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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

5907 hours spent playing RDR2? Assuming he spent 12 hours a day playing that's 492 days spent doing nothing but playing RDR2 (the 246 days quoted in the article assumes he didn't sleep, eat, go to the loo, shower, etc.). He's literally spent 33% of his waking life in the ~4 years since release doing nothing but playing RDR2 or RDR Online? That seems... perhaps unhealthy, certainly unbalanced - it's definitely a lot of time invested in one game which, given the profusion of other excellent games available, seems maybe too limited? Each to their own, I guess.

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It's 4 hours a day for 4 years. That could breakdown to a couple of hours a night and full days on weekends. Millions of people spend just as much time watching TV, or reading, or playing Call of Duty. That's nothing particularly unusual or special about that amount of time.

Back in the early days of World of Warcraft people would have seen 4 hours a night as light, casual gaming. :)

I see alot of people in my personal circle criticize gaming, but do the same watching TV/movies, reading books, etc.

One might think, well books are educational. You learn something from them. There's so many bestselling books out there written by so called "experts" that turn out to be totally wrong or mislead by giving a layman's explanation of research post book release, and 10-20 years later the same nonsense is being passed on from one generation to the next.

The difference with gaming is the saturation threshold. Some people are able to binge shows of course but no show has the 'just one more moment' effect displayed quite as powerfully as a well-designed game. Eventually even a show with 10 seasons ends but RDR2/Factorio/Civ is forever.

There's a very big difference between gaming for 4 hours a day and spending the same amount of time in a single game. Watching ALL episodes of Friends takes 88 hours, you'd certainly call a person crazy if they watched Friends +60 times in a 4 year period.

And let's not pretend like WoW is normal or particularly well accepted.

*looks nervously at time spent on HN*

Stadia launched in November 2019, so not even 3 years ago.

That's 1,064 days ago, so it's 5.5 hours a day instead of 4. That still sounds pretty reasonable to me.

He was over 5k nine months ago according to one of his streams, so that would make it ~6.4h.

His videos don't have nearly high enough view counts for this to be his main or even meaningful income source. Also, a big part of his shtick seemed to be that he was playing on Stadia.

> He's literally spent 33% of his waking life in the ~4 years since release doing nothing but playing RDR2 or RDR Online? That seems... perhaps unhealthy, certainly unbalanced

A lot of tech people have a blind spot for excessive video game addiction that goes beyond having some fun with your friends on nights and weekends. The mainstream focus is all about social media apps, but at least among tech people I believe video game addiction is a serious problem for a significant number of people.

I've known several people who lost their social lives almost completely to WoW, EVE Online, competitive multi-player games, or just burying themselves in the 1000 on-sale or free games they've collected in their Steam accounts. Losing entire years to video games during the formative stages of young adulthood can be devastating for social development.

I think 6K hours is excessive, but before anyone casts stones, they should count up how many hours they've spent glued to their smartphones. If we had to pick one, phone addiction is probably a more widespread problem to tackle than video games.

Is it ok to spend the same time on motorcycles, paragliding, mountaineering, snowboarding, and so on? There are divorces because of motorcycles and other addictive passions. These activities are much riskier and more expensive.

I know there have been gamers like this for years but in this case 2 of the 4 years were during a mandatory isolate at home public health crisis. It’s possible this was actually a positive escape to help cope.

Personally I’m not attached to digital ephemera. I’ve already lost more save games and files of one type of content over another to be used to it. I’d call the clingy-ness the real issue. Others have to put in a bunch of work to manage this persons figurative video game identity?

> positive escape to help cope.

This is certainly true. Though public health analysis only shows correlations, not causations, between video game playing and decreased alcohol and drug use. And in my life, whenever I knew men whose girlfriends would relentlessly harp on their video game playing, it gets substituted by alcohol.

In medicine it is called video game fixation. I’m concerned though that it is not open as a possibility that what they are calling a disease is closer to a medicine than certainly alcohol, tobacco or drug use are. Closer to how coffee is used for tiredness, maybe, for a depressed 15-25yo male, than to any of those things. That said this guy is spending 33% of his life, and video game fixation can also look like 90%, which is certainly pathological.

