A link between video games and unemployment | Hacker News Reader

A link between video games and unemployment

economist.com

177 pointsnabla9171 comments

Video games become the sole source of agency in many people's lives. This isn't just for the unemployed, but also for folks stuck in a job where they feel like they lack control. I couldn't understand at first why my fellow Googlers found so much time to play video games, but after a couple of months I understood. Afternoon Halo matches became the highlight of my day, I felt like I had more choice and responsibility in a 20 minute match than I did the rest of my programming work.

A friend of mine felt the same way. He was undergoing a tragedy in his family, and he would play video games after returning from the hospital at night. It's funny, looking at him and talking to him, you'd never think he'd be a huge video game player, but it really was a source of stress relief. He could focus his unspent frustrations and hurt into competing online, and the way he explained it, I think it kept him sane during those times.

It's funny, I can tell how in control of my life by gauging how much I play games. When I start obsessing about playing games (I like playing them, but when I feel I have to play them to escape), I know something needs to change in my life. I'm saying it's that way for everyone, but it really is a great tool for stress relief for some.

I haven't been able to find it, but I remember a comment here on HN by a guy who basically said that gaming saved his life by helping him to zone out during a period of severe depression.

I guess it's a form of mindfulness, in a way.

That's the exact opposite actually. Nit saying it's a bad thing though. But it's important to understand that screens are taking your attention away. You are not in the moment at all.

Would you be willing to elaborate on that a bit? Once upon a time, i played a few competitive games. I'd have to be very aware of my emotional state. Being aware of a sort of sick feeling when i'm falling behind, recognizing that that exists and not letting it affect my play seems like what people mean when they speak of mindfulness. And the converse, not getting cocky when pulling ahead. I also dealt with the random chemical changes of adrenaline. My hands get very cold and a little sweaty, heart races a bit. But that's just a thing that happens. being aware of it, acknowledging it and moving on with what i choose to do next seems like a mindful practice.

But maybe you mean something more sophisticated?

Maybe OP means the eu-stress from gaming is neglectable compared to the emotional trauma described. Getting used to and thinking that's normal stress might numb rather than build mindfulness, because just doing it frequently doesn't promise improvement. EG repetitive strain might hinder that. And it might be distractive in general.

That's a really good point. the gaming i talked about was in a pretty stable time in my life, more or less every other aspect of my life was working smoothly. Thanks!

I'm just a beginner since I've been meditating for only 8 years but from my experience, most video games involve at least one of the following:

- ego

- loosing track of time

- loosing track of physical reality, such as bodily sensations

- reacting

- desiring an outcome

- judging

Not all of them, and not for all video games. But any of those characteristic seems to be something quite antagonist with mindfulness.

Now somebody that is very focused, very selfless and equanimous in a competitive game will have something close to meditation. But first they are rare, and secondly the very existence of the game, being virtual and... a game, seems to be orthogonal the mindful state state.

I'm not a competitive player though, and:

- when I play dota I react A LOT.

- when I'm coding or watching a movie, I completely forget reality.

It contrast a lot with my meditation practice. Maybe some people are better at dealing with screens that I am.

I agree with that, you are completely taken out of your actual context, or at least I am.

I used to game really heavily during a pretty terrible period (divorce + grad school) in an attempt to cope. Of course it actually just made things worse overall while distracting my brain to make it seem temporarily better, it diverted a lot of the energy I might have used towards engaging and fixing the problems.

When I game severely (FPS shooters are my crack) I can get focused for a dozen hours at a time. My body almost shuts down, I get into a trancelike state and my metabolism recedes. I forget to eat, I don't get tired. When I finally do sleep I will wake up the next day and actually have a headache until I play again for a little while. It was that kind of physical withdrawal that made me realize long ago how pernicious it was, at least for my particular physiology and brain. Now I will only play games like that in a social setting, never alone lest I fall back into that spell.

One time in grad school I stayed up all night gaming and I slept through my alarm. I missed an exam. That I was proctoring. I went straight to a pawn shop and sold my console when I realized what I was doing to myself.

> I forget to eat, I don't get tired.

Sound like dopamine at play!

Sounds like how I feel when writing code.

I don't agree. As I understand these things:

You are mindful and react on direct stimulus - while gaming, you do not think on future or past, you are immersed in your actual activity - it IS mindfulness.

BUT it does not improve mindfulness - it is easy to be mindful at interesting times - that's normal, but not so when nothing interesting is around, and you are just left alone with your own thoughts or problems. Thats what various mindfulness practices trying to improve - to be mindful in common "boring" or bad situations too.

And like for any improvements you usually have to make some effort - not just do something when it is natural.

> You are mindful and react on direct stimulus - while gaming, you do not think on future or past, you are immersed in your actual activity - it IS mindfulness.

I disagree. Reacting is the polar opposite of what mindfulness is about. Mindfulness is about, among other things, responding appropriately to what is happening, not reacting.

What you're describing, the state people get in when playing computer games, is a state of hyper-vigilance. Acute-awareness of what's directly in front of you induced by a simulated battle.

Not all games are shooters that stimulate fight or flight reflexes.

