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I think there is good reason to be skeptical of hardcore sports fans who are above a certain age. Sports all use the same basic tricks to trigger to pleasure mechanisms of the brain. As such, anyone who is sufficiently intelligent should be able to figure out that they're all basically the same, and thus to be avoided after a certain point if one wants to keep growing as a person.

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.

I think your comment is actually a convincing argument that we should be skeptical of hardcore sports fans rather than a convincing argument that we shouldn't be skeptical of hardcore gamers.

Playing sports has the side benefit of making you fit. While physical activity may indeed be a "repetitive basic need", fulfilling that basic need regularly will still make you a happier, healthier person.

You're painting with awfully broad strokes. Hardcore games are actually extremely varied, much more so than casual games. The variance has decreased among the AAA titles in recent years, but even there it's a good bit more than you imply. Perhaps you're thinking of the twitch genres like FPS's and platformers and generalizing from there? Have you taken a look at the Total War series? X-Com? Monkey Island?

It's sort of like saying that all movies and TV use the same tricks to trigger the pleasure mechanisms of the brain.

That's fair enough, it definitely was a sweeping generalization. I guess what I meant is that if you've already played Ultima Online when you're 12, Everquest when you're 14, etc., do you really need to still be raiding in World of Warcraft when you're 30? I don't think so.

If you've already read Boxcar Children when you're 12, Hardy Boys when you're 14, do you really need to be reading Harry Potter when you're 30?

Actually, I don't think it makes much sense for grown adults to read childrens' books like Harry Potter.

I'll give you that MMOs in particular don't bring much to the table (except that they're a form of socialization), and that they're engineered to be digital crack. I don't see much value in them either, and I'm really relieved that I got tired of WoW and quit after playing it for 2 weeks straight, instead of becoming more addicted and flunking out like some of my friends in college did.

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.

> 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.

No argument there. It's true of most SAAS companies as well.

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.

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?

Couldn't anyone use this exact same logic against anything they don't believe contributes to the world in a meaningful way?

Reading, outdoor activities, sports, television, movies, even religion I would argue could be described using the same logic.

I think his basic premise (which may need more argument) is that games rob you of agency.

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.

I'm sure you have used a less confusing term than 'agency' here.

Would you be skeptical of a chess player above a certain age as well?

Not the other poster, but I wouldn't be. In my semi-baseless opinion, chess playing pleasure is more like the pleasure you get from reading or doing math. Video game pleasure is more like television or cocaine.

What about the pleasure you get from playing a video game version of Chess? It just doesn't make sense to lump media as varied as video games, books and television into broad categories of pleasure. The content matters more than the medium.

And what about people who watch low-brow movies and/or television?

I'm skeptical of chess players of all ages.

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...