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Are You Gaming For the Right Reasons?
An editorial at IGN discusses healthy (and unhealthy) ways to play video games. The author says that while gaming is a perfectly legitimate hobby, it needs to be approached with moderation and an understanding of what you get out of playing. Without understanding your motivations and compulsions, it's quite possible to play video games in a way that's detrimental. From the article:
"Games, especially modern ones, revolve around the principle that if you put the time in, you will be rewarded. Many gamers claim to not understand how anyone could put up with grinding in a video game. But grinding is comforting. Grinding tells us that, no matter what, if you keep playing you'll become more powerful. ... The real world does not operate this way. You can 'grind' at a job for 10 years and still be laid off. You can 'grind' at your physical health your whole life but if you switch to an unhealthy lifestyle you will immediately begin losing this progress. ... It's important for gamers to have mastery of their own mind. Are you grinding out a level in World of Warcraft because you're truly enjoying the experience, or are you doing it to replace missing feelings of self-worth that you don't want to confront? Do you revel in your virtual successes to avoid the uncomfortable internal dialogue regarding of your abandoned gym routine? Are you playing games because you're having fun, or because you have an unconfronted fear of failure?
Sometime during the last year I realized that I was not eating healthy. My lifestyle mostly consisted of eating nachos and pizzas and playing World of Warcraft. While perfectly ideal lifestyle for young gamer, I realized I was getting too old for it.
Since then I've gamed and eaten healthy. I play with my Wii. I use Kinect for Xbox360. I eat Subway sandwiches.
And I feel better. You can't even imagine how good Subway's The Big Philly Cheesesteak and Subway Melt tastes. Omnomnom, some extra cheese and bacon to go. My choice of sauces usually includes light mayo and chipotle southwest in Italian Herbs & Cheese bread. I order all the veggies except for tomatoes. I don't know why but I just can't eat tomatoes on a subway or pizzas. Do you know what happens if my mom haven't bought me that days subway in my basement? I feel angry.
This new healthy lifestyle has not only improved the quality of my life but given me a reason to make it through Mondays. Sweet Onion flavor, mmmm. Ranch sauce.. Breakfast B.M.T gives me the extra power I require for Mondays!
Remember to game and eat healthy, folks!
I play games to shoot people in the face. Call it end of day "stress-relief."
I play games to escape reality, hence I dislike the attempts at reality in a game as the current tech generation does not handle it very well. I also play games to socialise, and PVP is a great way of doing that, especially fighting games and shooters, but other arcadey genres are welcome too. There is a social aspect to gaming that I keep returning to when I am not busy playing Fallout 1 or Fallout 2 just one more time to get all the possible combinations of endings like I have done since 1996 and 1997.
If you are GAMING and think you need any sort of reason, you are one messed up dude !!
Or because it is a better means of escapism than reading cod-psychology online?
all they have to do is play it 100 hours a week and they're gods. that's why i don't play multiplayer rpgs, i don't want to be in a "no life contest" with some unemployed fat guy in kentucky.
I confronted my fear of failure long ago. Now, grinding has more to do with my hatred of [unnecessary] failure.
Good idea: Playing a game to have a good time, challenge your mind, and reduce your stress.
Bad idea: Playing a game instead of having a good time, boring your mind, and causing stress.
In other words, the moment a game starts interfering with your friends, family, work, marriage, etc, stop now! The game will be there for you if and when you come back to it.
I am officially gone from
I'm 'grinding' to get 'first post'.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Are you sure you're reading Slashdot for the right reasons?
Is it just me who reads TFA and things "this guy's just taken a basic intro-to-psychology course and is all excited thinking he can now explain the whole world"?
If you like gaming, are able to financially support yourself and your gaming and can do so without ruining the rest of your life, then play whatever the hell you like.
Also, the guy doesn't understand modern (Western) MMOs. These are MUCH less about grinding than is commonly considered to be the case. The level "grind" in World of Warcraft is so short as to barely merit the term. Going from 1-85 is best thought of as an extended tutorial where you learn how to play your class ahead of the real game, which begins at level 85.
And once you're at level 85, the game is fundamentally skill based. On the PvP side, that's so obvious that I don't even need to explain it. On the PvE side, it perhaps deserves a slightly longer explanation of what the commonly perceived "gear grind" actually is.
WoW's end-game PvE content is, over the course of each expansion, a series of co-operative challenges of increasing difficulty. The series starts with relatively short 5-man dungeons, which require fairly simple tactics. What then follows - released gradually via patches - is a series of challenges for larger groups (10 or 25 people) which require better reactions, better planning and more complicated tactics.
