College and Gaming

It is funny that if someone in an office on a Monday morning says they spent the weekend binge watching the entirety of seasons 428 of their favourite show in one or two sittings on a box set or netflix this is considered somewhat ok - but someone who spent a few hours gaming not so much.

It is also funny to see it being made out to by solely a guy thing. More and more of the fairer sex are into gaming these days. My own girlfriends would be into gaming on occasion as much as I would. Some games are even so well made the girls would be happy just to watch me play them like watching any TV or Movie.

I am a very infrequent gamer myself. But when I do invest in a game I then invest myself completely in it. I will play it for hours at a time until completion on one binge and I will complete it to 100% if possible. Every side mission and every bit of storyline.

I play one or perhaps two games a year so it almost never happens. But I will give it hours when I do. The Witcher series for example probably got 200 hours of my life. I somewhat expect the upcoming Cyberpunk game will take a fair chunk too.

The phrase "Computer Game" however is very misleading. It encompasses too much. Some games are mindless tripe while others are true works of actual art. Investing 200 hours in a single game for me depends mightily on the game. With a decent work of art 200 hours is fine. While with another game even 200 seconds would be an egregious and unforgivable waste of my time. Something like Minecraft will never get 5 minutes of my attention. And even 5 minutes is generous.

FTA69 wrote: »

My experience with people playing that sh*te for hours is that they’re far from social and do unfortunately often correspond to the idea of withdrawn loners cooped up in their rooms.

There is a large element of what is called "Selection Bias" there though. It happens with many things. Not just computer games. Take drugs for example. Many people have certain negative stereotypes of what people who take drugs are like.

The reason for this is very simple. The people who play a lot of games or take a lot of drugs - but not to the detriment of the rest of their lives - we simply do not notice.

We only _notice_ the ones who are problematic and so our stereotypes are only fed by the noticeable extremes. The rest - even those who play a lot - simply do not register with you so do not feed into your stereotypes.

I do not see the problem you do with defining it as a hobby. Unless you are using a dictionary very very different from the ones I own - the word hobby covers it perfectly. It is certainly no more or less a hobby that watching television or watching grown men on television playing ball games. Nor are computer games more or less infantile than grown men playing ball games or watching other grown men play ball games rather than do so yourself.

FTA69 wrote: »

I dunno, seems to me part of a wider infantilisation of people I see going on.

Some of that goes on but not as much as I think people imagine. Actually quite often the opposite is happening as things aimed at a younger audience are so often done in a mature way that does not patronise or infantilise that audience - or treat them as children - that it naturally makes it accessible to adults too.

For example a whole swath of young adult fiction - fiction aimed at children or teens - is very accessible to adults. Not because the adults are being made into infants. But because the material aimed at children respects it's audience and does not talk down to them. I would much rather read young adult fiction from John Green - or something like the "Gone" series than many works supposedly written for and targetted at adults.

It comes down for me not to the target market of any particular product service or media - but to how the producer treats that target audience in their work. And this can leave something aimed at tiny children accessible to adults - while leaving things targetted at adults so dumb and patronising I would not even insult a child with it.

FTA69 wrote: »

banging away on computer games for hours upon hours a week isn’t healthy by any means.

Pursuing _any_ hobby too much especially to the detriment of other areas of your life is not healthy. There is no reason to single computer games out for this. You can over do any hobby to the point of it becoming unhealthy. You can over do reading. You can over do collecting. You can over do the gym. You can over do drinking. And so on.

Parabellum9 wrote: »

And I suppose it would be more acceptable to you if they took the day off to go shopping for new shirts and slacks, then home to guffaw at the paper while listening to liveline? Mind your own business what people do in their own time, I'm pretty sure your hobbies would have some people rolling their eyes as well.

I have friends who take the week off work for Cheltenham and go to the pub all day. That to me is absolute madness.

ranto_boy wrote: »

I think to be comparable to what I said, your friends would have to take time off to watch Cheltenham from twenty years ago. Ones they remember well. Races that they could easily if they wanted to, watch for free on Youtube. But maybe the racing post is selling HD versions of the races. And you'd fork over 80 quid for them.

Yeah taking a day for that particular game is a bit of a head scratcher considering its already out on older systems.

I have once called in sick when a new game came out so I'm clearly biased in this debate.