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.
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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
Is Sekiro difficult?
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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
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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.
What's a skinner's box?
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.
I heard the guitar riff
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"
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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.
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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
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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.
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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).
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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.