Anyone with a full-time job has spent about 8000 hours on that singular activity in the same timeframe. I'm not sure that tells us that what this guy is doing is healthy, but it does raise the question... is working the way we do healthy either?

8k hours on a job should be leading to portable artifacts that are difficult to take away:

Something like 120K of income (probably closer to $200k), and a progression of skill development. Also could have intangibles like a feeling of contribution, socialization, purpose.

Yes, exceptions exist. But many could make their job have these kinds of outcomes if they choose to do so

you can trust that this professional streamer also walked away with some good money and increase in follower count

>professional streamer also walked away with some good money

Most streamers make very little, including likely this person.

I doubt you'll find many people here who will even consider what you're saying but it's really important.

Basically the difference between living to work, and working to live, and how we should be mindful of balancing it all

The notion of work itself is strange. If you are autonomous in what you do, feel your mastery increasing as you go along, see your actions have an effect, and are well rewarded for it in terms of material wealth and social approval, few other things in life are going to compare. If you are missing most of these characteristics, it will daily torture.

> is working the way we do healthy either?

Hahahahaha. Hell no. Most today's overwork is for escaping financial insecurity, anxiety, due to obsessive-compulsive tendencies, making up for one's lack of self-worth or a mix of all of those...

It's certainly not healthy but I don't see the system changing until most of our lifetimes have already passed, making the question academic. Or perhaps we are not bold enough or ready for sacrifice in our commitment to finding alternatives.

yes but no. He turns his gameplay into twitch / YouTube content. So it is a source of income for him

In some small defense, you could definitely go to the bathroom, shower, and eat while the game was active.

I wouldn't be surprised if that were some of those hours. Hours where the game is active, but he's not actively playing.

Assuming he plays every day. And assuming he doesn't take any vacations in this time (mainly because I don't want to deal with the math). With the game being on for 4 hours on days when he has work and 12 hours on days he doesn't. That's 44 hours a week he could be playing. And it would take him about 2 and half years to log that many hours.

Then I got even more curious. There have been 1046 days since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Stadia. He played about 5 hours 40 minutes a day every single day.

I really would like to see the game logs.

Someone else pointed out that he streams it, so it's akin to a job.

I wouldn't pass judgement on someone like this without more information. I've met disabled people who don't have a whole lot to do and pour themselves into a universe like this, I can totally understand that situation... and there are all types of different examples like this. You can't always assume the person on the other end of the line is just like you.

He's a streamer, who makes money on Twitch.

This is his job- by definition, he is a professional at RDR2. He gets paid for it.

Just how many hours have you spent in VSCode or VStudio? Shall we criticize other professions and how long you're in there?

It sounds terrible, but losing his save could possibly be the thing that saves his life if this is true.

People with uncontrolled obsessive behaviors aren't typically "cured" by losing the thing they obsessed over. Sometimes it's the opposite, and they become suicidal.

Assuming he played since the launch of RDR2 on Stadia then it's about 6 hours a day, and considering we are talking about a YouTuber it could be work.

From my perspective as a game developer, I won’t pass any normative judgement.

In a positivist view, those are hours not trying new games.

To reframe what other have already said, it is just as bad for the game industry as it is from a social perspective that people spend time this way.

He's a YouTuber, no idea if full time, but how much of your life do you spend at work?

Do you have a smartphone? The average person checks their phone about 300 times a day and spends 50 days a year scrolling on them. App culture and algorithms designed to addict people have taken over public consciousness and most are not self aware of it.

Most are addicted to being constantly reachable, constantly distracted with the latest social media notifications and most shrug it off because seemingly everyone else has the same addiction.

When you stop using surveillance capitalism services, or a smartphone entirely, it becomes easy to see these addictions in others and it looks gross seeing families at restaurants all staring at their phones in a circle.

At least console video games do not follow you around in your pocket. You generally spend at least time fully walking away from game consoles, but almost no one leaves home without their social media notification machines.

Some people spend that much watching sports, so...

Also if you look at steam reviews they say the number of hours played. Some people have 10k+ for some games.

I believe some buy games to farm trading cards and artificially increase their playtime. How skewed this data is only Valve knows as they have capabilities to identify farmers but don't do much.

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