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Comment by M_Grey | Hacker News Reader

I find that videogames fill my "brain in neutral" space very nicely. If I'm just not in the mood to read, or get out, pick up some new skill or polish an old one, hang out with friends or do something productive (and sometimes you truly want to do nothing)... I find that videogames are a nice choice. I especially enjoy combining them with unabridged audiobooks that I might not otherwise bother reading/listening to otherwise.

The trick is to make sure that you resist the temptation to allow that empty time (like empty calories) to dominate your life. It's like ice cream... a little is great stuff, but don't make eating it the center of your lifestyle.

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By basing your choices on feelings (i.e. "not in the mood") you are likely to go with the path of least resistance. If instead you choose to do what you prioritize by conscious mental effort you are likely to feel more rewarded in the end. For example, if you decide that learning photography is important and you spend hundreds of hours practicing you will be more satisfied than if you spent those hundreds of hours playing a game. At least you will feel that in retrospect. In the moment, perhaps the game will seem more satisfying. But most people find more fulfillment in practicing a skill or hobby.

This is a surefire way for people to burn out on something. If you never allow yourself mental downtime, then everything you do feels like work. If it's not meant to be work, then it's a hobby and if it's a hobby then it needs to actually allow you to unwind. Some people do surprisingly complex things for this, but the mistake we tend to make externally is view the accomplishment as "work" or something they really need to achieve - rather then something they devote idle brain-time to.

Decisions about priorities should be considered carefully. If the outcome isn't fulfilling, perhaps the choice was made on the basis of what others expect rather than what truly pleases. If a hobby is something you really enjoy it will not feel like work.

Games can be enjoyed in their own right as well. If we play for pure enjoyment and can otherwise balance our lives then they are certainly a means to unwind.

> If a hobby is something you really enjoy it will not feel like work.

Sorry, that's just not true. There are lots of interesting, rewarding hobbies that do feel like work, in the sense that they require a fresh mind capable of bearing a high cognitive load to engage in them. When my mind is fresh you're right, those hobbies are very satisfying to spend time on, but my "fresh" timeslots are mostly devoted to my actual job (phd) these days, which doesn't feel like work either much of the time.

Be careful, your attitude is a road straight to burnout.

> If you never allow yourself mental downtime, then everything you do feels like work.

What makes you believe that what reedlaw described is not to be considered mental downtime? I have made quite the opposite experience: when consciously reflecting and deciding about my mental downtime in advance, it turns out to be the most recreative. It's worth noting that I made bad experiences with: tomorrow from 7-730 I will be reading/running/cooking/medidate/watching an educational video for recreational purposes. The way to go for me is to predefine a set of activities which I support based on a principle. When in the situation for donwtime, I then choose from this set.

Edit: typo

How do you just pick up a project from a set like that? Typically if I put something on a list, it's not motivating enough for me to want to do when I have downtime unless I really want to work on something.

Many mentally challenging activities I'll start spontaneously, but it's typically small ones with direct, achievable goals, like write a little scraper in a new language or reverse engineer a single mechanism of an application.

I only have a few times a week when I have downtime that I feel like I can pick something off a list. The rest of my downtime I want something to do - and that's where games come in - and I'm quite glad for them, because without them I'd spend much more time watching TV, reading junk political threads on reddit, etc.

I guess the key here is that this list is based on principles and not just a list of activities I would consider advantageous to have done in some sense or another.

Those principles ought to be chosen as to align with my convictions and expectations from life. So you could say that I know that this list is the intersection of things I consider worthy doing (and immediately have a well-formed reason for their worthiness at the back of my mind) and recreation.

When a moment for recreation has come, there is nothing that makes me question whether I should do something from the list or not because I am reassured that I have thought of this sufficiently in advance to determine the best for me.

I agree with this.

It'll burn some people out. I can't just read/learn or create things and see it as some kind of stress relief.

You'll feel accomplish and all great things but that's ain't relaxing at all for me.

Playing magic the gathering, just turn off my brain and watching a good tv show either comedy or scifi is my way to blow off steam. Video games can make me angry sometime or frustrated. Mtg can be challenging in term of stress and require thinking skill but I've learned to not over think it and play with my gut. My buddy who I play against over thinks and stress out often in mtg, it's enjoyable for the guy but after several rounds at his cube his brain is mentally exhausted, this rarely happens to me. He often chastize me for not reading the card carefully... though, I just kinda remember them if I play often with the cube a lot. Hell I thought one card had flying cause the creature seems to be hovering in the art once. Bad play mistake. While our style are different I we're pretty much tie in term of deck building skill set and winning rate.

I believe the essence of what you're saying is true, but I dispute the overall reasonableness of what you describe.

The vast majority of video games are either built around the principles of addiction, or require a tremendous amount of time in muscle memory training.

What you're describing seems like describing how enjoyable it can be to smoke one cigarette a month. (assuming that actually felt good). Could be true- but the odds are certainly stacked against people attempting that behavior.

You can build the skills necessary to play games over time, and of course it greatly depends on the games you play. I would tend to stay away from pure time sinks like MMO's, and I've lost the taste for 2D fighters. That said, I've been playing FPS' since FPS', and those skills wake up whenever I play for more than ten or twenty minutes.

I don't see a correlation with cigarettes, which offer you nothing beneficial, are physically addictive on the level of heroin, and are one of the leading causes of human death.

> which offer you nothing beneficial

Nicotine can have some benefits; see for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6457772

> are physically addictive on the level of heroin

False. They're a bit above alcohol; heroin is much higher. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_as...

> and are one of the leading causes of human death.

Correct.

