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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   5620 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 7, 2025

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They are explicitly designed to be much more fun and addictive.

A quote below from your article linked in the above line.

I leave you with a final argument from fictional evidence: Simon Funk’s online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens - not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children. Perhaps the demographic collapse of advanced societies happens because the market supplies ever-more-tempting alternatives to having children, while the attractiveness of changing diapers remains constant over time. Where are the advertising billboards that say “BREED”? Who will pay professional image consultants to make arguing with sullen teenagers seem more alluring than a vacation in Tahiti?

“In the end,” Simon Funk wrote, “the human species was simply marketed out of existence.”

Solid points.

That all said, switching gears to adult stuff.

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.

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.

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.

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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