Some people have this idea that playing games is a hobby and it puts me off. Playing games is not a hobby it is a pastime. Hobbies are often communal activities that encourage socialization, not pseudo online congregations. You can engage with your hobby in isolation and it can be your own activity for yourself, or you can share your hobby with others which I believe is the prime function of maintaining a hobby the goal being socialization. Just because you play a game with other people or groups of people does not then make playing a game a hobby, you are merely interacting with others inside of a video game which is very dystopian.
This same phenomenon of pseudo relationships exists in the streaming world where people congregate behind their screens to watch a person do a thing or play a game, but together, it’s essentially gooning without the sexual pathology.
The definition of hobby has been stretched to include video games. Video games are not a hobby, they facilitate the atomization of the self and promote further isolation of the human spirit. I can play a game with other people without having met the other people, in essence they become the medium itself exempt from the human form. I do not know you nor have I met you, if we did meet would we even share a common interest outside of the pastime we bonded over?
The system that relies on atomizing its people to the point of creating virtual subjects with no corporeal being and promoting socialization through video games is entirely bizarre, the amalgamation of things that are present in my existence pushes me closer to reaching peak psychosis.
There needs to be a material value to a hobby, it can’t just be data on a computer highlighting one’s achievements. Without computers, without all that data stored, your hobby seizes to exist.
Video games must be abolished, they are just another barrier preventing our escape from a doomed virtual world created for the sole purpose of pushing us further away from our physical bodies. Like the universe shifting, the same process is existing within society, they call it the red shift and we are Red Dead shifting away from ourselves.
People used to play chess through mailed letters. Before the internet hobby communities could be restricted to people writing letters to enthusiast magazines or for the more privileged of them sometimes traveling to a convention, if they didn't live in a big city and the hobby was niche enough. People still play tabletop games through daily forum posts or over IRC channels.
For much of the 20th century the main American hobby was sitting dead still for hours every day staring at a man in a glowing box deliberately try to give you deadly brainworms. Before that sitting dead still staring at some cheap paper containing some weird racist story about Jack Manly getting the girl as his special good boy prize for doing colonialism was the biggest hobby.
In short, there's no reasonable dividing line of telepresence for hobbies nor is there innate quality to something being a hobby in the first place.