Today Show hosts think gamers over 30 are "weird"
gamesetwatch.com
gamesetwatch.com
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy playing genuinely novel games when they come out like Katamari Damacy or Braid, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that gaming can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits.
But at it's root most serious games today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain.
That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation.
I feel roughly the same about chess players as I feel about drunk drivers. That is, humanity clearly benefits from people willing to go out and drive while completely shitfaced, at least in the sense that when people are altruistic enough to kill themselves while driving drunk, the rest of us benefit by being able to look at their deaths statistically to create best-practices for the rest of us.[1]
In all seriousness though, if chess is your art then so be it, I certainly won't be the one to judge. On a personal level I think there are better mediums for self-expression. But clearly humanity as a whole gets stronger from diversity and randomness, and who knows what benefits us in the long run. And I agree with pessimizer that chess is ultimately more like math or music than cocaine or whatever.
[1] Pretty curve! http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/alcoholhighway/2...
Do I need to be thinking "How am I going to change the world" every moment of every day? Sometimes I want to go have fun and laugh at something. I might watch a movie, read a book, browse the internet, or play a game. Is that so bad?
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy watching genuinely novel sports when they come out like Foosball or Ultimate Frisbee, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that sports can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits.
But at it's root most serious sports today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain.
That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation.
It's sort of like saying that all movies and TV use the same tricks to trigger the pleasure mechanisms of the brain.
I wouldn't lump the rest of hardcore games in with those, though - there's a lot of really wonderful stuff out there that's just made to be fun rather than addictive. There's nothing quite like a good strategy game, for me.
There does seem to be a worrying shift towards games with ongoing revenue streams like WoW, which inevitably shifts the company's focus to gameplay mechanics that are addictive as much as they are fun.
The problem is that ongoing revenue streams are so much more profitable. As a game I prefer StarCraft to WoW, but Blizzard probably makes more from WoW in a month than they've ever made off StarCraft.
Reading, outdoor activities, sports, television, movies, even religion I would argue could be described using the same logic.
The transition from childhood to adulthood is characterized by ever increasing agency, hardcore gaming, he argues, arrest that development.
Thus, anything that diminishes age-appropriate agency is bad.
In this regard and many others, the rhetoric around social acceptance, identity (including age, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, political belief, and ethnicity or nationality), and maturity is really twisted. Most people are defending opinions instead of examining realities... I've been a lot happier since I stopped following the discussion in any serious way.
Not to mention if you time weight it. When I was 15 I spent a heck of a lot more hours playing games than I do now. I'm probably still a 'gamer' because I have Starcraft 2 installed on my PC, but I havent played it in 5 weeks. When Starcraft 1 came out, I was lucky if I saw the sun in 5 weeks because I was playing Starcraft.
It is sometimes hard to wrap one's head around the fact that generational change happens at the speed of... generations. One year per year, on average. Tune in ten years from now, when the average age of gamers may well be 47, yet gamers over 40 will be considered "weird" by people significantly older than 40.
This is also a better hypothesis because it has better explanatory power: The Today show is predominantly watched by people who are not scrambling to get to work in the morning, and that group is going to contain a high percentage of people with kids, and such people think like... people with kids.
First of all, the question being posed is sexist, it only asks about "men over 30", which tells me there must be a stereotype about "girls not being able to game" or something ridiculous.
Their laughs disgust me, and I'm a bit scared at how many people their opinions influence per day.
Fill in the blank and welcome to the mainstream US mindset, where Taco Bell resembles Mexican food, Dick van Dyke can sound like someone from England, and all folk dancers stick out their elbows and move like Popeye.
People who were in their early teens when they got their Playstation are just now reaching their thirties. Anyone older than that is likely to have acquired a contempt for video games before they became mainstream, and hasn't seen fit to update their opinions in the intervening decades.