It's true that games require player agency and thus by definition are active. However, your characterization of games using terms as "hyper", "acute" and "battle" is rather limited and outdated. Games that underplay or avoid challenge and focus on exploration, immersion or rhythm, can offer a state of mind and activity as conducive to mindfulness as walking or swimming.

What are some games that best exemplify a focus on exploration, immersion or rhythm?

Ico, Journey, No Man's Sky, and RiME most recently worked wonderfully for me. Certain "grinding" activities in MMOs like WoW would count too.

Rhythm is easy. Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, Rocksmith are three mega-popular ones. As a hybrid between standard action/rpg type games and rhythm games, Crypt of the Necrodancer is a phenomenal game.

Exploration is harder -- I can't think of any off the top of my head that have absolutely no combat component. However, that's pretty much how I play Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I've barely been engaging in the combat aspect of it, choosing mostly to just roam and explore and climb and enjoy the view.

I absolutely agree with what you've written here.

My exposure to gaming has been almost entirely seeing other people play FPSs.

Thinking about it, the most recent game I played was http://play.quantumgame.io/ which is none of those things I characterised games as.

Thanks for calling me out.

> you are immersed in your actual activity - it IS mindfulness

No it's not - it's called "flow", a state where you lose your reflective self-consciousness (i.e. the core of mindfulness).

I'm pretty sure Kerbal Space Program was the lynchpin upon which my sanity hung during a pretty dark period some time ago induced by a serious medical condition of a close family member and sudden passing away of few others during a period of two years.

That's the dangerous pattern. A single event in isolation you can cope with but if things hit hard in succession it can really strip you of resilience, a mental form of being punch drunk.

Same here, my amount of (somewhat compulsive) gaming is directly related to generic emotional and psychological well-being. Less well being -> more gaming, with gaming clearly being the effect and not the primary cause.

Don't worry. Your job will be automated away pretty soon, and you'll be able to enjoy your Halo whole day.

I'm the one who is trying to automate programmers away . . .

That's a good way to articulate why I couldn't work at a large company. And I never thought about them being related before, but maybe part of why I don't play games so much anymore.

You're also at an organization that selects for personalities susceptible to that. So many people want to work at companies like Google because they care more about the recognition for working at a company like Google than the actual work they do or impact they make. And that's a recipe for its own type of acedia.

Great word.

It's interesting how my desire to game has almost entirely disappeared since I left there and started a new company. I'm sitting here building deep learning rigs with fat GPUs, I could just add another partition running Windows and have a killer system for Overwatch . . . but nah, I'm having too much fun with Tensorflow to care.

I too am sitting here waiting for a TensorFlow language model to finish training :)

Shoot me an email!

I wonder how many people here are currently browsing HN waiting for their models to train.

526/1816 [=======>......................] - ETA: 1123s - loss: 0.2013 - acc: 0.9386 - val_loss: 0.3690 - val_acc: 0.9122

It's the new compiling.

Happened to me too much with FPS's. I am proud that I managed to stay off games like WoW that are basically the same stuff all the time. I fight smart players with different kits and play strategies. Keeps me thinking quick on my feet with improved hand-eye coordination and reflexes vs what I have with a brain injury.

That said, it still was too much time invested into stuff that isn't improving my life. Even the stuff improving thinking fast is training the intuition for wrong situations. I'd be better off doing part-time or contract work involving similar skills. Probably...

My friends and I blow off school pressure by playing smash. It is, no joke, the biggest addiction in my life. But it's exactly what you say – a way to regain some control in a world that otherwise is lacking in it.

Insightful observation. Makes sense.

As a variation on this idea... I have a job now where I do have control over some stuff that matters to me (and it definitely helps!) But I still like to take a video game break once or twice a day.

My game of choice is a Risk-clone on my phone. It's nice because it moderately cognitively challengeing, offers some variety with different maps, and the AI is quite mediocre -- which means I usually win. Games generally take 5-10 minutes and winning I notice gives me a little lift (even though I know my opponents are at an inherent disadvantage). So I've concluded overall it's a plus for my mental health.

Of course, every once in a while I do lose, which makes me a little grumpy. In that case, I'll usually just play another game straight away and win.

Out of curiosity, could you give the name or a link to the game?

It's called Border Siege. I believe it was originally called Drisk and Android-only. Not sure if it ever made it to the iPhone.

I'm interested in this style of > the AI is quite mediocre -- which means I usually win

I find the same with a certain chess program on my phone where I find running the lowest AI quite nice for 5 minutes and I have a couple thousand games versus it. I know I could do something more challenging, but there's something to be said for simple puzzles to be solved almost in a ritual way for comfort and stability

What were you working on at Google?

At my workplace I have a rather good control over the stuff I do (I'm an architect at an IT company) but I still play games online. I mainly do it because it is a kind of therapy for me because the game I play rewards careful strategic thinking, cool headed decision making, patience and punishes recklessness and hotheadedness. When I manage to remain cool and win a game I always feel a sense of achievement. I'm not representative though because I play games for 27 years and I never had this kind of a problem.

