It's funny you place games in the "bad" side of things, this hich need to be reduced. I group gaming with reading because the kind of games I play require a level of focus and engagement, and my brain rather spend hours scroll HN and Reddit. It really is an uphill battle.
What kind of games? I’d like to stop playing addictive games and start playing games that are better for my mind.
Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn, for investigations and memory and "human puzzles".
Manifold Garden, Opus Magnum (+ other Zachtronics game) for puzzle solving.
Nah, doesn't work for me. I know the games I like; they are all old and I know I love them. I don't follow the news on new games at all. I simply can't concentrate on the games I like for more than 15 minutes. I get distracted, I alt-tab out all the time, and eventually I close them. It's the same with movies or books. It takes a superhuman effort for me to sit still and watch a movie. If anybody has any recommendati…
Maybe the real question, why do you want to do thise things? Because games and movies don't matter that much, really. Nor do books, really. You dont need to force it. Try something else. Try different hobbies to spend time with. And also, old games are not as good as nostalgia has us remember. Maybe you are alt tabbing, because the books you ate picking, movies you watch were good for past you. And now your interests…
You make a good point, and I think there is fear in that the hobbies that we used to enjoy get replaced by something less substantive, even less “productive” - scrolling for endless content, engaging in short-term meaningless comment threads like this, consuming information that the brain forgets within hours.
It's funny you place games in the "bad" side of things, this hich need to be reduced. I group gaming with reading because the kind of games I play require a level of focus and engagement, and my brain rather spend hours scroll HN and Reddit. It really is an uphill battle.
What kind of games? I’d like to stop playing addictive games and start playing games that are better for my mind.
Kentucky Route Zero has been the most intellectual of journeys I went through in 2020-2021.
This game almost requires that I put it down every now and then to ponder and think. It calls for a glass of wine in a quiet place at 3am. I wish my friends would play it so I would have someone to discuss with.
I used to read books all the time. I spent most of my waking hours as a teenager reading books. I’m 35 now and can barely hold attention on anything, I read maybe 3 books a year if I’m lucky. Even on Hacker News I almost exclusively read and comment on the comments, not the actual article unless I see someone says “have you read the article?” I don’t really know why. I have 8+ hours a day screentime on my iPhone, whi…
I think much in the same way that heroin makes the ordinary pleasures life of life seem completely irrelevant by comparison, the supernormal stimulus of the web browser does the same thing for books.
Can you get absorbed in a movie or binge watch a TV show? If so, I suspect your attention ability is still intact. You just need to re-practice consciously directing it again. I still struggle with it too, but was able to "get lost" in a book again. It was key though to move my phone way out of the room, and was hard to get started.
> Can you get absorbed in a movie or binge watch a TV show? As a fellow 34 year old, no. Most movies these days are way too long and boring. Most shows it's tough to watch even a full episode in one sitting. Let alone binge a season. I think, for me, it's because there's just too many things on my mind. And a lot of stuff just feels like it isn't worth my time. Why am I sitting here watching a dumb thing that kinda b…
Hi Swizec. Coincidentally, a few days ago I found your internet diet article from a decade ago:
The way to cure this is to develop a habit that severely limits undirected online browsing and socializing. Part of it is just an education of your own aesthetic sentiments. I read James Clear's "Atomic Habits" (not that this is a special book, I was just on another kick in which I really needed to improve my productivity and picked up a suggestion to use a physical counter of some kind to make a habit stick. I bough…
Wow this is pretty interesting. In my experience checking social media is also a lot like a physical twitch. I might buy some marbles.
If I'm blunt, I rarely read long form things. I've found that most long form things are filler. If you make a movie, people expect 2 hours. If you make a book, people expect 200 pages. Both are generally full of a big amount of filler to meet said metrics.
Even with that being true, usually a GOOD non-fiction book will have more depth and value than browsing the internet. And you can skip parts while reading a book.
I definitely agree with this. One thing I've come to find out as I age is how much does -not- exist on the internet. We like to think all the information in the world is here, but a ton only exists in spoken word(folklore?) and in older books few will ever read.
An aside, I find it a bit interesting that at some point we stopped talking about internet and game addiction. It used to be a hot topic, but I guess now that we are all completely addicted after decade of intense behavioral experimentation, none of us are interested in reading about it anymore.
I remember about 10 years ago or so, smartphone addiction was something we talked about as well. People looking at their phones during dinner out was something we consciously called out. Now, it's such a normal thing that in commercials you see families depicted as all staring at their own devices like it's no big deal. Streaming services and internet providers promote bingeing of TV shows as well. During the pandemi…
Microsoft tried to save us, but Windows Phone failed
An aside, I find it a bit interesting that at some point we stopped talking about internet and game addiction. It used to be a hot topic, but I guess now that we are all completely addicted after decade of intense behavioral experimentation, none of us are interested in reading about it anymore.
I think we stopped talking about it because most people realized that it's not a proper application of the word addiction. Adapting to the changing times doesn't make people ignorant. I dislike how when certain groundbreaking changes in the way people consume content is introduced, people who don't understand it call it an addiction. It's insulting to people who suffer clinical addiction. A perceived bad habit isn't…
Frankly, I’m still shocked at the shift from how it was during my childhood to the extent where we’re on desktop computers for over eight hours a day. Though I suppose sedentary office work has long predates PCs.
It's funny you place games in the "bad" side of things, this hich need to be reduced. I group gaming with reading because the kind of games I play require a level of focus and engagement, and my brain rather spend hours scroll HN and Reddit. It really is an uphill battle.
What kind of games? I’d like to stop playing addictive games and start playing games that are better for my mind.
Disco Elysium would be a good recommendation, I believe. It is almost all reading based, and the theme is philosophical/political.