171–177 of 177 posts
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…
There is an episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" where Charlie, a character who never gets any success in life (a janitor living in a dump of an apartment, gets rejected by his love interest constantly, abused by his friends, etc) gets really engrossed in an online videogame. He becomes really good at it, and exclaims "I'm thriving! I never get to thrive, and I want to be the guy who thrives for once! It's…
Video games also provide a quality sorely lacking in real life. They try very hard to prevent cheating, because if there's too much cheating, or too much inequality between players, no one will play. Hmmm...
http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/how-designers-engineer-luck-i...
Video games become the sole source of agency in many people's lives. This isn't just for the unemployed, but also for folks stuck in a job where they feel like they lack control. I couldn't understand at first why my fellow Googlers found so much time to play video games, but after a couple of months I understood. Afternoon Halo matches became the highlight of my day, I felt like I had more choice and responsibility…
Insightful observation. Makes sense. As a variation on this idea... I have a job now where I do have control over some stuff that matters to me (and it definitely helps!) But I still like to take a video game break once or twice a day. My game of choice is a Risk-clone on my phone. It's nice because it moderately cognitively challengeing, offers some variety with different maps, and the AI is quite mediocre -- which…
I find the same with a certain chess program on my phone where I find running the lowest AI quite nice for 5 minutes and I have a couple thousand games versus it. I know I could do something more challenging, but there's something to be said for simple puzzles to be solved almost in a ritual way for comfort and stability
the article says that a lack of good jobs in the real word is contributing to this. Now gamers have their own online communities; I guess that the network of online friends could help to build a real world network to solve real world problems. This would be of great value to the players. I wonder if future games will have a built in social networking functionality...
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Insightful observation. Makes sense. As a variation on this idea... I have a job now where I do have control over some stuff that matters to me (and it definitely helps!) But I still like to take a video game break once or twice a day. My game of choice is a Risk-clone on my phone. It's nice because it moderately cognitively challengeing, offers some variety with different maps, and the AI is quite mediocre -- which…
Out of curiosity, could you give the name or a link to the game?
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Are they really? I've never spent more than a few days on a book, but I've certainly spent well over 300 hours on some video games. I love reading, but to me books seem quite expensive as an entertainment medium in comparison with computer games.
...until you realize that we still have this old-fashioned institutions called libraries .
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…
> Video games are cheap compared to other entertainment. Maybe with the exception of the public library.