Video games are cheap compared to other entertainment. I can buy a good enough PC for $400 and I can clock almost an infinite amount of game-time on it with friends all over the world. Most other activities - playing pool, eating out, bars, most sports, vacationing - cost a lot more per hour of possible entertainment.

So if you don't have the money and you have the time you should choose activities that provide the most entertainment for the least $

Previously unemployed people would watch a lot of TV for affordable entertainment, an they probably still do it a lot. However video games can be more cognitively engaging and more social, so they might be actually an improvement.

I think it's hard to beat books for economical. But certainly games are in reach.

I really wish books could hold my attention like video games. I would read a lot more.

You might not be reading the right books? But also -- getting into a reading habit takes a small amount of patience if you are used to the intense stimulation of game.

If your goal is to start reading more often, stop reading so many books you think you ought to read and read more books you want to read. Variety and challenging yourself are good but sometimes you can get carried away and just make yourself not want to read anything.

This is very true. I am usually not the best reader but I recently picked up an excellent fantasy novel and couldn't put it down and ended up reading like 4 or 5 hours straight. On the flip side when I read nonfiction or textbooks it's hard to push myself to keep learning.

Read better non-fiction, then?

In particular, read something that has nothing to do with your job once in a while.

There is apparently a link between our current internet culture and not being able to focus for longer periods: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-goog...

In short: you should start reading more books if you want books to hold your attention for longer.

If you expect books to grab your attention away from games--not happening. Instead, make a resolution to stop gaming and stick to it. You'll have plenty of time for reading and other activities.

Well, sure or writing music or poetry or drawing or playing soccer with friends or....

It's an incomplete picture if you ignore the fact that videogames are infinitely more mentally accessible. There's plenty of very cheap, very fulfilling things to do with your time but they don't provide the instant, accessible dopamine hit that movies or videogames do, which put them out of reach for a lot of people.

I don't really watch TV or movies, and I play videogames pretty sparingly. I'm definitely glad I did it, and I find my hobbies now a lot more stimulating and rewarding, but I'd be lying if I pretended it wasn't a somewhat difficult habit to get into.

Are they really? I've never spent more than a few days on a book, but I've certainly spent well over 300 hours on some video games. I love reading, but to me books seem quite expensive as an entertainment medium in comparison with computer games.

There is tons of reading material available for free or for less than ten bucks and the setup costs are nothing (if you want to go e-books maybe fifty bucks). It is rare for me to play a single video game anywhere near 50 hours, let alone 300.

One way to look at it is if you're getting any wisdom from books or video games that you can apply to real life, potentially getting more value from the experience and offsetting cost of acquisition.

...until you realize that we still have this old-fashioned institutions called libraries.

Uber for books, except you don't have to pay.

Indeed! That said, library quality, much like school quality, can vary enormously by geography. Also like school quality, it's not entirely random, there's a pattern where wealthier communities often (though not always) tend to have better libraries.

(I'm defining better as wider and deeper selection of books and ignoring anything else, like other library services, library hours, whatever.)

Technically, it's not free, but you've already paid for it directly if you own property or indirectly through rent (as property tax factors into rental prices.) We pay $120 a year to our public library. We also pay another $100-200 a year in fines, program fees and special requests. This still comes out to well less than $5/book read.

I just finished a couple of books that take approximately 17 hours on average. They cost me $5 each on the Kindle store. Hard to beat $0.3/hr. I also spent a few hours at a LAN cafe yesterday, at $1/hr, which is a reasonable rate here in South Asia.

Of course I could have gone to the library, but I read a lot more if the book is a tap away on my tablet.

I mean if a book is less than 15 bucks it might as well be free, practically speaking, for most people who post here.

> Video games are cheap compared to other entertainment.

Maybe with the exception of the public library.

Most people do not find value or entertainment in knowledge or reading. So they don't want to go to the library because it's not really a source of entertainment for them. Gaming on the other hand, probably engages them a whole lot better.

While I agree that gaming is very engaging, if you visit a library you'll be caught off guard how many people are there every single day. Now I will acknowledge that many of the people at my local library are kids playing games on the library computers, however there are also lots of people that genuinely enjoy reading and the other activities hosted at the library.

You're being down voted for stating an unpopular truth.

As much as I might wish it wasn't the case, I still agree with what you said.

The public library where I live loans video games, so why not both? :-)

Not only are they cheap, but the nominal price of video games hasn't budged much in something like 30 years. AAA titles have always hit the market in the $50-$60 dollar range since the days of the NES (and maybe earlier, but that is before my time). It isn't surprising that video game companies have introduced additional revenue streams with DLC or microtransactions in order to counter inflation in both real dollars and in production budgets.

I am not sure I agree with this statement. I remember new PS1 games retailing for $39.99, I remember PS2 games retailing for $49.99. It wasn't until the ps3 generation were games $59.99.

My friends and I always joked about how each generation games went up $10.

You can do a Google image search for old video game ads to prove my point.

Here are new NES games retailing at $55-$70 - http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/4240/90scommercials1324wwwk...

Here are new SNES games retailing at $60-$70 - https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/b9/57/24/b957...

Here are new Genesis games retailing at $45-$65 - http://farm1.static.flickr.com/215/523645427_a566d2d110_b.jp...

