Serious Gaming: Questioning the value of it as a pastime

[Vivi-Gamer]

Hello,

I am not sure if this is the correct place for this but I didn't think the topic was suited to just a casual gaming section.

I have played games for the majority of my life, ever since the NES I have always found them an enjoyable pastime. However, I am often very critical in spending time playing video games. Currently I am in a stage in my life where not much is happening and I don't have much to do in my actual life as it were. So I will then often go to my PS3 and play something for the majority of the day.

I've never been a competitive gamer, I am not one to aim for high scores - Although I do admit that I do go trophy hunting a lot. I have always told myself that I play games for the same form of entertainment as watching a film. Most of my favourite games are ones which have a heavily striking written narrative and feature characters which have struck a chord with me. However, I question what I am really benefiting from these games. I like to think that in experiencing these stories that they take some toll on how I live my life, but I question if they really do. I suppose that I am questioning here is if my justification of playing games for storytelling is really justified?

I mean, sometimes I will play a game for a narrative which is engaging, but it will not effect me at all, despite being entertaining. But I spend a lot of time playing games and I guess I am now just wondering is this a fair way to spend my time? Am I really benefiting from it? And if I am not, if the media is not giving me something to reflect over then is mild entertainment without any value acceptable? I sort of feel that if I am playing games to just elevate my emotions for the day then how am I any different from an alcoholic or someone abusing substances - in principle I mean, in applying myself to an addiction to elevate my feelings alone.

I just look back on the last few years of my life and feel I haven't really accomplished anything. This is due to a lot of circumstances which I feel are chaining my actually life this moment. I finished university which was an unfulfilling experience and since then I've just been lingering about. Many of the things I have felt passionate about have collapsed. I studied media at university, but since the rise of the internet and Youtube it seems like anyone can do what I do with a couple of mates, a camcorder and a Youtube account. Which sort of makes me feel everything I aimed for has been devalued. I would often write scripts and draw concept art for ideas, but these days I cannot even focus on anything like that either. If I were to start drawing now, I would be okay for 20 minutes or so and then the feeling of hopelessness will arise in how all this work is leading to nothing - Which has been my experience of my last two projects, where they just collapsed in post production.

So these days, my only real joy in life is playing games. Passing the time, which I cannot seem to apply myself to anyway. While playing games I feel fine and I can get easily immersed. But then when the day draws to a close and I reflect upon what I have done I feel a tremendous amount of shame and disappointment. I feel I may have become dependent on them to pass the time, to avoid the life I lead in which I am not satisfied with. I don't want to just be playing games all the time and not benefiting from them, I want to lead a life which flourishes from the inspiration they give me (Which they have, Final Fantasy being the most prominent). However, I know at this moment in time I feel very stuck in my life personally due to the way society is and the many circumstances which chain me.

Has anyone else ever had thoughts about their gaming habits? In questioning the value of it and if it is a practical or efficient way to spend time? I'm sorry to write on about a lot of personal situations, but I wanted to apply some context to the discussion which I hope I have presented to a coherent state. Thank you for your time.

 

[Shu]

Well let's do a comparison and then I'll get back to your problem. There have been a lot of addictive gamer studies going back all the way to the 80s in fact. You had your atari and arcade gamers who would literally toss their daily/weekly food allowance in a machine/buy a game or console and would play for hours. Gamers would meet up and best each other in games like donkey kong, centipede, ms pac man and other similar classics. They would waste their days away and even lose families over it just to be the top gamer.

Gaming can be worse than meth for some, depending on the person's addictive personality. Some are just bored and others literally need the gaming to fill their days to make it feel worth while. I've seen people who literally have played WoW or Call of Duty or some other addictive game be pulled off their game and literally go into a chemical induced depression. Their chemical imbalance occurs due to chemicals known as dopamine and glutamate. Every time they play the highly addictive games the higher the threshold of these chemicals are needed.

Now this may not be centered towards you, but let me tell you, some time you need to break away from it all and take a step back. Just like an alcoholic, you don't really know how addicted you were until you are fully sober. You no longer "need" something to get rid of a headache or a feeling.

This may take a while to be trained, but trust me, I was an addictive gamer at one point coming out of high school. I played Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, Team Fortress Classic (professionally), Star Craft expansion, Diablo 2 Xpac, Dark Age of Camelot, and a lot of other addictive games. These were all very HIGHLY addictive games.

I had to take my focus off gaming and actually do well in college. I had all this freedom and only when gaming did my grades decline. It ultimately lead to another addiction, alcoholism.

What I found out was I was an extremely bored individual. I didn't do drugs, I just needed to interact daily with life. My only outlets were sports, gaming, and some stupid relationships I should have never gotten myself into. My problem was I didn't find something I could "quiet" my mind with. Gaming helped that due to my entire brain was focused on it.

I couldn't just sit alone in peace with my mind, due to how many thoughts I thought of constantly. It was as if I had ADHD due to the amount of gaming I had riddled through and the amount of "life" problems were surrounding me daily.

So what happened? Well I'll be honest, a lot happened. I went to college and drank a lot right away. Even if I had drank since the age of 14, the amount of drinking was stupid at the age of 18. Yes, great, I was always surrounded by people, but I had a hole growing inside me that I was unable to fill. My first relationship in college was rough due to a few things happened in my life, but what ultimately happened is I needed to really focus on myself to find out how to break away from any type of addiction.

I took a bit of time for myself. I started listening to a lot of music (again) and started reading again. I needed stories I could identify with. I then went to forums/chat rooms that people identified in some of the same stories. (also started playing FF12, what brought me here) In reading I went from anywhere from Sci Fi to Fiction to Non Fiction. I started reading Russian Poetry / Short stories, which are sad let me tell you.

