Weird 2010's gamer nationalism meets china bad.
"Oh no, kids won't be able to use games to escape reality now" — Good, have them play outside or read a book or something.
"Horrible, I couldn't live without games" — Yes, this law is attempting to help people before they become like you.
"New generations won't grow up to be gamers now" — How will society survive!
"It's about controlling freedom of thought" — Ah, yes, this will stop the great dialogue had by fourteen-year-olds in LoL game chats.
I remember wasting 6 years (14-19) on World of Warcraft. Like actively raiding, reading forums, theorycrafting, playing the auction house. Don’t get me wrong it was “fun” but man, now that I’m 31 and think of how I could have been playing a sport, learning how to draw, meeting other girls so my dumbass wasn’t pining for my ex, and reading a ton more books, I would have been in a much better space in college. I would have periods where I found like, waterpolo or taekwondo, and it stopped me from loggin in so much, but the rest of the time I was just obsessed. And when you are a WoW player people actively call it a drug. I even talk like that, I’m an ex-WoW addict, I quit a long time ago.
My sister is currently obsessed with roblox and her and her friend constantly take my mom’s credit card for in-game transactions. Gaming systems are built to create habits, often negative harmful loops.
Personally I wish the U.S had the balls to implement even a modicum of regulation against major gaming publishers and companies.
This is what turns me off gaming. Even newer big games, specifically Ghost Of Tsushima just feel like a skinners box. Youre just vegging out for the next piece of digital clothing.
sekiro is my favorite game of all time, its so good. It even has good politics! Tsushima is so boring by comparison but for some reason I keep playing
I played a little bit of DS2 and I suck. I think I tried fighting these big metal knights at Heidis tower flame?? And they just swung to quick. So I said fuck that this game isn’t for me. I think in a differ direction I went last where a bird picks you up after a boss fight? And then I was bored or frustrated
i'm more of a single-player/cooperative mode gamer now because I don't have time to try and be competitive or log in every night to match up and try to best other people on the internet. I played journey for months. I was on Breath of the Wild for 3 years. I am playing untitled goose game with my son as a way to pass the time. My friends play fornite or apex legends and I am just immediately owned upon landing. I tried going to a smash ultimate tournament and got my ass kicked by a 17 year old. So yeah, no thanks lol.
It's like a box you put a rat in and it pushes a button and sometimes the button triggers a mechanism to provide the rat food.
I think the inconsistency makes it more addictive. Intermittent randomized rewards are often compared to this.
https://behavioralscientist.org/21st-century-skinner-box/
https://youtu.be/MOgowRy2WC0
I read "21st century Skinner box" to the tune of "21st century schizoid man." It honestly fits perfectly in terms of meaning.
A Skinner Box is a often small chamber that is used to conduct operant conditioning research with animals. Within the chamber, there is usually a lever (for rats) or a key (for pigeons) that an individual animal can operate to obtain a food or water within the chamber as a reinforcer. So, the games where its just a big stream of content and you press the button and get the reward feel like that. With Ghost of Tsushima its "run here, listen to peasant talk, kill 6 to 12 mongols, get cosmetic item, repeat"
I used to play competitive fpses and I regret it. I'm good enough I can jump in almost any shooter game and pub stomp single handedly, and that skill is useless. It's fun being able to jump in any random game I've never played before and dominate the whole lobby, get accused of hacking, etc, but the thousands upon thousands of hours of practice it took to get there was a waste. I was in a pro team, but got burned out practicing and doing scrims before I ever got into a paid match.
All of the friends I made in the competitive fps scene were huge assholes. I felt like the only one who didn't have a meltdown and rage when I had a bad game. I didn't seem like they were even having fun most of the time. I don't talk to any of them anymore.
If I had spend that time playing an instrument, making art, coding, anything actually productive I would have been a million times happier. I easily could have if any adults in my life at the time taught me anything or encouraged me at all. But they were all too busy being burned out from work, or otherwise just didn't care.
