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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

Kind of how all games are.

I could sit here and get virtual levels and virtual money... or go raise my actual human fitness level, or go work on my actual business for actual money.

Games are an easy win to feed you nuggets of feeling like you did stuff, but a poor substitute for real life.

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Nonsensical argument unless you generally spend time you should be working gaming or spend time you could be relaxing working.

If you want to be a workaholic and spend your free time working, go right ahead.

But you will end up like my father, mid 70s with no real relationships with your family, obsessed with "completing your legacy" and a general inability to enjoy anything that isn't "work".

If that sound like fun to you, go right ahead.

Me, I'll continue to work at work and spend my free time on relaxation.

You only get one life, spending it chasing dollars and dimes is a poor life plan

I work on programming projects I find fun. What makes it recreation is that it's something I want to work on, I don't have others imposing deadlines or requirements.

A mechanic can enjoy working on his own project car in the off time.

Both of these things are productive in a way that playing games isn't, but they're still recreational. It's not spending your life chasing dimes. It's looking at the different recreational things you could be doing, and choosing the ones that also intersect with being productive and have a side-effect of helping you professionally.

Games and play -- of the "unproductive" kind -- are a fundamental and valuable human activity. Not everything has to produce something beyond mental well-being. Plus, of course, children learn by playing.

We can keep learning by playing as we get older, we just change the scope. You have to tend to your curiosity to keep it fit and capable.

Sure. You don't have to convince me of this! I'm already a believer :)

Nobody said your hobbies must be productive. But some people prefer it to be, and I don't think it's right to shame those people as if they're just chasing dimes or denying part of what it is to be human.

Productive is all relative anyway. Children learning by playing is productive, the productive part is the learning that is a byproduct. Working on a project car is fun in itself. It doesn't become less fun if the person doing it is a professional mechanic. Would you tell a person who plays games professionally in an e-sports league that they must do something else for fun?

I think it is a sign of good life when you find a way to get paid for doing what you enjoy. And if you enjoy it, then it is still fun when you do it outside of work. The productive benefits of it do not make it less fun.

I agree with both of you, to a degree. Playing a single player video game is unlikely to help you build relationships with others. And yet never stopping to enjoy life in all its variation leads to a pretty empty life, too.

> Playing a single player video game is unlikely to help you build relationships with others

I disagree. I have fond memories of discussing Zelda on the playground as a kid. Similarly, online communities are formed around basically every notable single player game. It's still a shared experience, even if it's not shared at the same moment.

Your father got a child, so he's clearly not obsessing enough about work.

Recreation is important and one form is not more "real" than another. Notwithstanding the fact that some games feel like work (and therefore suck, in my view), for those that are enjoyable, that provides value, whether it be chess, team sports or a video game.

Maybe there's something to be said for opting to lead a more creative rather than consumptive lifestyle. Ultimately though, something only matters if you think it does. My work is largely bullshit, and I can't think of a business I'd want to get into that also wouldn't feel like bullshit. I think the value I'd extract would precisely be in the connections made and the problem-solving itself. How important is another piece of enterprise software to extract money from people that no one thought they wanted until it exists?

Have you considered changing your line of work, and perhaps seeing if you can use your existing skills to help you in a new career?

I'm eyeing off a few avenues, I wouldn't mind not writing software for money anymore but it would also be cool to use my hard earned experience to my advantage. One avenue I thought of was music composition, because there are ways to automate some of it with code that I could use to provide some extra value, but it's also enough of a leap from my current career that it would be a wildly new endeavor.

What about a B2C app that solves a real problem for real users in a new or better way than existing apps? That seems like an easy way you can deliver real value. That's what's gotten me moving on all my personal projects so far—though granted, I haven't published/monetized them yet, just shared them with friends and family. But I get value from them and my friends and family get value from them, and that makes me feel good.

Value to someone, sure. I wouldn't necessarily see the value in it.

I do have personal projects, one to do good, others out of curiosity. Mostly out of an urgency to be creative. I don't think this carries more meaning than pure leisure.

Eh. Time and place. People need downtime and even though I don't game much these days, I think fondly of all the hours of Starcraft and Starcraft 2 I played. And beating Xan on Godlike in Unreal Tournament 2004 (and totally cleaning up when we had lan parties) was just so fun.

Real life is fun too. But games are part of life.

But there is only so much time that you can be effective at running a business or running. Some people need to relax from the stress of work and tiredness of exercise by playing games for example.

But is it all that relaxing to build and run a complex virtual factory? Sometimes if the level of difficulty is too high it can become stressful.

I understand that there's satisfaction in it. That satisfaction can be hard to get at work sometimes. At work, you can be asked to work on things you don't like, that sometimes feel even more pointless than a game.

Part of the reason why I have programming side-projects at home is because they're an outlet to get the satisfaction of building software the way I want to.

The consequences of messing up a make believe factory is essentially nothing except one’s own time loss. The consequences of messing up a real factory are obviously substantial. What games or side projects let us do sometimes is to explore and enter a more diffuse mode of thought which has some tangential benefits to other activities. Spending too much time “being productive” can be counterproductive because one can get tunnel vision too busy executing tasks instead of reimagining or optimizing those tasks. Too much time questioning the work and nothing materially important gets done either.

Would you say the same thing about fictional books? They're generally regarded as being worth the time, but aren't they also "a poor substitute for real life." You could be having your own experiences instead of reading made-up ones. I don't see why games should be different. Certainly not all games are created equally, and some exist only to suck away time and money, but it's obvious when that's the intention.

There is more to games than videogames where you raise levels or virtual money (which are, in turn, a very specific class of videogames).

Eww, games trying to substitute 'real life'. Realism is boring. Games should be ART. Something you CAN'T experience in real life.

Yeah, most games should stay in a fantasy land... Like where you mostly kill your enemies.

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