Why I Stopped Playing Video Games
Rushkoff in an interview about A.D.D.:
Also, I’ve always been interested in gaming from the perspective of the playability of the world we’re living in. Most people don’t seem to recognize that we’re living in a constructed world, that a whole lot of the things we take for granted as the given circumstances of nature are actually very specific creations of people, of man. And they’re playable. The economy can be played with, the media can be played with. These are not laws of nature written in stone. These are very virtual worlds. We’re living on top of operating systems, however much they try to hide that from us. You know, central currency is an operating system. It was developed in the 1200-1300s by specific people with specific goals. Now, we go around thinking this economy is some natural thing, this economy is the way all economies work, and it’s not. Even this idea of free market — we don’t live in a free market. The extent to which this market is free is the extent to which we agree to play by the rules that were set in place by the people who invented the market that we’re living in right now. Gamers, it seemed to me, especially good gamers, are people who have the ability to see beneath the rules to the actual ‘who wrote this game’ and ‘what do they want this game to actually do.’ How is this game rigged, and who rigged it, and why?
From Forbes’s Susannah Breslin, the freelance guru and Gen-X Big Sister to all the real life A.D.D. new media troublemakers panning for gold online:
TIP #3: Act like a child.
Or maybe it’s that when you start doing things that are really easy for you to do, you become successful. For example, my grandfather used to say, when I was a kid, that I should write Hallmark cards. In broader terms, he was talking about being a copywriter. And I make far, far more money now as a copywriter than I do at any other job I have as a professional hustler.
You know why? Because it’s really easy for me to be a really good copywriter. It’s so easy, it’s laughable. At the same time, writing blog posts, finishing novels, and generating traffic for sites populated with content I did not create is harder.
I read some advice recently that said you should remember whatever you did when you were a kid, and do that when you’re a grownup. Because, more often than not, that thing, for you, is play. And play is when you have the most fun.
Imagine if you could get paid to play.
“Why I Stopped Playing Video Games”
I had to stop.
I was just about to take out a German machine gun in Call of Duty, and I got a cramp in my hand.
…I guess I shouldn’t continue on the big glass tower I’m building in minecraft right now either…
No, they’re time wasters. Any benefit is either purely imaginary or could be obtained with a little actual application and focus rather than thousands of hours of ‘game play’. The word that covers the whole ‘reality’ of gaming is “decadence”: pampered infantilism.
The bare essence of adulthood is time managment. Once you have your bills paid off and your affairs in order you are free and clear to pass your free time however you like.
I got relieved of the disire to act like an adult when I reached adulthood and realized that aside from the lack of upper managment on your daily living it’s boring.
So I work, then I pay bills, then I play. It may be reading, or chilling with friends or it may (gee willikers!) double-tagging Chimera in Resistance 3.
All things in their proper places. That is the essence of adulthood and it does not require the elimination of so-called “decadent” hobbies. Merely placing them in their proper places.
Some adults walk around looking like they have a stick in their backsides while others *do what needs to be done* then LIVE and love and play because life is too short to put it in a box for later.
Yes! I don’t play often, but after a particularly frustrating day I will go to the gym then mow down Nazi’s, zombies, or aliens for a while. I can think of less healthy outlets for frustrations.
Sometimes I just feel like mowing down bad guys with a khopesh in each hand, sometimes I want to heal the rest of the group so they can do the dirty work, and sometimes I enjoy making zombies dissolve all around me just by casting a single spell. (Our all-girl guild is called “Chixx Flay” of course). It relieves a lot of tension so that I’m less likely to behead the lovely ladies at church, in real life.
Yeah, playing video games is none too productive, I reckon.
Kinda like holding forth on the internet.
