the dangerous pattern. A single event in isolation you can cope with but if things hit hard in succession it can really strip you of resilience, a mental form of being punch drunk.

Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#115

Post by soreasan »

emodendroket wrote: post #84
rubicon33 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish books could hold my attention like video games. I would read a lot more.

If your goal is to start reading more often, stop reading so many books you think you ought to read and read more books you want to read. Variety and challenging yourself are good but sometimes you can get carried away and just make yourself not want to read anything.

This is very true. I am usually not the best reader but I recently picked up an excellent fantasy novel and couldn't put it down and ended up reading like 4 or 5 hours straight. On the flip side when I read nonfiction or textbooks it's hard to push myself to keep learning.

Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#116

Post by jacquesm »

orthoganol wrote: post #77
jboggan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great word. It's interesting how my desire to game has almost entirely disappeared since I left there and started a new company. I'm sitting here building deep learning rigs with fat GPUs, I could just add another partition running Windows and have a killer system for Overwatch . . . but nah, I'm having too much fun with Tensorflow to care.

I too am sitting here waiting for a TensorFlow language model to finish training :)

I wonder how many people here are currently browsing HN waiting for their models to train.

526/1816 [=======>......................] - ETA: 1123s - loss: 0.2013 - acc: 0.9386 - val_loss: 0.3690 - val_acc: 0.9122

Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#117

Post by soreasan »

jorgemf wrote: post #85
city41 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article addresses this: "While games improved since the turn of the century, labour-market options for young people got worse." That paragraph goes into more detail how the market has not been good for young people, and thus they turn to games, not the other way around.

If you read the paper it doesn't say that in the conclusions.

The second to last paragraph suggests it is a possibility though:

"To draw a firm conclusion, however, would take a clearer understanding of the direction of causation. While games improved since the turn of the century, labour-market options for young people got worse. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated for young college graduates since the 1990s, while pay for new high-school graduates has declined. The share of young high-school and college graduates not in work or education has risen; in 2014 about 11% of college graduates were apparently idle, compared with 9% in 2004 and 8% in 1994. The share of recent college graduates working in jobs which did not require a college degree rose from just over 30% in the early 2000s to nearly 45% a decade later. And the financial crisis and recession fell harder on young people than on the population as a whole. For people unable to find demanding, full-time work (or any work at all) gaming is often a way to spend some of one’s unwanted downtime, rather than a lure out of work; it is much more a symptom of other economic ills than a cause."

Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#118

Post by ricree »

hanoz wrote: post #25
pzh wrote: post #10

If nothing else, at least those economists have found the solution to keep people occupied when AI renders half the world unemployed. Now the premise of the Matrix doesn't seem so far fetched after all.

Isn't the premise, unbearably absurd even by the standards of the rest of the movie, that humans are used as a power supply?

Strictly speaking, Morpheus held up a battery at the end of his little talk. Humans make no sense as an energy source, obviously, but fat has a reasonably solid energy density for its volatility.

My personal headcanon is that the machines were laboring under something akin to Asimov's three laws, which required that they preserve humanity. The Matrix, then is a loophole, something which technically satisfies the requirements of their core programming, but in a way that is advantageous to the machines.

But then, once you've got all those people hooked up, you might as well make some use out of them. They aren't the most efficient battery around, but if you've got to keep them anyway, they might as well serve as a load balancer. The people of Zion just came later and mistook an ancillary benefit for the machine's primary purpose.

Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#119

Post by ricree »

__s wrote: post #33
hanoz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the premise, unbearably absurd even by the standards of the rest of the movie, that humans are used as a power supply?

They wanted them to be used for processing, but producers: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/116473

Wasn't that going to rest on the tired old "10% of your brain" trope? Pulling that one out would have bothered me a great deal more than the battery analogy.

Re: A link between video games and unemployment

#120

Post by Apocryphon »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #99
szemet wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. As I understand these things: You are mindful and react on direct stimulus - while gaming, you do not think on future or past, you are immersed in your actual activity - it IS mindfulness. BUT it does not improve mindfulness - it is easy to be mindful at interesting times - that's normal, but not so when nothing interesting is around, and you are just left alone with your own thoughts or problems. That…

> You are mindful and react on direct stimulus - while gaming, you do not think on future or past, you are immersed in your actual activity - it IS mindfulness. I disagree. Reacting is the polar opposite of what mindfulness is about. Mindfulness is about, among other things, responding appropriately to what is happening, not reacting . What you're describing, the state people get in when playing computer games, is a…

Not all games are shooters that stimulate fight or flight reflexes.
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