Could someone who feels this way expand on why they have such a negative view on games? Just curious if it’s personal, cultural, or something else?
Also, is it directed at complex games with storylines, online multiplayer, or mobile games meant to pull as much value as possible? Cause one is unlike the others.
More time spent videogaming means less time spent leetcoding, raising VC, and crushing it as a 10x engineer! /s
Game addiction is a thing (as is "tons of hours spent but not clinically addicted"). And unlike e.g. workaholism, it doesn't even result in a career to show for it.
I am "anti" any game that uses psychological tricks to get me to keep playing. And for stuff like Celeste, Gris, and Hellblade and Portal that keep me engaged by providing an inherently fulfilling experience.
It had a fraction of the budget and development man hours of Yooka-Laylee and yet came out better in pretty much every conceivable way. The controls may not be as tight as Celeste's but it's the best 3D platformer I've played in years.
As an aside, I almost hated Celeste. I’d given up on it and uninstalled it, but was prompted to try again by a YouTube comment (of all things) and when I did, a few screens after where I stopped, it got good. Incredibly unbelievably good. I’m glad I gave it another chance!
My scarce gaming time these days seems to be spent playing stuff from the 80s/90s and arcade games that I can pick up and put down easily. I don't even do mobile games, the grinding and dark patterns annoy the hell out of me.
I talked to a developer of a popular free-to-play game, and he told me of many of the psychological hooks they use in their game.
Exploitation of hoarding behavior, community fame for specific players, random occurrences that are carefully scripted, etc.
Nowadays it's hard to find games free of ulterior motives.
Yes, addictive games and personalities have always existed, but now there's money mixed in.
I'm not even sure what kind of "old" game you're picturing that you think didn't have "money mixed in" - tetris? pong? goldeneye?
No, most online games don’t count as social. They’re anonymous, faceless, and typically populated with the utter dregs of humanity willing to say the most vile thing to get attention. Genuine human interaction this is not.
The social experience has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Carnival games and casinos are also engineered to prey on the same human responses - often transparently engineered to be addictive - yet are social environments too.
Plus the people who develop problems will often be sat on their own - hooked on the machine they're playing and oblivious to anyone around them in spite of the social setting.
> No, most online games don’t count as social. They’re anonymous, faceless, and typically populated with the utter dregs of humanity willing to say the most vile thing to get attention. Genuine human interaction this is not.
That very much depends on the game and community you meet. Some fall into the category you describe while there are others that do not.
There are plenty of inspiring stories like the following that show good communities and genuine friendships can spring from online gaming:
Or, pretty typical 13 to 25 year olds, millions of them, people that could be your son or daughter or friend, and who you enjoy the company otherwise everyday...
>willing to say the most vile thing to get attention. Genuine human interaction this is not
Or perhaps totally genuine (which is different than "compassionate"), and context-appropriate?
It's a competition, from the ancient times you're meant to take sides, disparage the opponent, sing a nice insulting song against the other team, and enjoy crushing them!
How about an old adventure game, where you were expected to pay once, enjoy the story and quizzes, and complete in X time (no "dark patterns" etc)?
And of which the creators were as passionate about the their creation and genre as you, as opposed to cynical 'let's make another addictive MMOG' or 'let's make another FarmVille' or 'let's make Angry Birds 335' studios?
Food also has "money mixed in" but you can have a honest local food joint, and you can also have a global "give them crap" chain like McDonalds. Sometimes with identical prices too.
This is how I feel too. All games are addictive and have psychological "feel good" hooks in them. However it feels like a lot of those scummy mobile games prioritize engineering addiction and exploiting those hooks over making a fun game. Add to that recent controversies about some games being considered gambling which, as an industry, shares this goal of making people addicted to the rush so that they spend more.
What pains me the most is that it works. People vote with wallets and support these developers.
The real exception is gambling games.
And I did think along the same lines (in a very minor way) with arcade games. Pinball - where skill let you prolong a game gave way to video games (like pacman or tetris you mentioned), which quickly got too hard to keep going. And it went further when games like gauntlet kept you feeding quarters in a pay to play way.
But at that time, we got atari and nintendo and so forth. Pay once, play for a long time. Kids grew up with this, and parents worried about the cost of a cartridge.
