It’s nice that this young woman finally figured something important out. I am actually kind of hostile to gaming, so it’s hard to get my sympathy on anything gaming-related. But I really enjoyed her article. With any luck, the total shamelessness of the response she received will help her take a few more steps towards self-awareness and find some new hobbies that don’t involve a bunch of young adults treating opportunity costs as a religion. After all, every hour you spend playing Gears of War 3, or any similar game, is an hour you didn’t learn a thing worth learning, and didn’t make a dime. The best revenge is either living well or being happy. Obsessive video game play has never produced either of those results for anyone.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Wow! The games have changed just a little from the days of Pong and Pac Man!
Can’t say I agree with you. I guess the key words are ‘obsessive video game play’. I used to play an online game called Mythll, and for a couple years I was pretty ‘obsessive’. Game is still played online, but the community kind of fell apart. I had more fun than I ever thought possible, made friends around the world, and even met some of them in person. I still remember those days with great fondness. There were times I laughed so hard I cried.
I believe the impact of online gaming will always be underestimated, particularly by those who don’t do it. But a whole generation has now grown up playing with, interacting with, having something in common with, people from all over the world. It made, and is making, a difference. An old guy like me became part of a community. Shut ins could hugely benefit, if they gave it a try. And those shut ins who are doing it, I promise you, it’s improved their lives.
Dismiss it all you like. Many of us who have been part of it do not think it’s a waste.
nalbar
That’s fine. But let me ask you something. Did you get an education and a job before you turned 25?
Because, if you did, then gaming didn’t greatly diminish your prospects in life.
I turned 25 in 1977, a little before online gaming.
It seems like you are assuming ‘obsessive gameplay’ means ‘wasted life’ for young people. I don’t believe that. sure, there are some who probably ‘wasted time’, but those types probably would have wasted it in some other way, like surfing, or some other hobby.
Gaming is just that, a hobby. And a cheap hobby at that.
An anecdote….at work last week I got to talking with the heating contractors (Cory) son (Chris), who was helping him out. I’ve known Cory for a few years, and Chris for about three. One subject Chris and I talked about was gaming, and which games we liked. I told him about Eve (whttp://www.eveonline.com/) which he had never heard of. Chris is 24, and has been a hard core gamer his whole life. He just graduated college, and is going to go to grad school.
His degree? Astrophysics. His grad school degree? Particle physics.
Gaming did not hurt him. Sure, this is just one person, and does not tell the story of a whole generation.
But your story is not a whole generation either.
Side anecdote…I started kidding him about what he tells girls when he’s out at bars ‘hey, I’m an astrophysicist’
He said no way, they would not believe him, he tells them he is a mechanic.
nalbar
Boo, I regularly play an hour or two of video games a day and at the apex of my time with WoW while in college I probably played 4-6 hours a day on the days that I played. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager with only intermittent breaks and got through college with a History degree and have been at my current job for almost 4 years.
Not that I would call this a healthy relationship, but it is an example of the fact that gaming doesn’t have to ruin lives. In fact it placed long term planning and social challenges on me like having to organize a guild of 30 players from all over the world, deal with issues of building up stocks of materials necessary to confront big bosses, resolve fights between players, find replacements for no shows, as well as executing “twitch” gameplay in order to actually fight the beasts and bosses in the world.
Or, take Starcraft 2 which has been described as needing to “have the mind of a chess master and the fingers of a concert pianist”. Similarly tactical games like the Total War series try to blend accurate warfare techniques and weapons technologies into more broad based empire building strategy.
Or, you can just play twitch based games like Diablo 3, a first person shooter, or more casual free to play games like League of Legends or Dota 2 in order to relax at the end of the day. Although, the communities around some of these games I would definitely call into question and is actually what the article you linked to seems to be about. The anonymous factor of online gaming contributes hugely to the cretins that populate chat on these games, but I don’t think that is something unique to gaming.
All of which is to say: just like everything we humans do, just because taking a habit to excess is unhealthy doesn’t make the habit itself necessarily unhealthy (sometimes small doses can be beneficial, for instance some of the puzzle solving aspects of gaming have proved helpful). I think games are a great medium of entertainment, like movies or music, and am always baffled by your reaction to them.
Here’s an honest question.
What do you think you would have done with those 4-6 hours a day if personal computers and video games did not exist?
Because, unless your answer is ‘watch television’ or ‘masturbate,’ you would have been doing something better for you and/or more educational. And I think masturbation might win out for its health effects.
My point is it’s my time to do something that I enjoyed, its my downtime when I’m not on the treadmill trying to improve/educate myself. It didn’t stop me from going out and being productive or hanging out with friends on other days or at other times. Also, gaming now is a way more social activity than when I was growing up where you just played in your room. Now if I log on to a game I have a network of friends from nearby or across the US that I keep in touch with.
To answer your question though, in middle school before I got a Nintendo I used to read more and watch TV more (also had less friends), so of course I would be doing more socializing/reading/TV without those devices. I’ve had to make a conscious effort to trade time I spend browsing online for the longer attention span novel reading as it is something I’ve done less of since college.
