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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1988 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 28, 2023

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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Is there any reason to not forgo video games completely? Are they in a category with gummy candy, smoking, and lottery tickets - no benefit of any kind beyond a dopamine release - or more like classic movies, dime novels, and social media - escapism with some degree of social and intellectual benefit?

I’ve enjoyed my two-week trial run of Lex Fridman’s maximally productive daily schedule but do find myself missing my offline career-based sports games. How sturdy is the argument that “not everything has to be productive”? Are books and television and film so far above video games in the usefulness ranking (after all, they can confer knowledge and social benefits, if not maximally condensed) that it’s a no-brainer to stop gaming completely? Or should sedentary leisure as a whole be relegated to “break in case of emergency” status, never part of a daily routine but “around” when more productive options are not available, or only to be used in the company of others?

I’ve wrestled with this for every day of these two weeks and still see benefits of escapism, while simultaneously seeing the futility of time spent achieving nothing in the real world - even if only for an hour or two.

EDIT: I coincidentally just discovered the "End Poem" of Minecraft; a poignant take on this discussion:

[teal] and the universe said I love you because you are love.

[green] And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.

[teal] You are the player.

[green] Wake up.

The division between "productive" and "unproductive" activities is a false dichotomy - or at least it should be:

Time and time again, when questioned or interviewed, one is asked about one’s hobbies. When the illustrated weeklies report on the life of one of those giants of the culture industry, they rarely forego the opportunity to report, with varying degrees of intimacy, on the hobbies of the person in question. I am shocked by the question when I come up against it. I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic, who is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But, as far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognised profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything to do with hobbies – preoccupations with which I had become mindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill the time – had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality. Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them. On the other hand I have been fortunate enough that my job, the production of philosophical and sociological works and university teaching, cannot be defined in terms of that strict opposition to free time, which is demanded by the current razor-sharp division of the two.

TL;DR is that if you do give up video games it shouldn't be because they're not "productive".

I don't see the relation between your first assertion and the quoted text. The quotation is referring to activities which have demonstrable benefits, and the author takes issue not with the idea that they're forms of leisure, but that they're unproductive forms of leisure, which they assume "hobby" to insinuate. Video games are absolutely unproductive in any real-world sense; music and reading are real-world activities in the actual, non-simulated world. The question is whether activities in the simulated world have any worth in our real one.

Reading can most certainly be simulated: consider smut, or cheap fantasy and fiction.

Same goes for music, the distinction between popular and highbrow musical productions has nothing to do with productivity.

What about "games" that straddle the line between real-world activites and simulated ones? Poker, sports gambling? People make a living off such "games". And pushing that idea further, what about the gamification of financial markets? Is there any productive purpose to the microsecond race to the bottom with high-frequency trading?

Let's put it this way: you seem to already agree that listening to music is something that can be "taken seriously" (or at least, you didn't challenge that claim). If listening to music can be taken seriously, then why can't playing video games be taken seriously?

You seem to claim that video games are "simulated" and music is not. But I don't know what this means. You sitting in your room and listening to Beethoven's 5th on your laptop is surely no more or less simulated than you sitting in your room and playing Minecraft on your laptop. You could get together with other people and play music on real instruments. But you can also get a bunch of people in a room and play video games together. Again, neither activity seems more or less simulated than the other.

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