But the current crop of games is free, yet blatantly money oriented. Plants vs Zombies pre-EA vs post-EA comes to mind. Add grinding and then pay to not grind.
Yes, a little rose colored. But in vegas you can actually register as a compulsive gambler and the casinos will not serve you.
Games are often treated as, and judged as, timesinks. A good game is simply a good timesink. A good timesink makes use of addictive/gambling mechanics. And most games rely heavily on them (sometimes unintentionally; this is likely less true the closer you get to today).
But in my opinion games can be a lot more interesting than that, and “enjoyable” is a crass description of it. For example, I probably put over 2000 hours into league of legends when I was younger, but those hours were mostly a waste. Back then, I described it as enjoyable. Now I realize I never cared about LoL, I just had my social life there. The game was never actually good, and what little I actually think of it is only about the human components (and a little about how not to design a competitive game). The 15 hours I put into star control 2 were far more valuable (if only because it informed me how little, if not backwards, we progressed from it to mass effect, in terms of game design).
I have a negative opinion on games, but its because I like them. Most games are shit, and the industry has mostly been getting worse over time.
Also out of your three, I know you were referring to “complex games with storylines” as the “good” type, but taking a random lottery, multiplayer games are the only ones with any reasonable hope of actually being interesting, mostly by accident. Most “complex games” are completely superficial; multiplayer games naturally bring depth by “cheating” — the humans bring 90% of it.
But I like games. Theoretically. Sometimes, in practice.
I’d love to hear more about this, although I guess it’s a bit off topic... I played LoL for a while, but never too obsessively or heavily. It was mainly an activity to share with some coworkers so I suppose, like you say, it wasn’t so much about the game itself. I certainly didn’t play it competitively, so maybe that’s why I don’t see it as bad as you make it sound. (I also hear it’s got worse and more lootbox greedy. I last played it circa 2014).
One set of “complex” non-multiplayer (at least, 90% of the time I played single player) games that I do, personally, find incredibly interesting on a multitude of levels are the FROM SOFTWARE games. Even ignoring the difficulty (although I really do enjoy the challenge — or more accurately, when I eventually overcome it), I love the world building, the characters, the intricate level design, the deep but vague and mostly environmental storytelling, the rich implied but often left open to interpretation lore, the aesthetics and the voice acting of Demons’ Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne and in the past two weeks, Sekiro. I could (and have done) play nothing but one of these games for months and still find them interesting. Few they games manage this, for me, though.
I'm not sure HN is the place to discuss such things, and I'm not sure even that interesting – the major gripes are mostly obvious, but fundamental; eg reliance on champion-global external systems like summoner spells, runes and whatever they call their current system, which all make it extremely difficult to balance things locally. They've been consistently getting better at it. Lootboxes that is, not game design.
>find incredibly interesting on a multitude of levels are the FROM SOFTWARE games.
FROM is an interesting company, because they were never meant to be popular. They were happy wiling away in their obscurity, constantly iterating on the same niche games (King's Field, Armored Core, etc), until DeS became an accidental hit; I'm not sure the popularity was good for them – the games are misunderstood as simply "difficult" (typically compared to "arcade difficult", but they're not; they're punishing, they trick you, and require a minimal degree of patience that can be found in almost no other modern game, but they eventually push you towards success. Arcade difficult is a vastly different beast, asking for pixel-perfect input, few if any alternative strategies, repetitive play and exceptional punishment to wring those juicy quarters out of you), and that moniker apparently confused From's weaker teams, leading to the mess of DaS 2/3. Annoyingly, their Souls success seems to eaten Armored Core's lunch too.
Probably the most amazing thing about FROM is that they actually learn from their previous work. You can look at King's Field -> DaS lineage and see actual, consistent improvement. Even when they sidestep into Bloodborne and Sekiro, they manage to take lessons with them (and make new mistakes).
But yeah, the industry has its companies and its auteurs. Platinum, Grasshopper Studio, From Software, Clover, iD, Blizzard North, Sid Meier, Kojima, Carmack, Ford & Reichie, Tarn/Zach Adams, (From & Nintendo's) Miyazaki, Mikami, etc. And you'll consistently find interesting output from them, and games worth their salt (Carmack is a bit funny because he doesn't really give a shit about games, his stuff is always technically interesting, and sometimes game-interesting).
