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Comment by jp_sc | Hacker News Reader

If you have time to play video games, you probably have time to sleep well and exercise... which is proved to be positively correlated with well-being

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I'm curious as to whether these are actually correlated. I anecdotally doubt that video game players exercise at a higher rate than non players.

Alternatively, I would guess that just generally having free time to spend in any way is a healthy thing. We already know that stress is correlated with worse outcomes. The study does mention that income could be a third causal variable, I think stress is probably a similarly correlated factor.

You might be surprised. Take a look at Fly (DOTA professional gamer) for example:

https://www.gosugamers.net/dota2/news/47182-fly-and-s4-out-o...

Turns out that a healthy body is correlated with reflexes. You need a level of workout activity if you want to be a professional-level video game player.

The "fat and lazy" trope kinda-sorta works for maybe casual games. But a fit body means a fit mind, and a fit mind plays games at a higher level.

People who play professionally are a very different population of people than what this study was looking at.

This study was looking at Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons players from the general population.

Also note that I didn't claim that gamers were "fat and lazy" as you suggested. I doubt that they exercise at a rate higher than the general population. I would guess they probably exercise at a rate similar to the general population, particularly because so many people play games.

Neither of those games seem correlated with the "Fat and Lazy gamer" trope. "Fat and Lazy" is usually associated with games with high-levels of grind, like World of Warcraft or maybe Genshin Impact as a more recent example.

Certain games suck you in and require abnormal amounts of time to feel good about anything. Other games, like Animal Crossing or Plants vs Zombies, are more casual, and have a better life / play balance.

IMO, the "dangerous" games are these grindfests, basically Skinnerbox games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber).

That’s correct, I don’t think they do correlate with “fat and lazy” stereotypes. I think they correlate with “similar to the general population”

> I didn't claim that gamers were "fat and lazy" as you suggested. I doubt that they exercise at a rate higher than the general population

The general population is on average "fat and lazy" and exercise at a rate that is near enough to 0 to make no difference. Age and wealth as factors will outweigh any other input when it comes to these benchmarks.

That’s not a great example. There’s plenty of fat successful Dota players - xinq most recently (and historical as well).

At the height of WoW, most of my guild was raiding from 10PM to 3AM every single day, after solo play starting at 5 or 6 PM. And these were parents in their 30's/40's that would put the kids to sleep and game. And then go to work after 5 hours of sleep. The ones I knew in person were fat to obese and did not at all exercise because that would take away from grinding Molten Core or Nef.

It was/is(maybe) a particularly intense brain magnet.

There is a certain difficult to quantify benefit to video games vs sleep and exercise though. I have done 4-6 week stints of extreme discipline with a strict keto diet, 6X a week gym and no video games. I usually end up a little depressed after a few weeks. I think it is because we need to feel some enthusiasm or emotion in our day to day life, and if you combine a 40hr work week with disciplined free time you are just void of that. Video games and Movies allow you to feel a high level of engagement and escape in a 2 hour window. There aren't too many other activities that generate that feeling and can be slotted into the constrained time windows that working full time allow.

Essential needs: fun, Freedom, friendship, power and purpose.

Different people have them in different amounts and ways. But everyone has these.

You could say this about any leisure time activity, from interacting with friends to watching TV to reading books.

Leisure time is not a bad thing, as the title says.

You get 1-2 hours a night from 8-10pm what do you do? Exercise wakes me up so I don’t want to do that before I sleep and it’s too early to sleep. So I can watch tv, play video games, or work on my personal projects. The rest of the day is work, kids, cooking, and cleaning.

As the partner of someone who is addicted to a computer game this is 100% not true. The game takes over any non-working hours and eats in to sleep time.

also from personal experience, I find video games a lot more enjoyable when i have good mental health. When I’m depressed or anxious or numb video games don’t feel rewarding at all, they actually feel like work.

One need not exclude the other. You can do both;)

The point is that the correlation probably points to an underlying variable (e.g. leisure time) instead of direct causation.

Came here to comment this. Further, people with time and the resources (PCs, consoles) are probably more limely to be financially stable. This means (in countries w/o universal healthcare) they can afford Dr. visits, oral, optical, etc making them better off in general.

I don’t know. Back when I was younger and friends were younger and we had few responsibilities, gaming cut into regular sleep hours and know that we tended to do fewer outdoor activities.

Maybe the gaming landscape has changed a lot, but it would surprise me.

Ya, but if all you do is sleep, exercise, and work, you're kind of dull. If you have time to do anything but work and look after kids, you should spend some on exercise, and some on something that brings your life flavour

I dunno ... I have seen multiple people skip sleep and exercise so that they can play. And then everybody else had to deal with sleep deprived cranky them.

Wellll.... then there is https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-revenge-bedtime-procras...

TL;DR - you have time for exercise and sleep. But you sacrifice that time for "fuck about freely to do what I want for once" time.

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