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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

I was super poor working at Target and managed to play 100+ hours a week of World of Warcraft.

The nice thing about world of warcraft is it gives you the sense of progress without having to actually invent anything yourself. The only creative aspect of WoW is your build, but most players just copy the "best" builds from theorycrafters online.

I've been doing improv comedy classes lately. They're hilarious and exhilarating. In improv we talk about playing "at the limit of our intelligence". Walking on stage with no idea what you're going to say or do, and figuring it out in the moment - its the stuff of dreams and nightmares.

Not all play is created equally. If my cup was empty after work, there's no way I'd have the capacity for improv.

> The nice thing about world of warcraft is it gives you the sense of progress without having to actually invent anything yourself. The only creative aspect of WoW is your build, but most players just copy the "best" builds from theorycrafters online.

I’m actually writing a book about this price topic (in the realm of your analysis). It’s specifically about RuneScape, working title: Why We Play.

The first three lines are:

I’ve played a game called RuneScape for 5,000 hours and I don’t know why. Was all that time wasted. Was any of this experience valuable?

My thesis has something to do with realizing that (if the lower aspects of Maslow’s pyramid are sorted out) many individuals are driven to pursue tangible goals they set for themselves regardless of the domain, and regardless of the fact that nobody else will give a shit. What sort of frameworks lend themselves to this impulse. (Hint: what makes games like RuneScape World of Warcraft compelling frameworks for this “drive”?)

Is this subtly just chasing dopamine hits by doing things that we are good at?

I hadn’t played video games for years when COVID hit. Call of Duty Warzone launched and since my finances were in order, family was stuck at home, I promptly got pretty addicted to the game. I could play for hours on end chasing the wins. When I died I could reflect on what went wrong, make plans on how to avoid it happening again, and try again right away. Games are so quick that you can iterate and see the results within hours. Other things in life usually take weeks or months to see progress. It’s addicting. I still have to keep the PlayStation disconnected because playing one game can easily turn into playing all week.

Real life requires a lot more work to get the same reward.

You may be interested in what Ted Kaczynski says in his Manifesto. He hypothesizes that, with the majority of our biological needs fulfilled by society and technology, we are left with mostly “surrogate activities”: activities which do not need doing, but we have to do something with our time.

I work out a lot. That’s my surrogate activity. It’s something where I can push a boulder indefinitely like Sisyphus and there is no limit to how much I can do it. For others it is grinding on video games. For others, it is work (let’s be honest, how many of us can really say we “work to live” when all our money goes to consumer luxuries? Obviously situational). Once you start looking for it, you may notice a lot of people have surrogate activities.

I’ll go a step further and say that activities which are more accessible and give someone a better chance to feel part of something larger than themselves lend them best to be surrogate activities. I also think tasks which have no end make particularly good surrogate activities.

I’ve played a game called RuneScape for 5,000 hours and I don’t know why. Was all that time wasted. Was any of this experience valuable?

this is really puzzling to me. you don't know why you play? do you know why you watch tv?

there are many possible reasons, and not always reasonable ones, but in general i do know why i play games or watch tv.

to name a few more sensitive ones: boredom, loneliness, escapism.

the question is, do those activites cause you to neglect more important things in an unhealthy manner.

heck, the same can be said for reading and commenting hackernews.

is this discussion important or am i just looking for a some social connection instead of say spending time with my family?

well, it's certainly not important, so i get the same benefit as making progress in a game. it's something i like to do at the end of the day to wind down. (well, more tv and playing games rather than HN)

it serves a purpose that is meaningful and worth it.

recently i discovered that my brother played a game that i like too, so we arranged to play on the same server. suddenly playing this game is not only to relax but also to keep in touch with a family member who lives in another country.

i guess others have different levels of awareness how playing affects them, so i can't generalize or judge. personally i find this awareness important exactly to avoid wondering if that game isn't a waste of time.

If only somebody built a game that tricked people into learning... like RuneScape but in order to mine wood you'd need to grind LC/category theory.

RuneScape teaches (or taught?) a lot

May sound stupid, but I credit playing it since 2003 while in preschool (stopped around 2007, bounced back/forth a bit from 2007-2010ish) with leading me down the life path that ended up getting me a full ride scholarship in engineering.

Also the life path that ended up getting me a completely busted neck & shoulders.

It taught many people programming, as they found many things about the game tedious & wanted to automate with bots.

If you search “RuneScape” in the HN search bar, you’ll find many anecdotes of HN users getting into programming after writing bots/scripts while they played RuneScape as a young kid/teen.

I think that falls into the “tricked into learning” category.

Minecraft has done the same for many a bit younger than I am from what I’ve heard. Roblox as well.

I’m having a lot of fun with Duolingo right now. They definitely gamified the process of learning words (if not conversation, but I have a Spanish speaking friend who is cheering me on), I keep gaining experience and I have no idea what the point of the exp is but it has leaderboards and everything.

It’s also smart about putting you in “bronze tier” leaderboards then slowly upgrading you if you’re more into it, so you’re competing with your peers.

In retrospect I think World of Warcraft was the only socializing I could really handle after some really traumatic events in my life. I excelled at the raiding aspects and was in a top guild; I became an officer which was a whole different can of worms.

It’s funny because I feel like the soft skills I developed wrangling talented sixteen year old boys to get them raiding, while keeping them from harassing girls in the guild and instead keeping them focused has helped me more than I knew as a SWE team lead, ten years later. In a lot of ways work politics is EASIER. At work nobody gets upset and tells you all about how intimate they’ve been with your mother.

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