Here are new PS1 games retailing at $50-$55 - https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/08/89/34/0889...

What might be clouding your memory is that as a console generation ages the games might drop in price until a new generation comes in to reestablish the price at approximately $60. It is certainly possible at the introduction of the PS2 that most PS1 games were retailing for less than $50 and then it was repeated when PS2 aged and the PS3 was released, but it certainly wasn't the PS3 that introduces the $60 price point.

Playstation started with a SRP of $49 when it launched in the US in 1995. Sony dropped the SRP of first party titles to $39 in 1997, several years before PS2 launched. PS2 launched with games back up at $49, and then Sony followed Microsoft's lead and upped it to $59 for the PS3. So if you look at a narrow window of time, you see games going $39 -> $49 -> $59, but that doesn't give the full picture. Throw in inflation, and the increased costs, and games are shockingly inexpensive.

Sone SNES cartridges were even more expensive: Chrono Trigger was $79.99

This is what I remember, thanks for clarifying.

$40 in 1995 is about $64 now.

The prices have probably changed a little, sure, but a lot of that is just inflation.

You must have more expensive habits then me. Most of sports people do does not cost much money except if you go fashionable with cloth. Basketball, soccer and such require basically ball and place (which is available for free here). Same with running. Hanging with friends is basically free, so is reading (library) and watching tv.

You can go fancy with entertainment, but people who don't have much money tend not to. In that context, $400 is not such a little investment. (Through phone games can be played for free.)

>Basketball, soccer and such require basically ball and place (which is available for free here).

They also require you to be good at it to enjoy it, have slow and painful learning (depending on shape), and require you to be in a group interested in it. Unless you got in to it early on in your life it's not easy to pick up - unlike video games

Your comment is definitely true. While the argument that sports are cheaper than video games does have some merit I contend that the barrier to entry for video games is much much lower than sports. With video games their learning curves are typically very gentle, you can play video games by yourself if others aren't available to join you, you can play from home, etc.

That's not to say that anything is wrong with sports, because I definitely feel sports are awesome, but rather that I genuinely feel it's easier to jump into gaming than to organize a team sport like a game of basketball at the local park.

Shoes? Basketball you want ankle support; football you want a stiff sole with good grip, usually studs ('cleats' I think in en-us).

Studded boots ain't cheap.

I've spent about £5 on a video game and played for a few hundred hours. Discounting the computer, the only other cost is probably mouse & keyboard wear and tear ... and life.

This. I specifically used MMOs during periods of my life when money was short. You'd be surprised how expensive food is in comparison to a 25$ monthly subscription fee, and how fulfilling having actions cause their intended results is.

That's interesting... growing up, I always saw video games as expensive—both needing to buy the game and needing to update the system or computer every few years—but sports as the budget choice. There are so many sports you can play with just having access to a park and a $10 ball or frisbee.

Yes and I'd add the ones available on your phone: 99cents, or even free.

There is an episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" where Charlie, a character who never gets any success in life (a janitor living in a dump of an apartment, gets rejected by his love interest constantly, abused by his friends, etc) gets really engrossed in an online videogame. He becomes really good at it, and exclaims "I'm thriving! I never get to thrive, and I want to be the guy who thrives for once! It's like when I'm doing good in the game, I'm doing good in real life!"

It feels like there's an interesting insight there - if you're near the bottom of ladder in life (in an area with few/no jobs, have a hard time making friends, have no money for activities, etc), positive feedback loops can be few and far between, and it is very hard to get a feel for whether you're actually making progress or not. Work hard in life, and maybe you can reap some rewards years and years later, or maybe not (working at Walmart 20 years won't make you wealthy, or a respected Walmart executive). But work hard in a videogame for a few weeks or months, and you can have very concrete evidence of your progress. It's not hard to see why people would prefer investing hours in the latter then.

Maybe that's where the appeal of the army lies for some. The very clear hierarchy means you know exactly where you fit, and what the path to the next rung of the ladder is - something that is true in very few other organizations.

Video games also provide a quality sorely lacking in real life. They try very hard to prevent cheating, because if there's too much cheating, or too much inequality between players, no one will play.

Hmmm...

Exactly, that's why runescape and world of warcraft have adopted the marxist game mechanic of automatically redistributing all resources and exp between all players at the end of every day.

Warcraft is nearly a pure meritocracy. I might not have very much when I start, but there is a clear path that I can take to level up. In short, Warcraft is fair.

It is exactly that dynamic of actually being predictably rewarded for hard work that people are finding in these games.

Redistribution schemes may seem just but they are very seldom anything approaching fair. Its no surprise that they almost never appear in any game mechanics.

That's funny that to you "turning off cheating" somehow becomes fully automated communism.

If I were a kid and there was some game where my one of my peers always won because their parents let them spend literally hundreds of dollars on advanced gear that would cost me months of gameplay hours, I wouldn't want to play it. The game's updates and design would probably drift towards rpping off that kid's parents instead of maximzing fun. For some people, this is already real life for them.

In WoW, if my peer has a rare sword, it's not because his mom bought it.

People don't pay real money for in game items?