As long as you are making those kind of decisions and allocating time to do more than gaming I don’t see that gaming is the problem. In fact it would just say more about me than the things I do if I am refusing to take up other activities or spend recreational time doing something else.
Agreed with nalbar. With my commute, I’m currently working 14 hour days. Please excuse me while I play 2-3 hours of Diablo 3 before bed after a long day…
Didn’t you just complete a grueling engineering degree? I don’t think I’m talking to you.
Well, perhaps it’s because I’m in a bubble of others who are “just like me!” but everyone I know who played video games as kids turned out the same as me: went to college, finished their degree, play video games. Most of the hardcore video gamers are the ones in CS and computer/electrical engineering anyway.
I’m not a big gamer anymore anyway; I certainly wasn’t in college (I turned to the news and politics for my new addiction in school). But Diablo games were a love of mine in middle/high school, and with the third installment out I’ve been playing that.
Then who exactly are you talking to?
And follow-up question: do you level the same comments at people who watch lots of TV?
I’m talking to an entire generation of mostly males who have barely seen the Sun or the spine of a book. If an enemy wanted to weaken us, they could hardly do better than Gears of War, internet porn, and the internet in general. And, yes, television did the same thing on a much smaller scale to the generations that came before, including mine. But you don’t level up playing television.
Boo, do you have some sort of reference to actual numbers about this “entire generation of mostly males who have barely seen the Sun”?
The general trends I have been seeing personally (as part of that generation, I’m 27) as well as reading about are that now most gamers are actually now a broader spectrum of the population, and gaming is not an exclusive activity that somehow prohibits you from having a social life and the like. I think most gamers don’t spend nearly as much time as you allude to in order for them to “barely see the sun”. I just want to know where you get this feeling that kids/grownups who play video games are withdrawing from society at large.
Call it direct experience. I know a lot of teenagers.
Personally, I don’t have the will-power or authority to do this but I think it is admirable.
As for screen time, which includes television, computers, iPhone apps, etc., the Pediatricians are begging parents to take control and not allow their kids to zombie out.
There are plenty of studies on the bad side effects of too much gaming. link.
As for time:
link
If you’re playing games and surfing the internet frivolously for nearly eight hours a day, and you’re getting 8 hours of sleep, and you’re in school for roughly 8 hours, then you did not have time to see much sunlight.
I get your point, and I think the dangers of having web phones and iPads is actually wayyyyy more time consuming of kids than a simply video game system or computer hooked up to a sedentary screen. When you can take it to the table with you and distract yourself from what is happening immediately around you no matter where you are then I really do get afraid that this next generation coming of age in the world of smart phones will seriously lack interpersonal skills. Of course, I’m sure our society in 15 years will not even have the same social mores when it comes to these things as we do now, so the population at large may move past me on that.
Frankly, the way communities interact 5 years from now is a total mystery to me. I don’t know a single person in my current apartment complex, but I have friends all across NYC (where I live), NJ, PA… etc. Your friends aren’t down the block anymore, they’re in touch via email/text and from there its only up to someone suggesting a place to meet to bring you together.
Eh, I’m in my mid-30s and started playing video games not long after I learned to walk. I still play them today, and they’ve been a constant in my life. If they didn’t prevent me from getting a good education and a good job, or, for that matter, from reading a huge number of books, why would they do that for guys ten years younger then myself? Like I said, I’ve been playing them my entire life, and they’re not hugely more compelling now than they were when I was a teenager.
I’ve never understood the appeal of video games outside of Ms. Pac-Man and Robotron. Berzerk was pretty good too.
No Missle Command, Defender, Space Invaders or Legend of Zelda? 😉
I preferred Galaga.
defender was pretty good. Legend Of Zelda was on Nintendo, I mean the actual games you could play in the arcade.
You know what else was a good game. “Star Wars”, the sit down version. So awesome.
I think it’s easy for older generations (like me) to be dismissive of online gaming and gaming culture. It’s now a bigger industry than Hollywood. The fact is that our culture has increasingly prioritized entertaining ourselves for a long time (“Here we are now / entertain us” – Kurt Cobain, 1991), and it takes a lot of forms; online gaming itself has a lot of forms. It’s a platform, not a genre; it’s like criticizing “books” or “web sites.”
I don’t think gaming as a platform is inherently any better or worse than celebrity gossip, zombie festivals, obsessive readers of mystery/crime novels, or people who spend hours searching out cute pictures of cats on the Internet. We might question why so many people want to spend so much energy in fantasy worlds rather than their own, but that’s not a gaming issue per se.
What does seem to be a gaming issue is that in some gaming cultures, especially the ones whose main selling points are violence, the misogyny, homophobia, and racism of the games and especially many of the players is horrible – and the resentment towards anybody who points any of it out truly discouraging. I take it for granted that there will be, or already is, a backlash to Ms. Hernandez’s piece. That’s really sad
Obsessive game play has made me happy. How about that?
