But at the same time, the difference between the things you list is the level of fulfillment. Or, in other words, how you feel about your time spent doing that thing 5 or 10 years later.
Even though I have good memories in some games, I don't look back on my time in World of Warcraft and think "yeah, that's definitely how I'd spend that time if I had a do-over." Meanwhile, my time spent learning language, meeting up with friends, and writing short stories are expenditures of time that I'm proud of.
Games usually suffer from two things:
1) Games tend to be cheap entertainment on the Netflix and Twitter and heroin side of the fulfillment continuum.
2) It's too easy to sink a lot of time in games, and they tend to dominate your mind when you're in them. You mention music, but people aren't just sitting at their desk from 6pm to 4am listening to music. Most hobbies don't grip you like that. It makes it easy to neglect other things in ways that, say, an addiction to hiking does not.
As a former big gamer myself, I think most people are stuck in the trap of games and only a small fraction of people are doing something particularly fulfilling with them. But my point wouldn't be that games = bad, but rather: beware.
For example, on the other hand, there was a time when I was only gaming to play online with my best friend who had moved across the country. That was some fulfilling gaming. But I wouldn't be surprised if most people were like me and found it very hard to strike a healthy balance.
* Having solid basic skills in a profession is crucial; in contrast, almost nobody really needs a virtuoso. Practically, nobody needs a rock star or diva.
* Always be reliable, even if others are not (don't pay back unreliability by being not reliable yourself). Be the one who is on time and does his homework. (In contrast, in school I learned that what technicality qualifies as homework often does not pay off.)
* Continuity is key to get a decent chance to succeed (again, in contrast school taught me that you can make things up as you go along, as long as you are somewhat talented).
To relate to the topic: the problem with many video games is that reliability and continuity come effortless. You simply need to go online and play. In contrast, as an amateur musician, I had to make sure I have the right gear, plan the transport without owning a car, make sure I can get into a rehearsal room regularly, find the right people to play with (the ones who have the connections that are needed to actually get a gig) et cetera.
Just like in "real" sports, many personalities in "e-sports" make a point of being douchebags. Some make a point of being a nice person.
> For me the social aspects, as well as the "mastery" aspects of gaming were just too simple, too simulated.
I agree, in multiplayer games "mastery" relates to improving mechanical skill, i.e. getting better at mashing specific button sequences as fast as possible or getting better at flickshots. These take a lot of time to get marginal improvements (e.g. improving your aim just a little bit beyond your personal baseline can take thousands of hours). In singleplayer and RPG games, "mastery" happens on the character and doesn't require anything from the player beyond either repeating some action a large number of times (e.g. picking locks to improve lockpicking skill) or simply allocating "skill points" awarded by advancing the game.
This is an incredibly shallow analysis. Most competitive multiplayer games have important strategic elements too. Positioning, knowing when to engage, effective team communication, countering opponent strategies, etc.
Don't mistake this for defending video games, but you can't expect a productive discussion when the strawmen stood up are so absurd.
Unless you're making a critique against games at large (physical and video), I'm not sure what you're getting at.
It's their job, which they get handsomely compensated for. Wasting away thousands of hours grinding Dota or CS:GO is the job of very few people, while the grand majority of gaming addicts are simply wasting a significant chunk of their life.
The article aims to show that this sense is indeed false.
Porn consumers don't generally share a sense that porn consumption improves their real-world fitness and success. You could make a separate argument against porn consumption, but the "fake fitness" argument the article makes doesn't apply to porn addiction.
I tend to think that, say, a month spent in competitive gaming at night is better For your mind than a month spent binge watching Seinfeld at night for the second time.
There are a few exceptional games that encourage creativity and arguably provide some education. However, the majority of gamers have been playing roughly the same FPS that provides the same basic violent catharsis since Doom came out 27 years ago.
For this vast majority of gamers, games are just mindless fun which neither aims for, nor achieves, any sort of meaningful self-improvement.
> You could make the exact same argument for music, books, films or TV - it is an artistic medium.
Most popular entertainment, just like the aforementioned FPS, is just mindless diversion catering (or if you will, exploiting) our baser instincts and propensity for addiction. That applies to all forms of popular entertainment: games, TV, films, and even books.
The point of the article is that games - unlike films or TV for example - promote a sense "fake fitness". Nobody believes that they acquire some valuable fitness by binge-watching Friends on Netflix. However, gamers do tend to hold a false belief that they are gaining some valuable skills out of the huge amounts of time they spend playing popular video games.
RPGs for example directly exploit this delusion: your character gains many valuable skills, and by falsely identifying with them, you feel a sense of accomplishment even though all you did was mindlessly grind some braindead "quests" and your odds of surviving in a real combat situation are just as bad as before - worse, probably, because your fitness has deteriorated from so many more hours of sitting on your couch mashing buttons.
This is especially true for the current generation of gamers who are often playing on consoles lacking any modding capabilities.
I know people who were heavy into WOW and decided to make life the real grind. They have done very well for themselves.
Identifying challenges, focusing on them, engaging in behavior that overcomes them, persisting in that behaviors until signs of success manifest, and then feeling rewarded by these signs of success.
These are all traits that really do tend to lead to skill-building, self-improvement, and success when applied in REAL contexts.
The problem with video games is that they create an ARTIFICIAL context to exploit these traits. It's not you who improved your fighting skills by mindlessly mashing that button 20,000 times - it's your avatar, a fictitious being. But games are set up so that you will feel the sense of accomplishment.
Games is conditioning our generation to gain the rewarding sensations of fitness, self-improvement, and survival success from trivial activities that are merely dressed up to appear challenging and "masculine".
As the article points out games fit very well into what it calls 'limbic capitalism', using reward mechanisms of the brain to keep people engaged in repetitive tasks. If you go through the list of the most popular games, very few are artistic in nature.
This isn't really true for reading. Okay, sure you can write erotica or fan-fiction, but culturally everyone knows that this is garbage essentialy. Going and picking up a (challenging) novel is relatively hard work, which is why reading that kind of fiction is on continuous decline.