I think most people who spent too much time on video games feel similarly if they have grown out of it at all. It's a symptom of having no adult in your life to teach you stuff when you are a teenager.
playing an instrument is several orders of magnitude more difficult than being a g*mer and can easily become a social acvitity IMO
I've never felt dirty the same way I do playing video games when I sink inordinate amounts of time practicing
playing an instrument is several orders of magnitude more difficult than being a g*mer
it generally takes a few thousand hours to reach the top 1% of any playerbase, so i'm not sure i agree with this. everything else is true though. putting a few thousand hours into sports, arts, languages, etc will bring you a lot more benefits than having a shiny rank
The fact that you are creating things when you do those hobbies. With a few exceptions, gaming isn't creating anything.
Watching tv and reading for the sake of reading are a waste of time. Reading improves your writing, which is a useful skill, so even pop fiction novels usually aren't a complete waste. Not to mention anything worth reading (which is a lot of things) teaches you stuff.
Sports are similar to reading in that they are exercise, and thus even trivial time wasting ones like hacky sack are not a complete waste.
Wasting time isn't a sin or a major character flaw, but making a waste of time the main thing you do as a hobby isn't good, and is a character flaw. It becomes it's own punishment as well, I've never meet someone who had an unproductive time waste as a hobby who was happy. They get stressed from life, run to their hobby to distract themselves, and it doesn't help. It just distracts them enough to avoid having an active breakdown until they are tired enough to fall asleep.
Counterpoint: I exercised, had a productive hobby, made art, had a social network and was still completely miserable. None of those things reduced my misery.
yeah, i feel you on that. i used to play an esport at pro level (and before there was a decently-sized esport community built around it) and it feels like a full time job that simultaneously sucks out all the fun out of something that's supposed to be leisure. the game wasn't even an FPS so all those hours translated into... nothing else. now i only play multiplayer games if it's with friends or i'm listening to music. otherwise it just feels like a pointless time sink.
I am definitely making a value judgment based on WoW. Not Battlefield Bad Company 2 which I could pick up and put down pretty easily, and I also played with friends and met cool people on servers and ventrilo and mumble. I do think online communities can provide social needs just as good as a physical community; but there is something tangible about physical communities that we have to cultivate, because tangibility makes actions a lot easier to maintain, recurrence builds habits, and solidifies networks. While I am of the opinion that the digital is also material, digital spaces are also at the total mercy of Capitalist enterprises (except for small arks and holdouts like this place).
yeah, everything in moderation. which I think the chinese are trying to accomplish. Moderation.
Yes and No. The value judgment I am making now is harsh and probably a bad way to :cope: with my actions as a teenager. In reality, I met a ton of people and some amazing friends during that time that kept me from probably killing myself. But I can also tell you that youth is so fleeting and having to re-learn to be a social person, and find time and space to grow as a human being in your early 20s and 30s, with kids, wife, and work, is a lot harder than if I had devoted my time to praxis, self-development, socializing, etc. I was also addicted to porn. So for me, my teenage years were play wow, jack off, play wow, do my high school and college homework and go back to playing wow and jacking off. Overall it feels gross. The addiction loops that we allow children to experience on the internet, start from an early age. And it is horrifying in retrospect when I think back on my life.
I have had the same experience and it is validating to read them like this
If it helps, I had similar restrictions on gaming as a child (which is why china sounds like my mom), no gaming on weekdays and so on and I can for sure tell you I didn't do any of that shit except arguably reading books and only because it was a discreet way to procastinate. Like I can safely say that video games weren't the reason I wasn't Chad Einstein football team captain and expert oboe player in high school. There's something to be said about how video games was the only hobby that was able to capture my dope-ass ADHD brain attention when everything else failed of course, but I think meds would've been better for my development than a blanket restriction on video games and even then I don't think it would've changed my lack of interest in sports or whatever in any significant way. Maybe I would've been less anxious tho
This is not to dismiss China's policy of limiting online games, I think it's a good thing, but I also don't have super high expectations about it either.