But the annoying thing is that that you can take probably 90% of games today, and find something that did the same thing better 20 years ago. Hell, I'm beginning to doubt most game designers are even aware games existed before 2000.
The only thing we're making any real progress on is graphics.. and thats just towards realism. We've lost a lot in style. I mean hell, it's difficult to find games where player interaction is even a base concept of its design, and thats the primary thing games introduce as a medium!
> the major gripes are
Ah, yes, I agree with that at all. You can feel how hard the balancing is from how they kept changing the existing characters, basically, trial-and-error balancing.
> leading to the mess of DaS 2/3
DaS 2 is a good game, if taken on its own merit. Its just that compared to DaS 1, it was a step backwards (certainly in terms of world and level design). DaS 3 I really like. It has a lot of missed opportunities in terms of the world and the world is less interesting because of it (I also largely feel that being able to bonfire teleport from the start is to blame -- in the first one, no teleport, connected level design and scattered merchants meant you had to learn the level layout because you would travel through it a lot), but overall, its a lot more refined than the earlier games in terms of mechanics and controls and the game itself was pretty good. At least, I don't call it a mess. I do like DaS 1 and BB more (maybe even DeS too), but I don't dislike it at all. I do wish for an Armoured Core game though (and Tenchu, although Sekiro scratches that itch for now).
I don't fully agree that the only real progress is in graphics. Yes, there are many uninspired games out now, but there is plenty of progress being made, in my opinion, outside of graphics, certainly in things like branching storylines and just in general games are mechanically more refined (camera and controls of 3D games are now a solved thing, back in the early days of 3D, both were terrible) and certainly if you look beyond the AAA games, there's a lot of creativity (story, gameplay mechanics). But even the shiney graphically fancy 3D games like God of War managed to pull together an experience that is more than just graphics. However, I do agree that many less-inspired AAA titles focus on visuals at the expense of everything else still, I just think there are enough alternative options that I can ignore those games without missing anything and still having more games to play than I have time for.
> it's difficult to find games where player interaction is even a base concept of its design, and thats the primary thing games introduce as a medium!
Agreed, too many games really do suck at this and I agree that this is where games could (eventually will, IMHO) shine compared to other types of entertainment, but they're certainly not there yet.
I wasted a large chunk of my life on Counterstrike, Arma 3, DayZ Mod, PUBG, and countless console games. _Thousands_ of hours in total. For me, games were more than an escape or simply a way to unwind. For me, they were a well-hidden addiction. They were an obstacle to reaching my potential. I can't see myself going back to games again and still being as happy as I am now.
I miss games sometimes -- I still occasionally watch them on Twitch or YouTube -- but quitting cold turkey over a year ago has been one of the best decisions I ever made. That I didn't give them up 10 years earlier is a source of great regret.
I'm probably not going to ban my children from playing games they buy with their own money, but I'll definitely have plenty of long talks with them about the dangers of gaming.
As graphics keep improving I would argue that it might even replace cinema in the future, to some degree.
Also, gaming is just a vast area that it's hard to generalize the whole thing as "scourge". Some games improve critical thinking and can actually be great educational tools. Would you just read a boring history book or activelly engage in the political situation of medieval Europe by playing something like Europa Universalis.
The mechanism is strongly dependent on the person. I have much more of a problem with TV shows and fiction books than with videogames, because I'm a sucker for stories. A TV show or a book series can offer couple dozen hours of engaging storyline; most story-based video games are either much shorter, or the story is crap; the book-series-quality videogame storylines are few and far between. That's probably why I never got addicted to multiplayer games. By their nature they have no quality stories, so they bore me out quickly.
(I'm aware that there are people for whom the "active engagement" part is a core ingredient in addiction. I'm just saying that it's not the only mechanism, and different people are susceptible to different things.)
Substitute "football" or "drinking with friends" or other outdoor activities for the videogames here. Or "reading a book". It's all the same thing. It's natural for young people today (at least those in more well-off places) to spend absurd amounts of time in a way they later on may consider waste. It's natural for adults to spend some time like this too. We call this entertainment - stuff you do for fun.
