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A very interesting piece of long form journalism cum memoir about the way video gaming has subsumed and changed the way we live, interact, and think.
To the uninitiated, the figures are nothing if not staggering: 155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November's presidential election. And they play them a lot: According to a variety of recent studies, more than 40 percent of Americans play at least three hours a week, 34 million play on average 22 hours each week, 5 million hit 40 hours, and the average young American will now spend as many hours (roughly 10,000) playing by the time he or she turns 21 as that person spent in middle- and high-school classrooms combined. Which means that a niche activity confined a few decades ago to preadolescents and adolescents has become, increasingly, a cultural juggernaut for all races, genders, and ages. How had video games, over that time, ascended within American and world culture to a scale rivaling sports, film, and television? Like those other entertainments, video games offered an escape, of course. But what kind?
In 1993, the psychologist Peter D. Kramer published Listening to Prozac, asking what we could learn from the sudden mania for antidepressants in America. A few months before the election, an acquaintance had put the same question to me about video games: What do they give gamers that the real world doesn't?
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday March 06 2017, @07:18AM (3 children)
"In the generation before mine, "video games" were called "books""
As someone straddling these generations (I used to read a tremendous amount, and I have been gaming for decades), your are right. But: as TFA points out, the difference in a video game is that *you* are in the story.
TFA is very long - should have been cooked down by 50% or so - but hits all of the right points. Really, I think the most important points are:
- Agency: You are in the story
- Simplicity: Video games have simple, understandable, fair rules. Real life is complicated, not always understandable, and certainly not fair.
- Meritocracy: TFA says that video games are a meritocracy, where everyone starts on an equal footing (unlike real life). It's more than that: video games are designed so that everyone can *win*. IRL, if you set modest goals, you can achieve them but over the course of years. In a game, you can conquer the world (or whatever) in a couple of hours.
Personally, as an older gamer, I find myself playing less. Games are fun, and a fine distraction, but they eat time that you could spend doing things IRL. Ultimately, after you conquered the world, the game closes and you are left with nothing. Paint a wall (granted, less exciting), and the paint is still on the wall tomorrow. Games that create an enduring world blur this boundary, which can make for interesting discussions, and is the reason that "Y" in TFA lost track of his life.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @01:48PM
Meritocracy: TFA says that video games are a meritocracy, where everyone starts on an equal footing (unlike real life). It's more than that: video games are designed so that everyone can *win*. IRL, if you set modest goals, you can achieve them but over the course of years. In a game, you can conquer the world (or whatever) in a couple of hours.
It's more than that. In games you are almost always being treated fairly. IRL you may run into an asshole boss or college that will sabotage you and get away with it, but in gaming being doublecrossed happens rarely and when it does, the asshole usually gets poetic justice in the end.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 06 2017, @03:30PM
That's true of video games as they have been, but I think that's because we haven't properly harnessed their immersive quality yet. Across cultures and history people have used games to teach real skills. Eskimo girls played games where they tried to shoot arrows through a rolling hoop, and that sort of thing. For us it's common to play a video game and become so immersed that an entire day can disappear, but at the end we've gained nothing because we yoke no serious purpose to it.
There is such a thing as a "serious game," but that is more an attempt to gamify what amounts to a training video. There is no fun to it, and fails to immerse a player in a state of flow conducive to real, deep learning. You do it for work because you have to, not because you'd want to in your free time.
A better approach would be to add dimensions to the games you already love, probably best done through downloadable content. Imagine you like playing Assassin's Creed: Revelations where you run around the streets of Constantinople. You install the DLC and get additional missions that require you learn some basic Turkish. You play through those, successfully answering in Turkish, and at the end, Congratulations! You have earned college credit for completing basic Turkish.
Or you could play the Mass Effect trilogy with DLC such that when you hack a system's code to gain credits you have to run a debugger on a simple function. Congratulations! You have earned college credit for CompSci 101.
Playing Call of Duty you could be called upon to splint a squad mate's leg or apply a dressing.
You can think of a lot of scenarios to spend that time immersed in a game and coming out the other side with real knowledge/skills. With VR, there are even broader possibilities.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @03:50PM
I really am glad I avoided MMORPGs sucking up my life. (I played them, but mostly in binges until I figured out the rules, or figured out how the mechanics worked that were intended to time sink me/hold me back.) But yes, many people today get sucked into videogames, especially persistent ones in order to feel like they are making a difference in SOMETHING even as their lives are held at a standstill, whether by their own shortcomings, the constraints of the society they live in, or simply a string of improbably bad scenarios they don't have an opportunity to avoid or overcome.
Personally, similiar to you I have stopped gaming almost completely. Besides making a difference in the RL world around you, there is sooo much non-gaming stuff to be found on the internet, and if you enjoy learning, you will quickly find it sucking up all that time you could otherwise spend on videogames. Of course many people aren't that intellectual, which is why there is still a burgeoning industry behind videogames, but also why so many of them have become 'low brow' in comparison to what we had in the past, and especially the ratio of quantity of intellectual videogames compared to mindless/stinker ones.