I am again here to remind you that being online enough to post to hexbear is no better than being a gamer.
Just as many of us celebrated the banning of the subreddit, I will celebrate the day this domain is seized.
I choose to interpret this as advocacy that an army of 7-year-olds join hexbear. No I will not listen.
I am here in hopes that this place grows or launches new leftist projects.
It's just limiting online games, which is still a little boomer-y but it isn't that big of a deal. Nothing is stopping the kids from hanging out and pulling an all nighter on something local, which was some of my greatest memories as a kid. The law also limits the amount of homework schools can assign, so overall I think this is a net positive, nothing to get too :joker-gaming: about
Weird to think that as computers became lighter and more portable, LANs got rarer.
The solution: bring back arcades. It's a place for kids to hang out, build friendships, exchange ideas, do all that social stuff while playing video games. ofc make the machines free. I have fond memories of hanging out after school at the spot the school set up for high school kids that had arcade machines, pool tables, and a multimedia room. Kids just did whatever they wanted, played time crisis, set up DnD games or just hung out and watched tv. It was a great experience.
I really love how they do this in Mexico. The country is so fucked by neoliberalism no one can afford game systems so in most cities there are arcades where you can pay to play Xbox (like sometimes literally the original Xbox) or watch TV or whatever
I personally have fond memories of going to the internet cafe to watch my brother play Halo, at least when such a thing existed in the USA
I saw places like this in Brazil, people would get together and play console games and hang out. It reminds me of a lan party of sorts. Actually lan parties are still really viable in 2021, especially playing older games that already have systems in place to do it.
There’s this old school arcade in Chicago that is a 20 dollar entrance fee and all the games are free to play for the entire day. They do a lot of community events too. I wish I grew up during the 80s to experience going out to an arcade because it’s so fun.
I wish I grew up during the 80s to experience going out to an arcade because it’s so fun.
Same. I was at the tail end of arcade culture in the 90's and I only got to see a glimpse of it as it was dying out, giving way to the home console boom. Japan still has a thriving arcade scene which is where I took some inspiration from this. Of all the gaming communities out there, the fighting game scene is what I'd point to for something "good". Arcades would be a way for kids to engage with one another and bond over fun games.
When I lived in China there were lots of internet cafes. Used to play a ton of diablo and counter strike on the lan. Not sure if that will be restricted too but it was basically a modern version of an arcade. Lots of good memories from those places.
I learned to play foosball in a break room where they'd stuff tissues behind the goal so they could catch the ball after scoring and just put it back in play instead of having to pay another coin for it.
I regret to inform you that hexbear is full of g*mers and that this is about ethics in child gaming regulation.
Good, have them play outside or read a book or something.
Ok Gramps let's get you home
Living in the US, it's hard to imagine what you could even do if you were a kid other than play video games. With few exceptions, in the US not allowing a kid to play video games is not allowing them to have any real socialization, or anything to do other than watch tv and stare at the walls.
That's now fucked this place is.
Banning video games feels like banning childhood when your childhood had you so isolated video games were the only way you had of interacting with people on a daily basis outside heavily restricted environments like school.
I don't know what it's like in China, but I seriously doubt it's anything like the US in that respect.
The restriction in China is only for online games, the government is probably fully aware of the logistics nightmare of banning every type of game for kids. The kinds of online games popular in China right now aren't anything one could meaningfully socialize within, but rather, extremely grindy gacha games or exploitative MMOs based around sucking as much money out of you as possible.
Also I'm certain kids are going to figure out how to use a VPN to get around it anyway
Yeah, everyone thinks they're being banned from Planescape Torment: the MMO. But it's really just some lootbox infested hellscape that uses marketing techniques that literally hack minds.
This, everyone is projecting themselves into believing chinese children won't be able to live their beatiful child fantasy of playing final fantasy X while their mom makes kool aid or whatever when online gaming currently is one step removed from actual fucking casinos which is indescribably evil, and I still think China is being too tepid here.
lib glasses time
China is weaponizing Genshin Impact by preventing their kids from playing it enough to really engage with it while leaving the rest of the world vulnerable.