Grass is always greener, but you'd probably burn out if you tried to spend those thousand of hours working in your economical self-interest instead. If you were doing something else for fun instead, you could be regretting that today, wishing you played some videogames a bit more. And even if you wouldn't, you would be a different person. The time you spent on videogames - the experiences, the stories, the people - are a part of you right now. And it's not like videogames are unique in enabling escapism; if you look around, plenty of people are escaping from their lives into books, or sports.
I have yet to see anyone seeking treatment because they read too many books or spend too much time with their friends.
I do find it disingenuous that you happened to leave off many of the negative interactions that have also dropped in occurrences when people don't 'hang out with friends'. Young men in particular, when hanging out in groups, have a penchant to find trouble or commit crimes. People don't seek treatment for hanging out with their friends, they seek treatment because they hang out and drink/do drugs with their friends, etc.
Almost any behavior can become negative. People also tend to min/max.
One of these is not like the others.
It is not like games would be special in impact when you do it too much. What is special is that most people cant play football that much due to physical limitations.
So when book reading has the same addictive quality that makes one play till night regularly or that makes you yell at kids because they interrupted your play, people complain all the same. It just happen less often with books and movies, because of their shorter length and easier way to space out sessions.
- Equating games to watching football is disingenuous at best. Games tire you out mentally. I liked games because it gave me a thousand things to track at once and optimize (big fan of cataclysm DDA/Aurora/factorio/rimworld). But that came at a cost - am a zombie at the end of the session, fully drained. (Definitely happy). This is a big reason why I switched to watching videos instead. I definitely don't have the mental bandwidth for this.
- equating videogames to outdoor activities is again disingenuous. Outdoor activities have a definite social component to them (NO - eve didn't replicate this to even a small extent). Not to mention the health benefits. I know the general world is going towards more of a 'controlled experience', but I am still a strong believer in outdoors and semi-controlled experiences.
- Video games and books are definitely escapism. But fiction just doesn't engage your mind in the same way. Most non-fiction books either I will have to dedicate study time for it OR just fall asleep 30 pages in. All the motor function engagement and quick dopamine hits are just not the same in books.
I am not against video games, my thousands of steam / youtube hours should make that clear. BUT diluting the effect of them just makes the argument muddled.
IMO Video games are essentially alcohol without the liver-effects. Yeah it's a lot of fun in moderation if you are in control (OR if it doesn't pull you in like it does to addictive personalities) but they can pull you down a rabbit hole too deep to climb out of.
I'd say such blanket statement is disingenuous as well. I can understand that playing complex games (like the ones you mentioned) can be mentally draining, but I don't believe a simple shooter or racing game would have the same effect.
And the same is true for watching videos - it all depends on the content you play/watch. If I'd be watching a video of someone teaching quantum physics, then I'm sure I'd also find myself mentally drained afterwards, even more so.
> equating videogames to outdoor activities is again disingenuous
Well, they are obviously different, not only because of the social component (which, as you wrote, is deeper in team sports) or health (but the balance is still shifting due to VR). They are also different because games train the mind, while sports do not.
> IMO Video games are essentially alcohol without the liver-effects. Yeah it's a lot of fun in moderation if you are in control (OR if it doesn't pull you in like it does to addictive personalities) but they can pull you down a rabbit hole too deep to climb out of.
Pretty much anything is "esentially alcohol without the liver-effects", if consumed without moderation. An adult person should know their own limits and be able to stop an activity, before it pulls them in, regardless of the type of activity.
Offline games can be played when I want (mostly in the evening for an hour or so) and there's no pressure to improve like in Dota 2 and WoW.
One of my favourite purchases recently was a PSP Vita, I can emulate most GB, GBC, GBA, PS, PSP, PS Vita, and many others and I'm having a whole lot of fun going back to play many games that I'd missed in the past.
HN has many grown-ups, which might skew it a little from the "games all the time are great / custom game rig" demographic.
>Also, is it directed at complex games with storylines, online multiplayer, or mobile games meant to pull as much value as possible? Cause one is unlike the others.
In the end, their value is time wasted translated into money. It's not like even the more evolved ones make some big artistic statement with deep meaning. Even the best are at the level of a Hollywood movie (and usually closer to Michael Bay than Kubrick).
