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One thing that's great about gaming as an addiction: it's very inexpensive. This has been changing for the worse with all the pay to win stuff, but there's still a fair amount of cheap gaming out there. With a gaming addiction, never leaving the house and a minimal food budget I wonder how much the average gamer subsists on each month.

I had a friend whose brother would go to work and come home and play video games every day. That was literally it. Work, pay rent, game, eat sleep. I watched him repeat this cycle when we were hanging out. He didn't even have much to say most days.

The hikomori in Japan are already adopting this terminal frugality en masse.

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> One thing that's great about gaming as an addiction: it's very inexpensive.

It can be extremely expensive in opportunity costs, unfortunately.

As with all addictions.

Well, it depends. Some other addictions, while they may consume parts of you, can on balance be more contained (if they don't kill you first). Video games, on the other hand, are sure to eat away inordinate amounts of that which you can never get back: time.

I would propose two counter conjectures: 1. There is no you. 2. There is no time.

Is a addict really that much worser off? At the end, all that remains of life, is sugar encoded eletricity in a jelly-fish on a walking sausage. They dont make copies of themselves though.

My grandfather had a collague, who build a fast-breeder reactor in germany. Then the political climate changed and the reactor- brand new was deconstructed, and the whole thing reverted to a grass-farmland.

Noting but memorys to show for it.

all these moments will be lost in time.

Like tears In the rain

The reason it's seen as depressing is that game addicts are usually celibate

Sorry. But that is precisely the point of opportunity costs.

Building that reactor isn't just a job. That kind of a job generally has a future/career. You would learn so many things on the way you will likely land a better job sooner or later.

One of things that I keep saying to my younger cousins that pretty much everything I built at the start of my career in programming doesn't exist now.

All that remains is me, and along the way I've gathered skills.

Video games don't give you this.

That assumes that the person has opportunities they're giving up. If they don't have them, or can't see that they have them, it's not nearly so expensive to them.

(Belief that you have opportunities, and motivation to take them, is very valuable. You can't just tell people this though, humans don't work like that)

This is one of the reasons I believe basic income won't result in masses of people 'dropping out' of society. People will seek real fulfillment given the resources.

I'm afraid people will just drop out and get high. That's what people on disability or social security are doing now.

*hikikomori

It can actually be extremely expensive if you are addicted to free to play games. There is literally no upper limit on how much you can spend in those games.

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