The only question is: why does China hate Bulgarian children?
Also I’m certain kids are going to figure out how to use a VPN to get around it anyway
Correct, which is why it would be infinitely better if the companies themselves were targeted with fines or whatever if they engage in practices that make the games extra addictive.
This should also apply to social media apps or whatnot, they've all god algorithms designed to keep you hooked.
That would be a non-boomer solution that might actually make things better.
A VPN is going to add so much lag that the vast majority of online games would be rendered unplayable anyways. You could play turn based games, MMOs, and maybe some old school rts games, but that's about it.
So this ban isn't trivial to get around.
I used to play LoL with a free VPN, my ping went from about 20 to 40-50, so not too bad
"Oh no, kids won’t be able to use games to escape reality now” — Good, have them play outside or read a book or something.
For some kids, being able to be social online is one of the few safe spaces growing up - speaking particularly about LGBTQ+ children. Presenting as you want offline isn't always a viable option, so finding people you feel safe being yourself around and doing something together like gaming can be a very needed escape.
When you grow up in a house that's unsafe, it doesn't always feel safe to connect with people irl. Please think this through from a different perspective
There are many spaces online that you can socialize in that aren't video games tho
True, but being able to actively do things besides just talking is good too. Ideally having the ability to watch stuff, talk, play games all as options is good.
Yes I agree 1000%. That being said online gaming seems to be getting more and more financialized and predatory, so cracking down on that is good imho. Really what we need us an actually free internet.
Or they could crack down on the predatory elements of gaming instead of just saying kids aren't allowed to enter the casino
I always thought the worst thing about computer games was these people who "be a gamer". Like, playing games is a recreation. It's not supposed to be the focus of your whole life.
But American culture is so bereft of meaning, these young men have got nothing else. When you spend 60 hours a week doing something, of course it's going to become super important to you. Moreover anyone who says otherwise is going to become an enemy. These things only work when you have a sealed hermetic community. Cult behavior. Anyone viewing with a cocked eye and stating, "Men in their thirties should be living their lives, not playing children's games" is going to be viciously attacked. Scientologists have a word for this, I can't remember what it is. Suppressive personality?
Gaming is the cheapest hobby that can occupy a large amount of your life. It's depressing to play video games for hours and hours every day, but it's less depressing than watching tv or browsing social media for the same amount of time.
When you ask a "gamer" why they aren't doing anything better with their time, it is perceived as an attack because you are basically asking "why are you such a loser you can't afford to do anything actually cool"? Even when they can spare a bit of money to do better stuff with their time, they are usually so depressed and numb from playing video games all the time that they just go with what they know. The easy option.
It is OK to love video games. It is NEVER OK to be a "gamer".
“Cut a liberal, and a gamer bleeds”
Don't you use our word. Show me your steam account before you use our word. I need to see 1000+ hours on a game that's just a map.
Does 1200 hours in Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic count?
:side-eye-1: :side-eye-2:
(interestingly, the games I've played most are not the games I'd consider knowing best (with the possible exception of Morrowind). I've only got 70 hours in HL2 and I know every inch of that game by heart.
And in the suburbs both suck if you don't spend money to go to places where those things are fun.
everyone needs to recognize that all hobbies are commodified and capitalist marketing encourages you to spend as much as possible on hobby equipment to make line go up. the strong consumers identities formed out of hobbist groups are likewise encouraged by capitalists to increase profits
I disagree with the bit about music. Back before computers, the most common form of "training" was handing a kid a guitar, teaching them how to tune it, and telling them to try and play stuff off the radio.
Everyone I've ever met who plays guitar over the age of 30 learned that way.
yeah all that shit is cheap in theory until you have to buy all the camping gear, fishing gear, hiking gear to be a "real" hobbyist. Very few people who 'camp' for a hobby (not even a hobby imo, that's a vacation) don't also buy a bunch of gear to flex on the other dads with. Same with fishing and hiking.
