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nickjj

All 3 of the article's points could be applied to any hobby / passion driven profession.

Next up...

Guitar disorder

Karate disorder

Baseball disorder

Fast forward 10 years...

Someone coins the term "hobby disorder" after detecting numerous patterns of people wasting their life away on doing things they enjoy.

Fast forward 20 years...

Being passionate about anything is a thing of the past. Everyone works a corporate job at 1 of 5 companies in the world (people stopped innovating and a few large tech companies took over everything).

Sounds like a good way to begin the journey towards even more income disparity between the 1% and the rest of us.

</tinfoilhat>

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But there aren't many people (as far as I'm aware?) who forgo self-maintenance to play guitar more and more. Games are uniquely positioned to get someone hooked in the same way that gambling is, because modern games are so well optimised for triggering dopamine release. It's certainly fuzzy, but there's a line between "I do this thing in most of my spare time because it's my passion" and "I neglect important aspects of my life because I'm spending so much time doing this thing".

I think so. I was really addicted to playing the guitar when I was younger. You get that same dopamine release from learning a riff or finally getting through a solo without messing up (which you may end up trying 100 times in a row). Then once you pull it off, you do it again, and again and again because it feels good.

The same thing happens with any skill based activity. Like learning a 120 move form in Karate, or pitching a no hitter (where every single time you prevent a hit, you get that hit of dopamine), etc..

Or programming where you might spend 15 hours a day consumed with it, forgetting to eat, etc., where you might get hundreds of dopamine hits during that time frame. Each one being triggered by your app doing what you wanted it to do.

Some people have a ridiculous amount of determination and will not give up until they do what they set out to do. It doesn't matter if it's a video game or not, the activity will consume them. Video games just make it easier for more people to get addicted, but that deeply rooted dopamine cycle will affect you no matter what you do. If video games didn't exist, you would find something else.

> Fast forward 20 years...

> Being passionate about anything is a thing of the past. Everyone works a corporate job at 1 of 5 companies in the world

And they play videogames to relax. And think life is good this way. Maybe today is the right time to avoid your dystopia.

This is really funny. How much have you "innovated" while gaming? You are living under the thumb of entertainment media already. You're trapped in your time waster instead of innovating.

Everything is a time waster until you know, investments pays off. Playing an instrument is a time waster until it turns into something you can market. Its difficult to judge future benefits of current actions.

Why does everything have to turn into something you can market?

So you spend a few hours playing games and you have nothing to sell or shill on Hackernews. Is that a problem?

Did you enjoy yourself playing those games? Yes? Then why isn't that enough?

Downtime is important.

WE GET IT, you're so smart and great because you don't like video games. We're really impressed over here.

No I'm horribly addicted to them. I'm just honest about the reality.

If you want to be overly reductionist about it, everything you will do in your life is a waste of time.

> Being passionate about anything is a thing of the past. Everyone works a corporate job at 1 of 5 companies in the world (people stopped innovating and a few large tech companies took over everything).

Dumb question here: why is not having to feign passion for every single corner of technology (just to even get a chance at a foot in the door at each particular company) a bad idea?

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