Lots of people don't pay extra for in game items.

Designers of videogames as a matter of fact twist your luck so you can win and keep playing:

http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/how-designers-engineer-luck-i...

Reminds me of this Wired article from years ago:

The Unreal Estate Boom

https://www.wired.com/2003/01/gaming-2/

Not long ago, a 43-year-old Wonder Bread deliveryman named John Dugger logged on to eBay and, as people sometimes do these days, bought himself a house. Not a shabby one, either. Nine rooms, three stories, rooftop patio, walls of solid stonework – it wasn't quite a castle, but it put to shame the modest redbrick ranch house Dugger came home to every weeknight after a long day stocking the supermarket shelves of Stillwater, Oklahoma. Excellent location, too; nestled at the foot of a quiet coastal hillside, the house was just a hike away from a quaint seaside village and a quick commute from two bustling cosmopolitan cities. It was perfect, in short, except for one detail: The house was imaginary.

Of course, because the lower salaries, the high prices of the houses and the global crisis during these years has nothing to do with the unemployment in the young population.

The article does note this, albeit using "good job" as a proxy for "all the things one might have historically expected to stem from having a good job."

This seems like a forewave of the trends that point towards the basic income argument. Fewer productive jobs being necessary than labor force to fill them results in bifurcation of the labor market: between overpaid specialties (e.g. software dev) and underpaid make-work (e.g. McDonald's and Walmart) there's been a hollowing out "historically normal" jobs that don't take specialized knowledge but are still productive enough to afford a good quality of life.

In the face of this, opting out and escaping into a virtual world seems fairly reasonable. Especially if you're on the losing end of whatever the current hot specializations are.

I think this sector is now a embodied in sales/marketing. It's reasonable to expect from some one to become a productive salesperson after a few months. This professional will have many options from online marketing through mall cart sales to selling cloud services to corporations

Anything that can be eaten by software will be eaten by sufficiently advance software eventually.

I can't think of any substantial value-adds from sales/marketing in the future to necessitate adding jobs there. High value (e.g. Apple) is currating a brand and most value is added at the top (average Genius salary looks around $45k [1]). Low value (e.g. Android OEMs) doesn't have the profit margins to support a larger human-sales/marketing team. And commodity (e.g. McDonald's) is high-level strategic branding with essentially no low level value add.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Mac-Genius-Salaries-E...

You need a particular kind of personality to do well in sales and most people don't have it. Most sales people end up dropping out.

What a nightmare vision that gives me; Automation and lucky people who randomly chose the right skillset work, producing more and more of the core economy, and the rest of the meatbags are left selling stuff to each other?

What happens when many business services are selected from automated markets... I guess we all sell custom hand-made widgets to each other?

This is the easy response to the article. It is partially true, but the article is more true than you're giving it credit for.

There are other articles about this (e.g. http://www.vulture.com/2017/02/video-games-are-better-than-r...) all confirming that unemployed people who play video games don't have the same increase in unhappiness that other unemployed people have. Which might be good for their short-term well-being, and is something to keep in mind for the post-scarcity UBI future if that ever happens, but in the medium term worrying, both for the individuals and for the economy generally.

There are currently sectors- like construction- which are having trouble finding labor as the economy picks back up. Are these people going to avoid re-entering the labor force even when they can get a job, and are we ready for the consequences of that? And even if they do, they'll be starting out way behind on building household wealth and work experience.

-if the post-scarcity UBI future ever happens-

I live in a country that throws away half of its prepared food. Like we're not even talking about some chopped up animal corpse that sits out for too long and has to be discarded before it goes rancid - in the US we strait-up assemble food in some factory, wrap it plastic, burn fuel shipping said wrapped and assembled food to a store halfway across the country, unwrap the food, put it in another container, and then at the end of the day just toss the remaining contents of the container into the garbage bin because you've got a few more tons of shipped and prepared food already in storage that needs to be sold. This is the post-scarcity future.

It won't be a problem* unless we make more of us. Political and religious leaders that oppose education and planned parenthood are the long term problem.

Ok, slaughtering is a problem, but I think it will sort itself out eventually.

don't you think it's a much bigger issue that we are normalized to a profoundly wasteful life style? this isn't really a population problem, it's an energy per capita problem.

No. It's primarily a population problem, although that does not mean that we should not manage the resources we have as efficient as possible.

To be fair we're also hurtling toward ecological catastrophe and it's not clear we're gonna be able to do that indefinitely.

I don't think "we should strive to make unemployed people more miserable so they're more motivated to work" is a proposition worthy of serious consideration.

Economy is not helped by people being eternally miserable - miserable people are less likely to find another job, more likely to start drugs or commit crime. Depression does not tend to incite people towards meaningfull action. Staring into wall does not build work experience anymore then game. Nor does hanging around cheap alcohol with other unemployed.

I do not know what the issue with construction is, but it is highly unlikely that the same city have thousands unemployed playing games who could otherwise work there - if only they were a bit more miserable.

I dunno, there's a line. Being a little bit uncomfortable can spur one to action. Most new parents are driven to be attentive partly out of a fear of killing or harming their child, for instance. Being just miserable enough to be motivated towards something healthy is actually good - the trouble is that it's very easy to be tipped over into destructive comfort-seeking.

