The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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I have a 7 year old. He's never played a video game outside of a DIY version of online chess against me.
I notice a lot of kids play Minecraft. I've never played it. This is a little odd since the entire reason I have a career is because I wanted to get into game development and learned to program C.
I would like to expose him to video games since I believe they have upside, but I'm pretty worried modern games are crack and educational benefits or whatever are oversold and not real.
He has an excellent attention span right now and we play a lot of card (MTG) and board games (Catan Jr) and I don't want to ruin that. Other families say once their kids play video games they stop caring about all of that other stuff and see their attention spans go to shit.
We homeschool him so he's not exactly surrounded by other kids trying to relate to him re: games but it's only a matter of time.
Don't.
Treat video games as you would sugary drinks, staying up past midnight, sleeping until mid morning. Delay the acceptance of these habits as long as possible, until the likelihood of them becoming habits dwindles and a certain ability to self-regulate has developed. The trade-off is simply not worth it.
I never played video games growing up (well we didn't have them, although I played Adventure and Pong on my friend's Atari), nor even was I allowed in principle to buy comic books, which were seen as brain rotting by my parents. By the time I could buy them on my own I just wasn't that interested.
Others may disagree. My sons now are fixed to their phones and often playing some game which, because of its design, not only pulls in their attention but cannot be, as in the old days, simply paused, without suffering some in-game loss. Predictable tension occasionally ensues.
In any case the toothpaste will make its way out of the tube, it's only a matter of time. In Japan I'd never homeschool as the socialization aspect of school is vital to functioning in society, but I am no longer very savvy how anything works in the US.
Seconded. I would no more introduce a child to gaming than I would introduce them to porn, or gambling, or alcohol. Or social media, for that matter.
Video games are fundamentally synthetic work, presenting you with fake skills to master and providing you with illusory rewards. They are explicitly designed to be much more fun and addictive than any real work could possibly be. And maybe this would be fine if we lived in a post-scarcity world where there was no real work to be done, or if at the very least if you were already financially independent and romantically successful and there was nothing left for you to do but enjoy life. Anything short of that and video games become a permanent drain on your ability and willingness to get things done; "devourers of life’s potential" as jimrandomh called them.
Any purported educational benefits of video games are bogus. All research on transfer on learning is that it doesn't exist. You don't get good at X by doing completely different activity Y that arguably has some kind of underlying similarity to X; you get good at X by doing X and by training under somebody who is better than you at X.
I game, but I would have been better off if I had never been introduced to the hobby. At most, some of the very best video games I have played (Metal Gear Solid, Fire Emblem, Days of Ruin, Cave Story, Iji, etc.) have provided approximately the same level of enjoyment, emotional release, and intellectual stimulation as a great movie or a good novel, except that they took much longer to do so (your average video game takes 20+ hours to beat, compared to 2 hours for a film and however fast you can read a book). At worst, games like Tetris and Civilization IV have consumed countless hours of my life through highly-optimized dopamine loops with nothing to show for it.
A quote below from your article linked in the above line.
Solid points.
That all said, switching gears to adult stuff.
We're in adult entertainment territory here and I suppose I would disagree with this. Steam tells me I've played Cyberpunk 2077 for about 25 hours or so and I'd say I've enjoyed it a lot more than any movie. Maybe even more than 12x ~2 hour movies, though the median movie is bad.
The art direction in Cyberpunk is top notch and often inspiring and while some of the storylines are camp, some of them are really thought provoking and interesting. It's very good interactive sci-fi and I don't want it to end, though I'm near the end of the expansion pack now.
If I were playing video games 10 hours a week constantly chasing that high I might reconsider the category. But Cyberpunk is like an hour or two every few weeks right now. Seems fine.
Yeah I hear this. I've only played like 20 hours of the first or maybe second Civilization in my life, when I was a kid, and it taught me a bunch, but I could see how if this grew to 1000 hours between all of the sequels I'd feel like they were a loss.
I suppose in my ideal society I would have access to video games but most people who seem to ruin their lives with them would not.
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Note that Minecraft is also in this category; the fact that it's like this but without any of the optimization/active engagement in the gameplay makes me feel like I'm waking up from the Matrix. I really don't understand why people like this game at all (much less why the modding community exists, to say nothing about its size), though admittedly it's much easier to play with friends who don't have that... anxiety? about it.
Terraria puts more work into being actively entertaining to play and less intrinsically complicated, and it was always the better game.
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