It's a common misconception that the only difference between the bottom end raids in a WoW expansion and the top end raids is the gear requirement. Yes, you will need better gear to tackle the top-end raids, but this can essentially be thought of as a skill-check system. Before you can progress to the top end raid, you need to prove that you have the skill to defeat the easier, lower-end ones. If you don't have that, then you'll end up banging your head against a brick wall, no matter your gear level.
So back when I was most deeply into the game, in the Burning Crusade era (1st expansion), the bottom end raid was Karazhan and the top end raid was Sunwell Plateau. Karazhan's bosses required fairly simple tactics, with generally just one or two mechanics that players needed to respond to during each fight. The difficulty increased substantially throughout the raid, culminating in a fairly tricky final boss. Said boss was, however, massively simpler than even the first boss in Sunwell Plateau, which required each player to keep track of a large number of factors at once, with any failure resulting in more or less instant death. Also, as you are level capped for this, the fights are not magically getting easier just because you put more time and effort in.
So the attraction in modern, Western MMOs isn't the grind at all - it's about team-work and overcoming challenges co-operatively. Indeed, Western gaming in general has been remarkably successful in eliminating "the grind" - you don't tend to spend much time running in circles doing random encounters in a Bioware game, or one of the Witcher games.
The grind does still live on in some Japanese gaming and in some Eastern MMOs - but that's likely just due to the conservatism of Japanese and Korean developers. It would be great if at some point during the next few years, a high profile Japanese RPG developer (perhaps Square) could take the step of eliminating grinding from its games.
I game to pass time. It helps winds down the time till I die. One of the games I play is Everquest II. You end up doing a lot of grinding in the game. But grinding for purpose, not because it makes my mind numb. I grind to level up toons, for a quest, or probably to get a rare item to drop. But grind because I think that is what life is about? No.
Life is the grind. Does it make sense? No. Do you always get rewarded? No. Is it going to change? No. So is it so weird that we grind in a game for rewards? No, I don't think so.
And who is to judge why people play games? Does it really matter? The games are for escape, we all find our own way to escape reality. So what if someone is making up for whatever from their day job in a game? As long as they aren't being abusive towards others, I think whatever they want to do is fine.
The article? Stupid. I'm not even sure what the problem is. Apparently, if we play games where we do good, and in real life we are doing bad, the video games are bad for us. Because we are trying to get over are real life failures online.
Here's my take. Dude is a gamer that is hitting middle age. He's think back on all his wasted time in life and what he's missed out on, and want to blame it on video games. yes, another person blaming Real Life on video games.
Be seeing you...
Are you playing games because you're having fun, or because you have an unconfronted fear of failure?
Umm that's why I don't play games. Nothing says 'failure' like getting killed repeatedly in quick succession.
It's interesting to contrast articles like this one to the findings of people like Lynda Sharpe.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/05/17/so-you-think-you-know-why-animals-play/
Slow news day, it seems, both at IGN and Slashdot.
Gaming can be a fun past time, but if abused, it'll consume your life, much like drug or alcohol abuse.
Nothing to see here.
Are you grinding out a [paycheck] in [employment] because you're truly enjoying the experience, or are you doing it to replace missing feelings of self-worth that you don't want to confront? Do you revel in your [monetary] successes to avoid the uncomfortable internal dialogue regarding of your abandoned [other factor]? Are you [working] because you're having fun, or because you have an unconfronted fear of failure?
If someone really was using games to gain a sense of self-worth I don't think they want some smart-ass article diagnosing their problem. It's not even posing a solution. It just exposes people to a problem they might have and then leaves them in the cold.
"Hey J. Random Gamer. Are you gaming to to hide from your own short comings? If you are, then that sucks for you. Avoiding social situations with games is a BAD thing. I bet you never thought of that, now did you? You should really get control of your life, like I did."
I don't think this article is helping anyone.
