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Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

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Re: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

#231

Post by problems »

Baeocystin wrote: post #134
overcast wrote: post #3

Honestly I don't see the thirty something generation ever giving up video games. They've been a part of our entire lives at this point. Once we're old, it will be a case where no generation has ever been without video games in some capacity.

Am 43. Grew up playing games. Not planning on stopping any time soon. Went through the 'I should be doing something better with my time' phase briefly, about ten years ago. Realized it was anxiety driven, not rational. Having fun is an intrinsic part of being human, and cannot be skipped without genuine mental health consequences.

I've sort of been fighting with this myself - a few years ago I started working full time and spending more time with friends.

When I get downtime it's pretty much just turned in to playing games or watching TV - I barely have time when I feel motivated enough to start learning something new anymore. I taught myself almost everything I know about programming in downtime during my teenage and college years, but that sort of highly motivated downtime hasn't carried over so well now that so much of my time is occupied automatically.

I think you're right and having actual downtime when you're doing something relaxing is a very good thing, but I can't shake the feeling I should be accomplishing more.

I guess I'm just sort of disappointed that all my most motivated times seem to have sunk into other activities and now I don't get them to learn on my own. I don't know what to do about it.

EDIT: You know, I don't know anyone else who feels obliged to spend their free time in some sort of "productive" way except developers.

Maybe I should just ignore this whole thing and accept that development has for the most part went from a hobby to a job for me and that's okay. Spending time with friends and gaming in my free time are probably more relaxing and improve my overall happiness more than forced productivity would. Optimizing happiness is probably a better idea than optimizing productivity.

Eugh, I don't know, I keep bouncing back and forth on this one in my head.

Re: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

#233

Post by kkleindev »

problems wrote: post #224
kkleindev wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you never allow yourself mental downtime, then everything you do feels like work. What makes you believe that what reedlaw described is not to be considered mental downtime? I have made quite the opposite experience: when consciously reflecting and deciding about my mental downtime in advance, it turns out to be the most recreative. It's worth noting that I made bad experiences with: tomorrow from 7-730 I will b…

How do you just pick up a project from a set like that? Typically if I put something on a list, it's not motivating enough for me to want to do when I have downtime unless I really want to work on something. Many mentally challenging activities I'll start spontaneously, but it's typically small ones with direct, achievable goals, like write a little scraper in a new language or reverse engineer a single mechanism of…

I guess the key here is that this list is based on principles and not just a list of activities I would consider advantageous to have done in some sense or another.

Those principles ought to be chosen as to align with my convictions and expectations from life. So you could say that I know that this list is the intersection of things I consider worthy doing (and immediately have a well-formed reason for their worthiness at the back of my mind) and recreation.

When a moment for recreation has come, there is nothing that makes me question whether I should do something from the list or not because I am reassured that I have thought of this sufficiently in advance to determine the best for me.

Re: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

#234

Post by digitalzombie »

XorNot wrote: post #194
reedlaw wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By basing your choices on feelings (i.e. "not in the mood") you are likely to go with the path of least resistance. If instead you choose to do what you prioritize by conscious mental effort you are likely to feel more rewarded in the end. For example, if you decide that learning photography is important and you spend hundreds of hours practicing you will be more satisfied than if you spent those hundreds of hours pl…

This is a surefire way for people to burn out on something. If you never allow yourself mental downtime, then everything you do feels like work. If it's not meant to be work, then it's a hobby and if it's a hobby then it needs to actually allow you to unwind. Some people do surprisingly complex things for this, but the mistake we tend to make externally is view the accomplishment as "work" or something they really ne…

I agree with this.

It'll burn some people out. I can't just read/learn or create things and see it as some kind of stress relief.

You'll feel accomplish and all great things but that's ain't relaxing at all for me.

Playing magic the gathering, just turn off my brain and watching a good tv show either comedy or scifi is my way to blow off steam. Video games can make me angry sometime or frustrated. Mtg can be challenging in term of stress and require thinking skill but I've learned to not over think it and play with my gut. My buddy who I play against over thinks and stress out often in mtg, it's enjoyable for the guy but after several rounds at his cube his brain is mentally exhausted, this rarely happens to me. He often chastize me for not reading the card carefully... though, I just kinda remember them if I play often with the cube a lot. Hell I thought one card had flying cause the creature seems to be hovering in the art once. Bad play mistake. While our style are different I we're pretty much tie in term of deck building skill set and winning rate.

Re: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

#235

Post by Latty »

KirinDave wrote: post #79
Cpoll wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Who can find the most abusively unfair strategy first, and then exploit it." I'm not sure I agree with this. "Finding" the best strategy rewards you for a week at most, until the community absorbs the strategy. Then you're no farther than the people you were beating last week. Most games have co-opted the word "metagame" to describe this phenomenon. Someone discovers an effective strategy, it becomes the metagame,…

> I'm not sure I agree with this. "Finding" the best strategy rewards you for a week at most, until the community absorbs the strategy. Then you're no farther than the people you were beating last week. In most cases I experienced, exploitative strategies are only slightly improved, and require a fair amount of skill (usually games hotpatch outrageous exploits quickly). The people who find it worse train to use it fi…

I'd argue this isn't unique to esports - Formula One has a similar thing happening - the teams develop new technology to make cars get round the track faster, and then the organisation decides if they fit within the rules. The rules change over time.