All hobbies are time wasters. So are all games, whether physical or virtual. All of them are only possible in a wealthy culture with plenty of leisure time. The reason video games are still considered kid’s stuff is their relative novelty. It always amuses me when somebody no more than a decade older than I am can’t believe anybody would play video games in their 40s, but think nothing of whiling away 5 hours in front of the television at night. TV is simply more socially acceptable to the Baby Boomers since they grew up on it, and video games are more socially acceptable to Gen-Xers because we grew up on them. Whether they waste time or not is irrelevant. Even reading great novels is a waste of time in the strictest sense, because the simple fact is that the little things we learn from Jane Austen or Charles Dickens can be had in other ways. It’s possible to learn about human nature in countless ways, including interactive video games. Reading novels was the socially acceptable way for better than a century, hence it seems like it always was, but Austen herself wrote about how novels were considered trash in her day. When TV was new, it was derided, and now is again, because it’s still geared towards the infantile wing of the Baby Boom generation who want remain teenagers forever. Movies are in the same boat; it’s rare to see a movie with a storyline that fits with my generation instead of the endless whines of BB-ever-babies.
There are benefits to every leisure activity. They tend to be minor in every way, but they exist. If nothing else, relaxing after a busy workday has an intrinsic benefit, whether one plays golf, watches TV, or joins friends on World of Warcraft. Declaring otherwise is an obvious sign of the hardening of the synapses, otherwise known as narrowing the mind.
I play Angry Birds only. Yes, I know, I know, green pigs are a philosophical metaphor for everything that’s wrong in the universe, from ecologists to crony capitalism, to robbery to the cultural war against family values.
As for the birds.. they are showing us the only way to stop this madness: precision hits, intelligence-driven ops and demolitions.
Plus, if I get a cramp in my finger, I have others to play
In my house we had that stupid WII computer games. The kids got the games, played with them for about a year, and are now back to reading books. Of all things, reading books no less! Probably because our house is filled with books and NOT more computer games. Now they are steadily reading away as well as going on the Internet to communicate with friends. And the WII is sitting on a shelf gathering dust. I think we’ve reached a happy balance between computers and books here, and I’m glad.
Not to burst your bubble but one can easily do both. I enjoy videogames because they last longer than books. I am still playing Dead Island and it was released last year.
I killed 11 books in a single week and again the next.
I just ordered 2 more and have shelves stuffed with games, CDs and books because I love them all.
Ditto. I’m working on GKC’s “Everlasting Man” and “Moby Dick” lately too. Several family members learned how to play canasta through a computer game and now we all play with real cards sometimes. Moderation is the key. Wii Fit is nice in the winter when it’s too cold and rainy for outdoors.
I don’t understand your point. You’ve traded obsessive behavior in one virtual world, video games, for obsessive behavior in another virtual world, blogging. Both may, or may not, touch tangentially the real world but neither of them are real. In fact, it appears that you know video games are fantasy but view blogging as a “crusade for the truth” on your mission to change the world but here’s the thing – people who become journalists often say they do so “to make a difference, to change the world” but journalists simply report about the people who actually are making a difference and changing the world. Journalists want to “change the world” without having to do the hard work involved in changing the world, they want the glory without all the risk, and that’s probably a far greater waste of time, and tuition money, than spending a few hours killing space aliens.
Unfortunately, large segments of the media all too often seek to become rather than to report the news objectively. Look at the recent coverage — largely without adequately verified or as yet verifiable facts but with ample speculation — about the Treyvor Martin situation in Florida. “Reporting” of that sort has stimulated not only demands for vigilante action against Mr. Zimmerman but (and possibly of greater importance to the media) more media coverage of the same type.
If the media were more involved in reporting actual news with reasonable objectivity, rather than in providing opinion disguised as news, your point might be better taken.
On the other hand, most blogs that I read are undisguised opinion pieces, with little claim to presenting their own well investigated news. To the extent that they deal with reportage, the focus usually is on commenting about it.
I don’t think there’s a problem if the opinion piece is “undisguised”. It’s when ABC pretends to be honest but blurs the Zimmerman video that it’s a problem.