Those aren't things you can just do whenever. You aren't going to get home from work, decompress for a bit, put on your hiking boots and walk into the woods. That's a weekend thing. That isn't going to occupy a good chunk of your time.
85% of Australia lives within 20km of a City.
There are city dwellers, rich retirees that make the inner country unaffordable with $15 coffees and $2million dollar homes in "quaint" former farming villages, and station owners who own farms the size of Belgium. So to a first approximation, everyone who might be a gamer does live in an urban centre.
station owners who own farms the size of Belgium
:aus-delenda-est:
Ok that doesn't really help the majority of people who do live in urban environments though?
Great for you if you walk 2 steps outside and fall into a pristine lake surrounded by a huge forest but that doesnt really represent most people who would try to find a hobby to take up their time.
It's 90 degrees out in most of the US rn. It's not realistic to go hiking or camping in that weather unless you are dedicated. It's not something you can do whenever.
gaming can be cheap if you build a cheap pc (not rn entirely ofc with gpu pricing) for 500-600 dollars and pirate all the games.
You need a place to play where the volume wouldn't be an issue. All the kids these days use a computer program and a DI box if they live in an apartment. Which is actually more expensive if you get programs that don't sound like shit, but the free ones are good enough to get people into it.
Also, for literally nothing you can download stuff that lets you play with MIDI. I don't know what programs are best because I can't stand fake instruments most of the time, but many people love MIDI. I bet if I was introduced to it when I was in middle school I would be one of those people.
Those sound like shit and are a lot less fun to play through headphones as a result. Playing through headphones with amps like that feels like dry practice, if that makes sense.
Can get an epiphone dot and a hotrod deluxe for that much.
The gpu shortage is a temporary anomaly in the same way COVID stopping people from going to concerts is a temporary anomaly.
There has been like two or three temporary gpu shortages due to crypto at this point. This current shortage is agrivated by the chip shortage. The majority of the crypto part of the shortage is already over, and now it's almost entirely a shortage of memory chips that is driving it. Once that is resolved things will be back to normal.
There are Ryzen APUs which are still widely available and will run most games perfectly fine.
https://youtube.com/c/LowSpecGamer
isn't there initial costs for other hobbies as well? you need camping equipment to camp, musical instruments to play music, hiking equipment for hiking.
my cousin plays gta on his 300 dollar laptop that his dad bought for online classes. while it won't get a billion fps or look photo realistic, it works fine for him. gaming can be expensive or cheap, like almost every other hobby.
the budget pc+pirated game combo i mentioned is very popular in "developing" countries.
Low end games uses hardware people generally already have for the purposes of living in society. In a way that regular shoes cant be used for hiking.
A long ass Ethernet cable is $10. Garbage headphones that at least allow you to hear are like $20. Most low end games are $0-20. For $40 you can play CS:GO and the only thing preventing you from being able to keep up might be your mouse, depending on how shitty your existing one is.
Like, it's ok for it to be the focus for some people. Some people live for model trains or birdwatching or 11th century French Poetry. Super cool.
But that there's so many that it's grown from subculture of geeks to its own thing is symptomatic of a larger issue (that rhymes with crapitalism).
Honestly, the move is literally a good thing. Online games are addictive and that addiction hurts the people most vulnerable the hardest. Kids are fucking vulnerable as it is, and online gaming is the easiest addiction for them to fall into. Is 3 hours a week too low? Yeah, for sure. But it seems like a reasonable starting point. Maybe it can be loosened in the future.
It's all cope. If these people were instead aspiring to be like the urban intellectuals of yesteryear and reading Proust and playing viola and idk birdwatching instead their lives would not be meaningfully better in any sense. None of that fights capital. Yes there's a value in art but it's not going to fix the problems in their lives. This entire argument is just masked middle-upper class elitism trying desperately to use a cultural signifier to separate themselves from the lumpen. I like books but they don't make me a better person than someone who doesn't.