I had to be obsessive to complete every challenge in this list for the game Modern Warfare 2:
http://www.darthscreencapture.com/sf/MW2_perks.jpg
It gave me a sense of accomplishment and pride since a lot of people don’t go to the trouble to accomplish every challenge.
The nuttiness she experienced online is no different than what goes on in both amateur and professional sports. Are you going to crack on that, too?
It’s great that you enjoyed playing your game. However, I cannot believe that your obsessive game playing didn’t come with a high cost. Only you can know whether you lost opportunities to increase your income, left chores undone, pissed off your spouse or kids, or otherwise misprioritized your time. I don’t know any people who have enough spare time to obsessively play a video game without it being detrimental to their lives, especially teenagers.
Boo, you keep answering folks who play games in this thread by saying, “Well, you’re educated and successful, so I don’t mean you.” The thing is you’re not really talking to anybody but perhaps an incredibly tiny percentage of people who play games, if that’s the pass/fail marker.
You sound a bit like Alan Simpson barking about “the Enema Man” here.
The girl saying “I raped you” in the multiplayer got a little too excited, but it’s really no different from dumb jocks bragging about how they “crushed x, brah.” Except that with gamers I suspect — like most of the Internets — they’re usually mindful of how over-the-top it sounds and mean it in jest, whereas jocks are oblivious to how stupid they sound and are just bragging.
I’ll tell you what. When I was a teenager, I played competitive tennis, soccer, lacrosse, baseball, and basketball. When I was a young adult, I played competitive football and basketball. It may have been a waste of time in some sense, but I got a lot of exercise, plenty of sunlight, and learned to be both a team player and an individual player. I also had to interact with other people in real life, including parents and referees and umpires and fans and reporters and sponsors, etc.
If I added up all the time I spent exercising and interacting with adults and compared it to a typical teenager today, the difference would be staggering.
FLOTUS on her book circuit this week kept dropping the statistic that kids today spend 7&1/2 hour a day in front of a screen. If you allocute some overlap with school as maybe 8 hours and sleep another 8, that means that means that the kids today spend next to no time outdoor or doing physical activities anymore.
IDK, but to my mind excessive gaming as a adult is meh, but many excessive gamers today, probably started as children who were themselves excessive gamers…right?
Right. And it’s not good for a developing brain to get no exercise, to have extremely limited interaction with strangers or adults, and to spend all day killing things in a virtual world.
You forget something. I forget the reasons, but I’ve heard a lot of schools are trying to do away with gym class, or for younger kids, recess. Doing away with gym is an obvious cost attempt. Getting rid of teachers. Sad!
You know what? I did both gaming and sports. I can throw a football accurately 50 to 60 yards and I can get through Doom faster than most of my fellow children of the ’90s. You know what all that means? Not a fuckin’ thing, that’s what.
They’re not mutually exclusive, and being into one doesn’t make you superior to someone who’s into the other.
If you need organized sports to learn how to work as a teammate instead of being a selfish prick, or to learn how to interact with adults, then gaming isn’t your problem. Your problem is that your parents are negligent scumbags.
So get off this Old Man Yells At Cloud bullshit.
Funny,
“old man yells at clouds” is exactly what I was thinking.
Old men have been calling out younger generations and their lower moral standards forever. Booman has added the jock versus nerd trope for more flavor, but it all adds up to the same thing,
“what I did/do has more value than what you did/do.”
nalbar
Yep. It’s Old Man Yells At Cloud plus High School Clique bullshit.
And its all the more amusing as Boo, the Blogger, utterly fails to grasp the social interaction inherent to gaming these days. It’s fine to pick one data point and run with it to get a rise out of people, as he did with this girl, but it’s painfully stupid from the standpoint of anybody engaged in an even kinda-sorta social-science-y way.
I’m assuming Boo was, once upon a time, a jock who got off ripping on the nerds. As I was neither a nerd nor a jock and got on fine with both — I was in bands and thus cooler than either group 🙂 — it’s quite offensive to me.
Add the Old Man Yells At Cloud element and it just becomes sad.
You can only play high school football for so long, but you can play the clarinet your whole damn life.
Yep, it is cooler.
nalbar
No, no, rock bands. Not high school band. I hung out with the “freaks” more than any other group, I think.
I played a lot of sports and was quite good at some of them. I was a winning pitcher who also played shortstop. I had a lifetime batting average over .500. I led my soccer team in scoring. I have three basketball championship trophies and was the starting point guard of my high school team for one year. I led all scorers in a New England JV lacrosse tournament. I played in tennis tournaments, although not too successfully. But I doubt anyone I went to high school with would call me a jock. Jock is an attitude. And I didn’t have it. I hung out with the musicians and stoners. Many of the members of Blues Traveler were close friends of mine. Their deceased bass player was one of my closest friends. The lead singer of the Spin Doctors was also a close friend. I won’t deny that the I was sometimes a dick to some of the nerds, but not in a jock type of way. And I deeply regret some of my behavior towards nerds in high school, as I recently discussed.
You regret it so much that you’re still, by your own admission, hostile and happy to continue stereotyping a group of them?
The idea that video games are a uniquely pernicious form of leisure time play seems not very well established.