It's the logic of Late Capitalism: all problems and failings are those of the individual, never of the system.

While that may indeed be the propaganda, blaming addicts for their addictions can be victim-blaming. Some of the rhetoric blames the video game companies more than the consumers…

no, not if the addict's diction is directed ad everyone else's faults but his own. Of course I am bending the definition https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/addico#Latin

There's a pendulum swing - focusing on the problems of the system, and focusing on the problems of the individual.

In truth, there are problems both in the system and with individuals, and failings in each reinforce the other, and effective aspects of each also reinforce each other.

The article addresses this: "While games improved since the turn of the century, labour-market options for young people got worse." That paragraph goes into more detail how the market has not been good for young people, and thus they turn to games, not the other way around.

If you read the paper it doesn't say that in the conclusions.

The second to last paragraph suggests it is a possibility though:

"To draw a firm conclusion, however, would take a clearer understanding of the direction of causation. While games improved since the turn of the century, labour-market options for young people got worse. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated for young college graduates since the 1990s, while pay for new high-school graduates has declined. The share of young high-school and college graduates not in work or education has risen; in 2014 about 11% of college graduates were apparently idle, compared with 9% in 2004 and 8% in 1994. The share of recent college graduates working in jobs which did not require a college degree rose from just over 30% in the early 2000s to nearly 45% a decade later. And the financial crisis and recession fell harder on young people than on the population as a whole. For people unable to find demanding, full-time work (or any work at all) gaming is often a way to spend some of one’s unwanted downtime, rather than a lure out of work; it is much more a symptom of other economic ills than a cause."

I said the paper, not the article in the economist. It is funny the article it is based on a paper which draws different conclusions.

Right, but the question I'd be interested in hearing more about is why gaming as a response to that unemployment? I'm recently unemployed (by my own choice), and am playing less games. I'm spending my extra time hiking, swimming, kayaking, etc. I actually deleted the games I used to play from my computer. I certainly have the time now to play more... but I'm in my mid-40s, and I did grow up on games, yet it seems far more enjoyable to me to go outside and unplug. So there is definitely a generational difference going on here.

Now imagine you're in your 20s and were laid off 6 months ago. You have no savings, no partner, and no in-demand skills. You bought a console and some games last year when you still had a job. $10 will pay for a month of online play, bus fare and a day pass at the pool, or enough gas for two trips to the nearest trailhead. You don't really enjoy playing video games all day, but it keeps your mind off your troubles, which is more than you can say for hiking.

I don't think your situation is typical even for people your own age. I suspect the biggest generational difference is TV vs. video games.

Video games are sometimes hammered a bit too hard. They certainly have their negative impacts, but the media harps on the downsides so much they often obscure benefits. They're one of the few forms of entertainment that actually force you to think--it's very easy to consume movies, television, and even leisurely books without thinking hard or at all, 'passive consumption'. Video games, by their nature, force you to at least use your noggin a little. Sure it probably becomes passive consumption too once you've played a particular game enough and have habituated skills, but at least it's engaging your mind on some level at the start. They can also fuel a healthy (though of course, potentially unhealthy) sense of competition, which other entertainment, aside from physical sports, can't.

I've become more aware of these little benefits as I've stopped playing games in lieu of other priorities. That being said, I don't think I'll go back to playing video games to any intense or serious degree any time soon--they really are quite addictive. I guess because they tap into those natural human drives for accomplishment, control, and competition, unlike other forms of entertainment. It's a fun hobby, and probably third best as far as general benefits go, behind creative hobbies and sports. That being said, it is way too easy to get sucked in, and to, as this article seems to suggest, let games become a substitute for more meaningful structures in your life.

I also play games because it keeps my mind active even when I have fun. That's the reason why I don't like watching series beacuse it is passive. I've also noticed that I have more fun nowadays writing games than playing them.

There's worse forms of escapism that are far less stimulating.

Alcohol or drugs, for example.

It's nice we live in an age where there's engaging entertainment like video games instead of just more passive entertainment like TV.

I don't know if drugs are less stimulating. Simulation of a different kind, to be sure, but probably not less in intensity.

Certain drugs, such as psychedelics, can also provide opportunities for personal reflection and growth.

>Alcohol or drugs, for example.

drugs like marijuana make everything more stimulating. Food tastes better, music sounds better, you can enjoy movies from almost any genre.You can get into great conversations with your partner where you are actually interested in what they are saying. Get over musicians block and let the music flow. so on.

Utter bollocks. That's the placebo effect that comes with being so doped up that one couldn't tell a good painting from a bad one, eg.

millions of people smoking marijuana for the placebo effect? ok.

read this https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/science-says-weed-ma...

You think it's being perceived to chemo patients for the placebo effect?

https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side-effects...

No, I'm not gonna read that and I'm still going to call bullshit. Neither did I claim any reason for anyone to smoke. Nor does the rest of your comment make any sense.

> perceived

prescribed

> chemo patients

are we still talking about stimulation or in fact about the opposite? You just said chemo patients want to feel their pain intensified, if I got that right.