I’m not a journalist. That’s the source of your confusion. This article isn’t a piece of journalism. If you want journalism read my fellow PJ Media editor Bridget Johnson.
Pray tell, what would MMORPG’s say to us?
I’m not sure we’re not still thinking like a liberal. The notion that important aspects of the world we live in have been planned, designed, implemented, and maintained by certain people for clearly-defined purposes seems to be the conceit of the age. Maybe video games give some of us the false impression that the human world has been “authored.” But the people who think they are programming reality are in fact programmed by reality themselves. They are not separate from reality, nor do they understand it, nor can they control it. The downside is, nobody knows what’s going on and nobody’s in charge. This is also the upside.
For the past two-thousand years, the process of “decoding the biases” in a “programmed world” as you describe in your article was called “thinking.” One way that it was taught to children was by having them hear or read things called “poems,” (the Iliad or the Psalms, for instance), but after the spread of writing, it was taught to children by having them read a variety of texts, classified as poems, novels, etc.
The advantage of the written forms, as opposed to the merely visual as in video games, is that the thinking of the characters in the stories or other forms of presentation can be made evident. Insofar as a graphic novel makes the thoughts of the characters evident, it has an advantage over the video game.
This is the most important comment here IMO. In video games, you have the rules, the ideas, the cause-effect implicated. You have to “live” (play, actually) with them without making them explicit. Instead, explicit ideas are required to “decode”, connect, find cause-effect relationships, etc and actually learn to live better.
So, if I got this right, the graphic novel would have an advantage over the video in this possibility. Books use written language, which is based in concepts that are the actual summations of phenomena/perceptions; while video games are mostly based on the phenomena/perceptions.
If someone gets inspiration from them, fine. Most people in the world seem to know (“dekh”) the same things without ever playing a videogame in their entire life.
I stopped after Pong. Pong was the last game you could play and still carry on a conversation over a beer. Hell, they even built the game into bar tables to do so.
EVERY game since then has been antisocial.
I did however have a good career building computer games. Time much better spent than playing them.
Even the most escapist of games is played in a virtual reality
crafted in and based on real life; The experience will be of use
when the players are confronted with the collapse of the economy
and the subsequent Hard Times.
I used to be a great gamer… then I took an arrow to the knee.
Skyrim rules!
How do you manage to misspell “meme”?
/facepalm
Maybe he or she is just a really bad mime.
I tried to figure out what was about. And then I took an arrow in the knee.
I think I have all the game platforms ever made and hundreds of games. My collection also includes about 3000 anime DVDs. It is part of my job however in game designing (at least that’s the pretext for my wife – What you bought ANOTHER game?).
The idea that a Designer In Charge made the world and we just need to decode the Secret Rules? Rather an old idea, actually. Ancient, in fact.
I’ve never played a video game in my life. I have a door.
Speaking as a Gen Y-er and casual gamer, I have to say that conflating videogames and reality is a really, really bad idea.
See, games are structured differently from reality. Cause and effect are still in play, but most games need to make *narrative* sense in a way that reality doesn’t. This is true of all fiction. When I play Skyrim (not gonna bother explaining it here) my character is very much at the center of his reality. Whether the Empire of Tamriel is further fractured, or the Stormcloak rebellion is crushed is pretty much his call. He can revive an ancient order of assassins, or destroy them. The only check on his power is Bethesda and its programmers themselves, but even they are trying to sell a product, and so must remain responsive to mine and others wishes.
Life doesn’t work like that. I’m not going to succeed just because I’m the hero. If I choose to exploit “glitches” in my life, I might contribute to breaking the whole system, and I won’t just be able to go out and buy a new one. Don’t you conservatives still get all up in arms about welfare fraud, and other exploitation?
