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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

I like your phrasing here a lot. I have come to a pretty similar realization recently. For me a small about of gaming does recharge me, but as you say it’s really easy to get sucked into spending too much time and ending up tired or sacrificing other recharging activities like exercise and socialization.

I think it’s possible to weave socialization and accumulated progress into the gaming experience and have it be a fully enriching hobby. But many (most?) single player experiences are just a pastime for me, as you say.

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I think Seneca would roll his eyes at most of these responses TBH. Who cares if you're just gaming to "pass the time"? When you're gaming, you're having fun and enjoying your life in the moment. It's only afterward when you start the cycle of criticizing yourself for not doing something "productive" with that time that the negative feelings enter. In fact, the whole exercise of feeling bad about yourself for playing a fun game and relaxing is exactly PART of the problem Seneca talks about - unless your gaming habits cause you to destroy your links to other important sources of joy and health, you shouldn't feel bad about having a fun "pastime" activity, that is just as valid as keeping a garden or reading a good book of fiction.

It's been a while since I read Letters from a Stoic, but I have a feeling Seneca would scoff at frivolous pursuits - leave such things to the Epicureans. He comes off as a bit of a (humorously) grumpy old man in that book though.

As an ex WoW player, I’m rolling my eyes and I haven’t been dead for 2000 years.

Many games turn into jobs. The sense of fun degrades over time, and the self recriminations aren’t baseless.

If you're not having fun with the game and you're extinguishing your social and physical health, then you have a gaming problem. If you're admonishing yourself for playing a single player game to recharge and relax, as in the cases I responded to, you have a self-admonishment problem.

Replace game with solitaire, is it now viewed differently?

Does every human activity need to be productive? Why would you care what others think about your hobbies?

My point was merely, some have a bias for types of hobby, not its healthiness.

I know someone who, while depressed was playing solitaire and one other casual game for hours every day, for months. It was definitely not healthy.

Specifically, commenter you responded to cares. Because, as he puts it "it’s really easy to get sucked into spending too much time and ending up tired or sacrificing other recharging activities like exercise and socialization." He literally describes negative overall impact he perceives. He is not feeling bad for gaming for irrational reasons, he says it makes him tired and makes him sacrifice exercise and socialization.

He even admits it is theoretically possible to do it differently, but also observed people not doing it differently in practice.

The problem is that the things you think you enjoy and that recharge you may not actually be what you empirically enjoy and what empirically recharges you.

For example, playing a game, or browsing youtube, or scrolling through social media, or reading the news, or even browsing HN for that matter you may think of as something you do to relax. It could be, however, that actually, doing some woodwork, or practicing a musical instrument, or learning a language, or going for a walk in nature, empirically recharges you a lot better, and you actually enjoy the days when you get to do these activities a lot more - and it makes your time outside those activities more enjoyable too.

These are just examples, it may not work for you in the same way, and all of these activities can be done in 'recharging' and 'non-recharging' ways perhaps. The important thing here is that what you think recharges you and what empirically actually recharges you may be very different things.

When I was young I realized I was escaping into games and damaging my life and relationships (one of the tests for addiction) and so I’m always going to hold them at arm’s length.

When I realized I needed a change I latched onto the fact that most people wouldn’t understand my excitement for an accomplishment in a video game, it wasn’t something I could bond with people over. But if I stopped fucking around and put that energy into programming, I could have accomplishments people understood (that turned out to only be only partly true. I still have programming accomplishments that my peers and communities don’t understand).

Bonding over games has shifted a bit since then. I know a hard of hearing kid who socializes online because conference calls make everyone have the same problem: differentiating two speakers is difficult. Everything sounds like hearing aids sound.

But it’s still easier for people to comment on my garden than whether I have finished the Thieves guild or stormcloak quest line in Skyrim, as an elf.

> But many (most?) single player experiences are just a pastime for me, as you say.

By this measure reading books would also just be a pastime? I see gaming more like an interactive story (especially singleplayer).

Regarding that last sentence, it's the exact opposite experience for me.

I see multiplayer experiences as just a past time, and singleplayer experiences the one that can have a meaning and are valuable by themselves.

I think the key point here is what singleplayer games are we talking about, because the offer is more varied than ever.

But why is socialization recharging and “pastime” not? My bet is because the former allow you to talk through the issues.

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