Fair enough... if you're schizophrenic and medicated, by all means vape or take nicotine in some form. There is still no real argument for smoking though... it's the worst way to handle something that is already mildly hazardous.

Edit: By the way, for an appreciation of "A bit above alcohol", check out an inpatient alcohol detox clinic sometime... it is no joke at all.

> False. They're a bit above alcohol; heroin is much higher.

I realize this is anecdotal, but I feel the need to point out that my father, a veteran ER doctor of over thirty years, has said more than once that based on his experience of patients, he thinks it is easier to quit heroin than nicotine.

Huh interesting. Thanks for the datapoint. Fwiw, nicotine has never been problematic for me. I dated a girl who smoked for 3 years, and she'd smoke around me all the time- and while i indulged in it every once in a while, i never felt like i HAD to smoke. Biological things at play, most certainly.

Perhaps because people who are addicted to nicotine are likely to also have addictive personalities, whereas anyone can easily get addicted to heroin.

Kind of like how in WWII the British improved the survivability of their bombers by increasing the armor in the places returning aircraft weren't damaged, theorizing correctly that those were the places the planes that didn't return were hit.

If a person with an addictive personality gets on heroin, they're probably visiting the ER very few if any times before they hit the morgue.

Check out this paper if you're interested in Nicotine:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f961/639e2a998d275f3e8f8f4c...

Nicotine is quite often used as a form of self-medication - it's helpful for people with all kinds of issues, from depression to adhd, to weight control.

Even among doctors, there is very little knowledge on the subject of why people take up smoking, and usually it's assumed it's just a matter of bad habits.

So, if someone uses nicotine as an unwitting way of self-medication, it will indeed be extremely difficult to quit without fixing the core problem.

To some extent it's like calling SSRIs "hard to quit", because people who begin taking them often never quit, even when side affects are worse than those of nicotine.

> The vast majority of video games are either built around the principles of addiction, or require a tremendous amount of time in muscle memory training.

Well, define "vast majority of video games." Certainly that's true if we mean F2P phone games. For a lot of others I am not so sure.

To be fair, when it comes to those F2P phones games, I would start to agree with the cigarette analogy... those are just skinner boxes with coin slots.

Some of those can be pretty fun, but when you get to the point that paying for it seems at all tempting it's time to take a different approach - the way which involves a decompiler, a debugger and maybe Frida too.

When free to play becomes pay to win, writing your own cheats is the more fun and rewarding option.

And that is how you leverage your downtime into something at least tangentially related to productivity. I like it!

His ice cream analogy was on point. There are plenty of video games which dont match your criteria. The ones that do (albeit the majority of mainstream games) become popular for obvious reasons, but one can even enjoy those in moderation if they have the mental skills to do so (like the people who can smoke cigarettes ocassionally and not become addicted).

I don't think a tremendous amount of time in training is mutually exclusive with brain-in-neutral activities. It's a question of what your goal is with the activity, and how you approach it as a result of that.

My friends and I play Overwatch. It's a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling, and if we wanted to compete professionally, sure, we'd have to spend a ton of time in focused training.

But we don't. We just hop on voice chat, play in Gold/Platinum against people of similar skill level, and we have a good time with it. Sometimes we'll pick up new strategies, we learn different characters, our aim and game-sense probably improve, but that's all secondary to hanging out and enjoying the game.

None of us are ever going to be competing in Master / GM / Top 500 tiers, and the amount of time it'd take to train and get better is immaterial to us because none of us want to.

I smoke a cigarette or two about once a month on average, typically when attending a party.

Not only is it quite pleasant after I've had a beer or three, but they're the ultimate social hack for introverted nerds. Are you at a crowded bar/party where it's impossible to have a proper talk with someone? Step outside for a smoke, and you can instantly have a nice, low key conversation with the other smokers. Lulls in the conversation aren't awkward cause you can just go back to taking drags; and once you're done, you can keep talking if you like the person- or have the perfect excuse to head back in if you don't.

Highly recommended.

As a non smoker, reading this just makes me feel depressed.

So you use smoking cigarettes as a crutch when making real conversations with the non-smokers inside gets hard? Then you fill in gaps in conversation with more smoking? Most people cope with those naturally occurring conversation gaps without breathing in smoke.

Serious question - Are you, as you stand out there with the party going on behind you, slightly repulsed by the fact that you connected with someone because you're both doing the same disgusting habit?

The whole scenario seems so absurdly sad, and certainly not something I'd "highly recommend" to anyone.

I've always tried and failed to keep my smoking habit to occasions where I could enjoy the smoking.

I wouldn't "highly recommend" trying it, because very few people can keep it at that level. I couldn't, and my way of quitting was to remember all the other ones I smoked. To this day, on the rare occasions where I crave smoking, I'll just remind myself of the nausea, the bad throat, the smell, the dizziness and whatever else the other ones, the ones I would smoke after the good one, would do to me.

Aw you sound sad man. If you want to grab a beer and a smoke some time, hit me up!

Would you say the same about drinking? Because in the scenario we're discussing, they seem pretty analogous to me: potentially addicting habits that are (to varying degrees) socially accepted, and make having conversations easier.

Damn, highly recommended to smoke.

You're mistaking all games for competitive games :)

Classic.

That's a pretty dark view of computer games. It's a popular media type like any other. You have all ends of the complexity spectrum, from undisputable art on one end to poorly-concealed skinner boxes on the other end.

People who appreciate computer games as a serious hobby will tend to enjoy games on the complex end of this spectrum. These games are no more built around the principles of addiction than a good book, or a physical activity like skiing.

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