Society is construct, like a game, but unlike a game it may very well be inevitable in its existence. Humans evolved to be social creatures. We all have the same basic reactions to basic stimuli. I know some people like to refer to our technology as “cheat codes”, but even our shiniest toys are beholden to mindless forces totally beyond our control. We can’t reprogram the rules of the universe, we can only adapt to them.
I like playing videogames because they have no purpose beyond entertainment. Everyone needs some respite from reality, one way or another, and my favorite pastime is examining stories. Not all games tell a complicated story; some just involve pretty lights and funny noises. But all of them rely on what Sir Terry Pratchett calls “narrative causality”, a construct that does not exist in the real world. My fascination, therefor, is ultimately grounded in my interest in the way people choose to pretend the world can conform to a set of tropes. And right now, I’m both interested and disturbed by the fact that so many people don’t know where the dividing line between fiction and reality is.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go pretend to be an elf for half an hour, and then get back to important things.
“Speaking as a Gen Y-er and casual gamer, I have to say that conflating videogames and reality is a really, really bad idea.”
Please define “reality.”
I sympathize with Robert Anton Wilson’s definition: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1561840807/pjmedia-20
Anything that doesn’t look like Skyrim and Mass Effect 3.
That was easy.
Or Elders Scrolls in general, judging by poster’s handle.
What ever happened to the good old fashioned board games? (Monopoly,Risk, Stratego)
I adore Monopoly. Every Christmas we have family monopoly marathons. Maybe Lifestyle should do a piece on Monopoly… Strategy tips, maybe? Or a ranking of best board games… Hmm…
Google “board game geek” before you start that article, if you haven’t already.
You will be amazed.
They went the way of silent films. No, but seriously. I still play them from time to time. I have fond childhood memories of going over to my grandparents house as a child and my grandfather was always up for a game of Dogfight, a great board game about WWI aeriel combat. Risk, Stretego, and later things Axis and Allies. Monopoly was a family New Years favorite. Today the fam gets together and we play Apples to Apples and always have a great time.
You have to have siblings (or neighbor children whose time isn’t “programmed” from school to bedtime 7 days a week) to play board games.
People became bored with them. Get it, get it!
ragequitting on a mp videogame is easier to clean up than the monopoly board
it’s why we quit, mostly, playing board games. One weak link ends the game. having small children, or one add child, is an always weak link. he finds video-games mesmerizing, like a rat with a push-pedal jolting his brain. so him and spouse play monopoly online, for hours, rather than the 35 minutes we all awkwardly play until he up-ends the board and has a screaming fit.
Did you say kindergarten in 1990? I was working on 3D projects with a program called Calagari in 1990 on my Amiga 500. Also, playing the heck out of Sid Meir’s Pirates. How old I feel all of the sudden. Video games are like any other form of entertainment. I see it as no worse than watching TV. No worse than reading Twilight. My wife doesn’t play video games, but she watches shows that I think are puerile, but she enjoys them, so let her be, so long as she extends me the same courtesy. I find, from a fiction aspect, many video games to be much better than television, movies, and some books for exploring deeper concepts. Not that they are weighty philosophy, but neither are the former.
Frankly, if I worried about anything I wasted time on, it would be how much time I spend paying attention to politics, which is far worse for my health than time spent saving the galaxy from mechanical eldritch abominations. It doesn’t effect my ability to go to work, make a living, or spend time with my family.
Yes, I don’t watch TV; MMORPGs are less mind-numbing.
Give me a choice between watching Idol finale or playing Neverwinter / Hellgate:London.
Not even a contest.
I had a ’57 Plymouth with the least inspired model name of all time; Plaza.It matched the car well.
I got married with kids. After doing everything that needs to be done, any gaming time comes out of sleep – and I’m not getting enough of that!
Like books and films, video ghames tell stories. The difference with video games is that I can pick the plotline, I can say what the character does and where he goes and I can choose how it ends and when.
So, a person sitting in a corner reading abook while others watch a football game isn’t anti-social, but the gamer, who is most likely online with thousands of other gamers is anti-social.