The thing is the games they banned are only the worst for kids. Kids can't play online games which means no gachas, skinner boxes, and no equivalent of American COD servers I have no reason to believe don't exist. I would argue those are all good things to ban and frankly the skinner boxes and gacha types should be banned outright for everyone. They're parasites, ask me about my time playing Genshin Impact.
I don't disagree with you but the tone of the original post isn't "hoo boy I sure am glad predatory practices are being regulated" it's "hahaha look at these shitty proles with their shitty prole hobbies, aren't I cool for not being one of them?"
how fortunate then that in addition to proust & viola these intellectual chinese students are allowed and encouraged to read marxist curriculum :xi-lib-tears:
this is a really funny take because there's barely any class character to strip out here besides 'lumpen' being less able to game because they can't afford it.
First they came for the gamers, and I didn't speak up cuz higher ladder ranking for me, git gud noobs
My only question, for both the Chinese gaming ban and for all the G*MERS, is where are the parents? Shouldn't parents y'know, actually parent their kids and restrict the gaming time? Do parents really just let their kids play Vidya non stop?
its a restriction on children playing online video games that are made to be as addicting as possible. You can still play single player shit unless the parents take away the power cord or whatever.
I can't tell if this is making fun of conservatives ("where are the parents?") but if not yes they do.
In fact, I have a pretty young child family member that plays 8+ hours of games a day.
What the actual fuck, my parents would've never allowed such when I was a kid, and rightfully so
It's hard to judge from afar because it might be the best way for the kid to socialize, but I doubt that's going to be the usual case.
Kids gaming a lot is just like kids raised by Sesame Street. Circumstances where it's essentially necessary due to poverty as well as neglect as well as mental health. Only Sesame Street is a performance while gaming specifically builds in addictive processes and is usually not as personal of a social activity. Kids will watch shows together and laugh together. Modern games are not usually in-person collaborative, the screen is your only window to other people and its lack of social resolution is a big part of why online environments are toxic. And the games tend to be competitive.
Hoping my family member turns out okay. They used to be more social but they hide in their room basically all the time now and are using a screen to game when they're in social situations.
Kids gaming a lot is just like kids raised by Sesame Street
thanks for making me sad
t. raised by Sesame Street and gamed for 8 hours a day almost everyday until I was 17
Reality is harsh. I think it's amusing running into reminders like that though because it reminds me how much poverty has fucked up my life. I think one of the reasons I was so ridiculously depressed and anxious as a child (to the point of suicidal ideation, which I know realize as a child doesn't always present itself to you as thinking about killing yourself but instead "not being here anymore") was because I was able to see that it was poverty that was fucking my shit up
I always felt bad when I worked fast food and I saw some employees keeping their kids in the lobby because no daycare and realizing they would experience a lot of the things I did but never make certain connections or realize why their life is so shit and fall into further dysfunction like soooo many people in my extended family did
Both a blessing and a curse to recognize that stuff. It's not totally incomprehensible for why these violences happen but even in understanding you're limited in being able to end them, so you have to watch. Did some after school outreach stuff for a while and man... sometimes it's obvious when kids just need some support or are trying to process real trauma like it's no thing.
Even more to have lived some of these things. I got off relatively easy but man... I have stories from other people. The worst are those with meth head parents...
Hope things are going a bit better for your now.
I don't totally disagree, but if you're trying to make decisions for the good of the whole country, then this is basically just personal responsibility.
Like a parent shouldn't let their kid spend 6 hours on WoW every night, but "Why do we need laws about child welfare, parents should just be good at being parents," isn't any way to run a society.
Also at that point WoW sounds like a drug addiction and I don’t know if you’ve ever loved a drug addict, but it’s fucking difficult to make sure they don’t use while they’re living with you’ve you.
They have their entire day to figure out how to use. You have to look after them while also dealing with your own stuff? Sort of confusing to blame the parents.
racist ass people made fun of Asian parents being strict for ever and now they're mad bc they're not strict enough