I started digging into the internet way hard for knowledge. This was the first time I took knowledge seriously. I started learning computer languages left and right. I started learning actual languages in addition to my primary language as well. I got a job at a software company as an intern quality assurance tester. From here I started doing research on macros and automated testing.

I picked up soccer again (age 22). I started dating and have a good group of friends these days.

Your thing is your thing. You need to invest time in yourself. Find what you like aside from gaming, trust me, you aren't a one trick pony. You would be surprised what you can do and what you are good at. If you like media, well heck, there is plenty to do in media as you know. This is the youtube generation, make yourself.

Where to start? Ask some folks here, they can give you a lot of direction.

 

[Galadín]

Life is to enjoyed not endured. If you are dissatisfied maybe look at the things that make you happy. If that thing is gaming then by all means invest some time in it (everyone needs to have a little "me time"). After that perhaps you could identify what it is about gaming that you really enjoy. It sounds to me that it is the stories and characters that really grab your attention, so maybe these are things you may enjoy doing yourself! Writing your own stories and/or creating your own scenarios and characters might be a thing for you. At the end of the day, you will have something tangible to look back on with satisfaction and say "look at what I've accomplished!".

That's my two cents for the price of one!

 

[SaShman]

I'd say I started to get tired with gaming at a fairly young age. By the time I finished high school I was just playing games mostly for the story. I'd spend about a week going through a game then I wouldn't play games intently for a month or two and move on to the next. By the time I was 19, I figured that there were other ways to have fun that I viewed as more productive than gaming. I still occasionally played games, but they were mostly single player games that I'd rush through for the story. I simply wasn't interested in games with no discernible end to them.

In your case, I'd suggest taking a step back and examining what you are actually getting out of gaming. You mentioned something about how you used to get inspiration from them which is a positive. But it's also important to consider how you apply this inspiration. If you are just playing as a way to pass the time then maybe you could consider investing your time in something more productive. I'm sure there are plenty of other ways you could be spending your time which you may find more productive and enjoyable than gaming.

 

[AuronX]

This thread is getting a little old at this point, but I imagine the topic is still relevant to a lot of people out there. Like Shu, let me start out with a little story and then come back to the real point of the topic.

For me, I'd say I've come to view videogames a bit differently over the last several years. I've always played them--I still remember the DOS commands to launch Lemmings 2, which I learned when I was only 4. But games weren't serious business to me until I hit my mid-teens. I can't really say what game first was serious to me in the sense that I played it on a schedule. Part of it is that early on I didn't play very serious games. Logic games, racers, shooters--they kept me engaged but ultimately didn't require a lot of emotional investment.

I think when things really changed was back a few years ago when there was a certain relationship I was interested in pursuing. I figured I'd have to start working more hours and spending my free time on another person, so I intended to cut videogames from my life. I was playing FFVI at the time, and I thought I'd finish it up and that would be the last game I really invested myself in.

But then that relationship completely and utterly fell through, under some crazy and kinda emotional circumstances. Seriously, it could be a movie.

Since I had been working in that sole direction for a while, I felt pretty directionless (again--far from the first time). I had a lot of pain and nowhere to go and nothing to do. And then it occurred to me that I had a lot of money saved up that I didn't really have any specific purpose for anymore. So I bought a PS3. And I started playing games again--seriously, this time. It wasn't merely a form of entertainment to me. At first it was a form of emotional release, or maybe control--I don't know for sure, I was just confused and conflicted, and I found that investing myself in stories helped. But as time went by, it gradually became less and less about self-support and more about appreciating games as an art form. I may have missed out on love, but as a result I discovered a lot about my own hidden love of art, and creativity in general. It's not that I wasn't creative beforehand, it's just that I was creative passively. It might sound silly to some people who can only think of CoD when they think of videogames, but truthfully, videogames--specifically, RPGs--helped me discover myself. And I'm a much more focused, stable person today because of it. I needed to explore certain themes, many of them quite deep, that RPGs not only explored but walked me through on the journey both to emotional recovery and finding my place in life.

As it stands today, I am learning to program videogames myself and already have a few products published aimed at making developing games a bit easier on other programmers, and I've got more such tools in the works.

Are videogame habits valuable? That depends. The real question is, is my videogame habit valuable? Like Shu pointed out so well, there are cases where they can be seriously abused. But just because a thing is misused does not mean it is bad or a waste of time. I've become steadily more and more isolated in the past few years, and I hate it, and I want out of it, but rather than use videogames as a crutch I find them to encourage, to beg me to get up and do something--and that something is to make great art that impacts others the way I've been impacted by art.

That's my experience. It may not be everyone else's. Probably isn't, in fact. But there's a point with any habit or passion where you have to stop and ask yourself if that habit is holding you back or defining you as a person. For me, it is the latter. I'm a geek. Trying to separate myself from videogames would be like trying to drive without glasses (when my vision is just bad enough that I'm legally required to). Sure, I could still navigate through life...but I'd have to try awfully hard, miss out on a lot of things, lack a lot of confidence, and potentially lose my way--all unnecessarily. It doesn't have to be an issue of addiction. It can just be a part of who you are. I'd say my life is fuller because of the stories I've experienced through videogames. Yes, stories. All the arcade-y stuff is fun and all, but that's not 'real' gaming. If to you 'gaming' means the sort of heartfelt RPG that leaves you in tears at the end, I'd say you've every shot in the world at being a perfectly balanced, emotionally healthy individual, not in spite of videogames, but even because of them.

And because I don't feel like I am explaining what I want to very well, I would highly recommend this web comic, Manic Pixel Dream Girl. Even though I'm a man and never had the specific struggles of the author, I found it highly relatable and insightful just as a general geek.