I think people who opmplain about video games being “anti-social” are just mad because the attention isn’t being paid to THEM instead.
Indeed. Gaming is more social now than ever, so much so that I pine for the good old days when multiplayer was played WITHOUT chat capability. When I was playing a multiplayer round of Mass Effect 3 I was privy to a kid’s crisis about why he couldn’t sleep around with girls like his roommate or something. All I know is that I was damned irritated by the end the session that I decided to stop playing and go to bed with my wife.
Wife, you say? Yeah, I managed to get one of those and been with her for nine years. I’m a pretty sociable guy and can make friends very quickly. Sometimes with the wrong sex, but I swear I don’t touch them! Gamers get a bum rap because gaming gets a bum rap. I wish people will leave the kids alone: They’ll be alright.
I’ll steal a line from Kathy Shaidle and say playing video games is only bad if it interferes with showing up to riot (can we riot AFTER the workday is over?)
But if you don’t pay young conservatives time off to riot, you can’t complain when they sink into video games. When Focus on the Family can tell stories about how this man and his wife met at one of their protests, I’ll know socons are doing something right.
If something is done when all of the work is done and there is no impact on responsibilities, I say go for it. Good games, to me, are more fun because instead of watching some intense action thriller passively…I am active in it. It’s fun.
I play video games as a way of decompressing. I also read and study a lot, mostly history and economics, but other things as well. When you see bad phases of history beginning to repeat and the corruption and madness of political leaders the world over and the social trends they both create and benefit from, well, it helps to have something for the mind to focus on for a while.
you might want to consider some of gary will’s books. he covers what happened when well-born young people opted out of their current reality, and tried to struggle forth into the light…about 2000 years ago. Roman citizens would marry, then rather than consummate their union, they would found monasteries and convents. They would have control of their patrimony, without buying into the fairly brutal materialist regime. As well, the Alexandrian refugees- monks in the desert- would retreat from as much of the material world as possible, and then struggle onward into illumination. they didn’t read the bible as a novel- they’d get, like, one verse, and struggle on that until they fully comprehended it- which could be years. They were quite…..garry wills says it was the equivalent of astronauts in our day- they were so daring, dashing and confident as they strove for the sun.
there are books about cathedrals, and their builders. it’s fairly evident that the spiritual and intellectual ferment there was likewise- an absolute catapulting into as much reality as they could bear. Cathedrals are what remains of their flight patterns.
Some of the early martyrs were young people with, at best, a fraction of one gospel- a bit of a sermon- hidden in trees, they’d go traipsing into the woods, or mountains, to find the samizdat. They’d be found, and then tortured into confessing. And yet they still took this chance.
These were people who had been steeped in greek philosophy, and yet they found this the wildest freedom they’d ever seen.
It’s easier reading this way, than thinking it’s a boring hour on sunday morning where a man in dress up clothes goes “blah blah blah behave behave behave “- asking what the change was, that was so startling.
it helps to know that one is limited and cosseted, for humbleness. Ask yourself if you’d be a samisdat writer’s friend in the USSR. answer honestly.
There are video games that have the profundity of the best in any other media.
There are video games that are as lame as the worst of any other media.
I do believe that video games are less — much less — of a time waster than television, and maybe just a little bit — and a teeny little bit — more of a time waster than the better novels.
Some games are anti-social, but so many online ones are incredibly social. Team-based shooters, MMOs that require teamwork of up to 50 people at a time, etc. To get a tough task done requires discipline and being able to either lead, follow, or both. Things like that develop the skills of working well with others. Heck, the military has used shooter games to practice squad combat situations.
What are some common alternatives to such social interaction? Getting together with five other people and drinking beer and watching football on Sunday for eight hours? Going to a bar and drinking until it closes?
Things like that amuse me especially when someone calls someone a nerd for playing video games and then starts talking about their fantasy football league that they spend hours every week playing and learning all the stats for.