I can't say of anybody's personal goals, but "time spent doing something [one] enjoys" is often wasted.
First, because every time you spent has an opportunity cost.
Second, because empirically peoples' future self often doesn't have the same priorities, and occasionally finds "time spend doing something they enjoyed" wasted and a bad choice.
How many regret e.g. wasting too much time gaming when they should have been e.g. studying or practicing, when they turn 25 and have nothing to show for it?
Even when I still played and did not yet seen addiction in practice up close yet, I realized that complex game with storylines and online multiplayer games are build for people who have the kind of free time that is incompatible with full time job, family and additional learning.
After all, I could double the length of Game X by adding twice as many handmade maps, well written and acted cut scenes, and carefully designed encounters - or I could double the length by adding extra grind.
The former would be something to be celebrated; the latter wouldn't.
Gamers are getting older. As in, the median age of people who identify as "gamers" is higher now than ever before. Part of this is because people who grew up with video games as children are now adults. People have always played games (chess is a great example) it's just what role gaming has played in the culture changes.
Since you now have a larger demographic of older gamers, you're going to start hearing more voices echoing this. When I was in college, I could spend 20+ hours a week playing video games until 3 AM. Now that I'm older and married I'm lucky if I get 5 hours a week for non-mobile games. I'm going to have a different evaluation of a title. The last thing I want is to buy a shiny new FPS just to get pwnd repeatedly by some 14 year old who keeps tbagging me and screaming racist taunts. Loot crates and pay-to-win feels gross because I don't want to dump money that I could be using for home repairs on add-ons for my toys.
I'm not anti-games. I love games. But I can hate tons of aspects of the games (like I mentioned above) or call out the toxicity of gamer culture and still be a part of it. This is a stark contrast to 15 years ago when we all needed to band together to explain that games can be art and that FPSs to lead to school shootings.
As a general rule I think "hours of enjoyment" is about as optimal as you can get for leisure payoff, the alternative "how much I learned" is nice too, whether that's literal stuff (like trivia), strategic growth or else can vary on a title-to-title basis.
But I do understand where you're coming from.
You just described mountaineering, rock climbing, skiing, running a marathon, skydiving, surfing, scuba diving, and just about every other amateur athletic pursuit.
That's a benefit for those who consider it a benefit. I personally don't find this interesting.
> social bonding
This applies to plenty of videogames as well - both directly to multiplayer, and to singleplayer games as social objects for discussions with other people.
> cardiovascular/muscular/mental fitness, tolerance to pain
In the same sense, videogames exercise your reaction time, complex reasoning skills and spatial awareness.
Point being - side effects are side effects, but both videogames and those outdoor pursuits listed are just waste of time, economically speaking.
Some reading on green exercise:
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_543531_en.ht...
For an MMO, you're engaged socially (presumably in a guild, rather than soloing). In a mobile grind game, you spend hours constantly checking on progress for that endorphine hit.
You can play MMO socially in a guild, or you can simply grind max levels / rare items endlessly.
You can play an IAP and ad-riddled mobile game to kill some time when waiting in queues, or you can have it become a part of your life checking the game everytime you have a minute of downtime.
And the transitions between those states happen impreceptibly, and there is no defined line beyond which you may consider the activity harmful.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a pretty short game, I put 13 hours into it by playing quite slowly (and there's a not inconsiderable amount of AFK time in there as well), I doubt I'll touch it again any time soon (because the structure gives it zero replayability value), and I would count it as one of the absolute best games I've ever played. Portal 1 is a 4 or 5 hour game and, again, one of the best ever.
On the other end of the spectrum, games like Minecraft, Oxygen Not Included or Factorio are enormous, all-absorbing time sinks that will consume your every waking hour for months or years on end if you let them.
How do I compare ONI and Obra Dinn and say that either is, in any objective sense, better than the other?
The far simpler, albeit non-egalitarian, explanation is some people are more productive and others will find ways to waste time.
quoting a comment from another thread "it used to be that you felt good because you were having fun. In this new era of micro transactions the games aren’t even fun anymore. There is only frustration, and then you pay to alleviate that frustration. You sometimes find yourself sitting there say, “why am I even doing this?”"