I have a paycheck, a house to live in that is paid for, and no debt. I may not have a wife and kids but that isn't as big of a deal really since I'm surviving. I think my gaming is just fine.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I found that the thing that kept me investing time into two types of games (fps and mmorpg) was the camaraderie of my clan and guild (respectively.) I was absolutely substituting my lack of friends in the real world with faceless avatars of the digital. When I came to this realization about 7 years ago, I almost completely quit playing games except for the occasional single player campaign. Since I've cut back, my life has blossomed in countless ways, I have a stable career, a girlfriend I always have time for, and a multitude of hobbies ranging from sleight of hand to martial arts, to sketching and foreign language, to writing fiction and beyond. There will be those who quickly dismiss this article. There will be those who claim the author has only taken one psychology class and thinks he knows everything. But I think a lot of you are just afraid to admit how much your personal gaming holds you back in life. There are countless arts to master in this world. Ancient traditions that hold wisdom and have been passed on through countless generations are all around you and ready to be learned. Maybe I was born in the wrong generation, who's to say? I just know that the accomplishments I've made in the 'real world' far outweigh anything I've done in the digital. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against video games but yes, people play them for the wrong reasons and they could be putting their real life time towards things like curing cancer. You want to master the art that is artificial? Say it to my face that this is your heart's desire and I will beat you until you decide it would be better to invest more time in self defense classes. (I tried to put a less than sign and a 3 here to make a heart but I couldn't get past the filter so just pretend this comment was lighthearted and we'll all get along)
Are they claiming IRL, working hard is meaningless?
Largely, yes. Look at the hardest workers around. Construction workers, nurses, loggers, wind turbine technicians. These people work fucking hard, and are lucky if they make it to the middle class.
Now look at the most successful people in the country. Lawyers, bankers, CEOs. They all sit around wearing pressed suits and charge tens if not hundreds of times the hourly rate of our hard working friends above. And they produce little or nothing of value for that time.
That's the world we live in. The more successful you are, the less hard work you actually do.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm actually learning how to play guitar and bass guitar by "playing" Rocksmith. I took lessons for about 18 months to get a foundation and have now played almost 300 arrangements, some as many as 40 times to really learn it (most under 10 though). I find there are actually rewards when playing :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
"Are they claiming IRL, working hard is meaningless?"
This may sound strange, counter-intuitive, pessimistic, and maybe a even a bit misanthropic... but in many, perhaps even most, cases hard work _is_ completely meaningless. Most people who work hard for their entire lives, try their best to live within the law and their own ethical guidelines end up with shit to show for it, at least in a purely objective sense. When your boss' boss' boss loots the pension fund to buy a South Asian island populated with underage hookers, it doesn't matter how hard you worked or how good a person you are: that fuckbag just fucked you even harder than he fucks his 12 year-old ladyboys after years of making more then you make in a lifetime, just because he could get a little bit more at your expense.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Call of Duty: Psychology? Dude, when then did that come out? Imagine, gunning down the bad guys *and* rooting out their deep-seated anxieties! (Which are mainly about you gunning them down, but whatcha gonna do?)
You seem to be equating "hard work" with labor intensive work.
Are you telling me a chemist can't work hard unless he's hauling containers back and forth? Are you telling me an administrator can't bust their ass with the only physical work being that of going to the file cabinet and back?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Hope this helps. Been there man. Nothing wrong with you.
IMO, I'd say you're right about where I was at 27. I was single, successfully employed, living on my own in an apartment.. when I made the realization that gaming was such a waste of time. I couldn't force myself to pick up the controller anymore because my better judgement was saying, "Yeah, after 1 hour of gaming... what was accomplished?" and more importantly "Who cares?". Empty entertainment value, not 1 bit better than watching TV.
I had the same thoughts of, why not spend that time working on development task? So I focused on trying to MAKE games, rather than play them. But even that seemed like a waste of time because I felt there were better pursuits out there. Probably, because I knew I could do it (my job is software development), it was just a matter of how long it would take. There was no challenge.
After awhile, and some thinking, I figured out that the things that mean the most in life, the things that bring back the most reward... are usually also the most difficult for you to accomplish (The challenge!). Which meant doing things that had nothing/little to do with computers.
I decided I would work on becoming MORE social, MORE active, and MORE well-rounded. I got into aquariums... african cichlids, I joined a co-ed softball league, I got back into music (playing)... anything BUT computers. It made all the difference in the world.
Since when is finding and securing an advantageous position "dirty"?
When it pisses me off, mainly.
I'm not saying it's not a valid tactic. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it in competition, or even in a regular match. But it messes up my stress-vent "shoot everyone in the face" matches, so I just play against bots.
IANAL, but I can tell you that most of them spend the first ten years, at least, after law school working 60+ hours a week. Most CEOs have done that for 20-30 years to get where they are. Just because something is less physically demanding than carrying a hod doesn't mean it isn't hard work.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
You seem to be equating "hard work" with labor intensive work.
Are you telling me a chemist can't work hard unless he's hauling containers back and forth? Are you telling me an administrator can't bust their ass with the only physical work being that of going to the file cabinet and back?
That depends.. is he running?