I'm sure you are looking for a stimulating conversation to learn more about it. In return you should stop trying to educate other people, even more so when you get your information from vice of all places.

To restate my point, there is no intrinsic quality in dope that would boost creativity and sensibility, quite the opposite actually. Only once the effects start wearing down, a relative increase will be felt.

Most people are just expecting something out of doing it so they become convinced to have achieved something and that might actually be the case to some degree, but mostly it appears bigger in hindsight than it actually was because of clouded judgment.

Edit:

The consequence is that people get exited anyway and exhaust that because of numbing effects until much later after the fact.

as others have pointed out to you: please don't lump all drugs under the same umbrella.

games are combined with drugs often enough, eat least sugar and coffein and so on

sugar?! you know what plants are made of don't you?

Pretty sure he meant refined sugar, which has been proven time and time again that it is both very addictive and very bad for your health.

Please, games are far more addictive. Stimulating? Depends on what you play. MMO's can be worse than heroin.

>MMO's can be worse than heroin.

Is there a study for this to show us what it measures?

It's pretty difficult to overdose on MMOs or get a super-high dose fentanyl batch. I'm not sure how you get worse than death.

The actual paper is really interesting.

Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/system/files/event_papers/lei...

After recently becoming unemployed, and in my spare time when not looking for jobs, I finally started working on my gaming backlog from sales (e.g. Witcher 3) and experimented with games that have a time commitment I have been avoiding, such as MMOs and League of Legends (which I ended up stopping because the rumors of a toxic playerbase are not inaccurate)

At the least, I got it out of my system and am now back to personal technical projects/blogging.

I think it's important to be mindful that entertainment like video games in moderation is entirely acceptable. We must not squeeze productivity out of every waking hour in the day.

If you replace "productivity" with "utility" you might find more consistency.

On positive side, until recently economic crisis caused crime rate to go up. However, after 2007-2008 crisis the overall crime rate has not increased.

https://phys.org/news/2015-09-link-economy-crime-broken.html

There are a lot of hypothesis to explain that, but I believe computer games played some role in that.

There also seems to be inverse relation between consuming porn and rapes.

However I think the strongest connection seems to be in the amount of lead in the blood and crime. The crime rates seem to fall everywhere in the world (with predictable delay) after that country restricts lead in gasoline. We know that lead is causes developmental problems in children (like problems with impulse control).

I used to joke that unemployed players with nothing else to do ruin online play with hyper competitiveness when someone like me wants to play once a week or month. May not be far fetched after all.

Aside being a former gamer (no time anymore) and having worked in the games industry for 6 years, that stock photo is a prime example of the ridiculous way game playing is portrayed on TV and film and by publications that don't know much about games. No one ever plays games with their controller held that way and their arms reaching out.

Anyone new to video games does things like that photo (push the controller forward when punch/kick/shoot/go fast, turn the controller to the side you want your character to go, &c.)

If nothing else, at least those economists have found the solution to keep people occupied when AI renders half the world unemployed. Now the premise of the Matrix doesn't seem so far fetched after all.

Isn't the premise, unbearably absurd even by the standards of the rest of the movie, that humans are used as a power supply?

They wanted them to be used for processing, but producers: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/116473

Wasn't that going to rest on the tired old "10% of your brain" trope? Pulling that one out would have bothered me a great deal more than the battery analogy.

NEO: The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

[0] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1263/is-the-basic-...

Now that's a movie I'd like to see. I mean, if you're going to simulate a universe, what's stopping you from playing around with the parameters a bit? Or at the very least, cutting some corners to save processing time.

Isn't this a theory that's sometimes used to support the simulation hypothesis? The idea that weird effects in nature such as wave/particle duality are the simulation's way of cutting down on processing time, something like reducing draw distance in a 3D game.

It's probably the kind of thing that will be easily debunked by a real physicist (if you are one, go ahead) but I find the idea quite mind-blowing if I think about it for too long.

Rather, it's a reduction of our processing, in our head, if anything. The dialog is correct, noone in school manages to verify quantum physics.

> cutting some corners to save processing time

I've seen this as an explanation for quantum uncertainty.

Here's my favorite fan theory from HPMOR:

>NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

>MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

>NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

>MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

>(Pause.)

>NEO: ...in the Matrix.

>MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

>(Pause.)

>NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

>MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

That's what the people in Zion believes, not necessarily what was really going on: https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-the-sentient-machines-in-the...

my understanding is that the original draft of the script had humans being used as a massively parallel distributed processing network. their own brains were the wetware that run the matrix simulation program. that's more sensible and a much more profound statement as to the philosophical connections between the matrix and the social construction of consciousness, which was a major theme of the film.

but then some shit-for-brains hollywood producers read the script, decided it was too intellectual/nerdy and had it rewritten as "humans are batteries" which is gibberish to anyone with an education, but hollywood loves the lowest common denominator.

Strictly speaking, Morpheus held up a battery at the end of his little talk. Humans make no sense as an energy source, obviously, but fat has a reasonably solid energy density for its volatility.