DOTA2 does this better than most - most strategies are accepted as a part of the game - in fact, a lot of things core to play now began life as those kind of exploits (pulling your lane creeps into neutral camps to deny enemies experience and allow you to farm the neutrals easily, for example). The game is balanced around those things, even if they were unintended.

Sure, the game is regularly patched, but the solution is very rarely to directly make something not viable any more - at most it will make it even by buffing other options or reducing it's viability (but not removing it).

The draft with bans also allows teams to deny the enemy team access to certain strategies, which means teams can't focus on one strategy, which is nice.

Re: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

#236

Post by [deleted] »

KirinDave wrote: post #79
Cpoll wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Who can find the most abusively unfair strategy first, and then exploit it." I'm not sure I agree with this. "Finding" the best strategy rewards you for a week at most, until the community absorbs the strategy. Then you're no farther than the people you were beating last week. Most games have co-opted the word "metagame" to describe this phenomenon. Someone discovers an effective strategy, it becomes the metagame,…

> I'm not sure I agree with this. "Finding" the best strategy rewards you for a week at most, until the community absorbs the strategy. Then you're no farther than the people you were beating last week. In most cases I experienced, exploitative strategies are only slightly improved, and require a fair amount of skill (usually games hotpatch outrageous exploits quickly). The people who find it worse train to use it fi…

[deleted]

Re: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

#238

Post by badminton1 »

laplace2 wrote: post #25

I've found learning and creating to be more fulfilling activities than videogames. That's not to advocate against gaming, or to generalize all games, but I've thought about how much time I spent playing games in the past and if I was happy with what I gained from it: I largely was not. I felt as if I was lacking in skills that I wished I had, and believe I could have learned in that time. I'm happier with myself afte…

What I learned from activities related to being a gamer, decades ago:

- Built my own computer from parts, and squeezed more performance out of it through overclocking and tuning mostly everything that could be tuned

- Learned about networks, power grids and basic event planning setting up LAN parties

- Built a website for my team. Learned to program with PHP and to manipulate images

- Made many contacts, many of them software engineers, including the ones that got me my first jobs

- Lots of team related administrative tasks like screening and recruiting players for my team, creating strategies and tactics with fault tolerance in case of events such as missing players or reduced network connectivity

All this before I turned 18. All these skills and connections turned out to be incredibly valuable later on when I went through financial hardship during college, my former teammates showed up with job offers for programming jobs, which helped to sustain me and my family.

Re: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

#239

Post by Baeocystin »

problems wrote: post #231
Baeocystin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am 43. Grew up playing games. Not planning on stopping any time soon. Went through the 'I should be doing something better with my time' phase briefly, about ten years ago. Realized it was anxiety driven, not rational. Having fun is an intrinsic part of being human, and cannot be skipped without genuine mental health consequences.

I've sort of been fighting with this myself - a few years ago I started working full time and spending more time with friends. When I get downtime it's pretty much just turned in to playing games or watching TV - I barely have time when I feel motivated enough to start learning something new anymore. I taught myself almost everything I know about programming in downtime during my teenage and college years, but that s…

Some of my best ideas have come to me after hours of twaddling away with no particular goal in mind in SimCity.

We as devs tend to seek optimal solutions as if they were a simple numeric quantity, where more/higher=better. We know this is not how things are, but the mental model is seductive in in its simplicity.

What I have learned over the years is that it is the constant change between different forms of attention and focus that drive me to be my best. Which means time, real time, away from what I do for work. And when I return to work after doing so, I appreciate it all the more.

You might be interested in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book, Flow, if you have not yet read it. Although it has nothing to do with game playing per se, it helped clarify many aspects of my thinking when it came to why I felt I was 'wasting' time while gaming, and why I was wrong in that assessment.

https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-...

Re: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

#240

Post by marvin »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #44
M_Grey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that videogames fill my "brain in neutral" space very nicely. If I'm just not in the mood to read, or get out, pick up some new skill or polish an old one, hang out with friends or do something productive (and sometimes you truly want to do nothing )... I find that videogames are a nice choice. I especially enjoy combining them with unabridged audiobooks that I might not otherwise bother reading/listening to o…

I believe the essence of what you're saying is true, but I dispute the overall reasonableness of what you describe. The vast majority of video games are either built around the principles of addiction, or require a tremendous amount of time in muscle memory training. What you're describing seems like describing how enjoyable it can be to smoke one cigarette a month. (assuming that actually felt good). Could be true-…

That's a pretty dark view of computer games. It's a popular media type like any other. You have all ends of the complexity spectrum, from undisputable art on one end to poorly-concealed skinner boxes on the other end.

People who appreciate computer games as a serious hobby will tend to enjoy games on the complex end of this spectrum. These games are no more built around the principles of addiction than a good book, or a physical activity like skiing.

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