My personal headcanon is that the machines were laboring under something akin to Asimov's three laws, which required that they preserve humanity. The Matrix, then is a loophole, something which technically satisfies the requirements of their core programming, but in a way that is advantageous to the machines.

But then, once you've got all those people hooked up, you might as well make some use out of them. They aren't the most efficient battery around, but if you've got to keep them anyway, they might as well serve as a load balancer. The people of Zion just came later and mistook an ancillary benefit for the machine's primary purpose.

The premise is that there was a war between humanity and its creations, and the creations won. Subsequently humanity was imprisoned in a virtual world. The specifics on why imprisonment was the chosen punishment is just detail and window dressing.

This is a weird article.

"Young people earn less, face higher unemployment rates than ever, and have been hit hard by financial recessions. Are video games to blame?"

Why is this piece all about jobs? Where's the family aspect? The hours playing games that could have been spent socializing, courting, going to a bar, having sex? Those things are even more important than working hard at a career. Sorry but this does sound very American to me. You have a very work focused culture, it's where esteem is earned it seems. I think that is also a bit troubling.

In the end it is very simply though wherever you are from, you can either spend your time consuming or you can spend it creating.

Depends on who you ask. Some people tend to work harder on their careers than their social life. Might benefit them more even if it looks different to you. In my opinion there is not much difference (in regards to being social) between me going to the bar with my friends or joining a voice server to play games with my friends.

The direction of causation (if there is one at all) is rather important as the article states. I have no time for video games at all, no I have no good feel for how likely they would be preferred over work and real financial independence for all but a very few.

>games will go on getting better

I don't think there's any evidence for this, and the call to panic is based on it.

yeah that makes no sense. Games will go on getting visually better but Gameplay, fun, replayability has very little to do with it.

Not just visually. Increased computing power and richer game frameworks will make for more compelling AIs. There are advances in procedural content generation that are getting past the saminess of endless variations on "kill ten rats." Open modding platforms (e.g. Minecraft) create whole communities around them, and endless supplies of content. I think we're still in the infancy of that trend. The immersivity of VR will make gaming experiences qualitatively more compelling than the screens of the past. There's a lot more going on than just increased polygon counts.

I have spent some time going back and replaying older games that I found amazing when I originally played them. Outside of simple reflex games like Tetris or Mario, game play has not aged well. Play a strategy or RPG video game from the mid 90s and see how fast it takes you to find some exploitable feature that makes the game trivial to beat.

Compare:

1. "Shogun: Total War" to "Warhammer: Total War" or

2. Civ2's city spamming to Civ5 really well designed gameplay.

3. 1993's Stronghold [0] is so easy for modern gamers to win it feels more like an interactive screensaver than a game and it was a great game when it was released.

The only real exception to this rule is RTS games like Starcraft or C&C, but only in multi-player.

tl;dr Gamers and game play are in a Red Queen's race with each other.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stronghold_(1993_video_game)

Games which were cpu limited in 1993 have improved for obvious reasons, but I'd argue that the best games between 2000 and 2008 were qualitatively better than the best games between 2008 and 2016, certainly of equal quality at least.

I think a better way to phrase that might have been "games will become more effective Skinner boxes", as developers discover new and more powerful ways to keep people in the reward loop. Because that's the real concern here.

I don't think there's any evidence of that either.

Games like Candy Crush and Time Clickers are amazingly good Skinner boxes. There certainly seems more that might be done in FPS games, say, to match that sort of dopamine hit.

It's interesting seeing the better gamers "fidget" (in my current game, CS:GO, players switch weapons, or reload, or swish their knife which gives an accompanying short sound effect) which is a self comfort move I think but in the context provides a low level visual-aural stimulus that I suspect is doing duty as a "reward" stimulus akin to that in a Skinner box.

Thoughts?

It's time to start questioning the underlying idea if jobs. We're close to a society that could make work optional or at least people could spend much less time doing it.

the article says that a lack of good jobs in the real word is contributing to this.

Now gamers have their own online communities; I guess that the network of online friends could help to build a real world network to solve real world problems. This would be of great value to the players.

I wonder if future games will have a built in social networking functionality...

Many modern games (especially MMOs) already do, not to mention platforms like steam or xbox live that facilitate both buying games and talking to friends

More like a link between easy entertainment and unemployment. Before games, TV and movies did the same thing.

^Clearly written by a non-gamer.

Leisure time comes from wealth. So a bunch of young men are wealthy enough to not work and play video games instead. All these articles miss the point someone is paying to keep these men playing games.

Who is?

That's a very broad generalization. Videos games, computers/consoles, and internet access are essentially commoditized to the point where an Xbox, some games, and a TV (+ maybe internet) can be found cheaper than an iPhone.

You could easily drive part time for Uber and get your emotional fulfillment from video games without being supported by wealthy parents.

Perfect point Uber is paying them and they play video games. (I love games, and the US is a wealthy country across the board so it does not surprise me that men are enjoying more leisure time at a younger age.) I am pro more video games.

The causation is clear. If you have free time, you spend it.

There might be an indirect causation which is homework vs games, but I suspect that students with less encouragement from their parents to do their homework spend the time on games.

So forbid homework and make the schools take responsibility for actually learning their students something.

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