Having a game I'm into makes every day enjoyable
plumshell.com
plumshell.com
In addition to exploring why people love games and other high skill activities, it discusses the idea that we can learn how to turn every day tasks into activities that evoke the same reward centers. It doesn’t just dive into “people like games”, or “people like achieving hard things”, but it delves into why, and tries to explain some of the mechanisms.
It made me start to see daily mundane/boring tasks differently. They’re things I have to do anyway, so I can choose to approach them with a mindset that actually evokes enjoyment. Might as well.
Video games used to be my primary outlet. These days, it’s photography and writing. Over time, cooking/baking have transformed from tasks I begrudgingly did to tasks I find deeply rewarding. I still play video games and my point isn’t to disparage them, but the more things in my life that I can move into the “things I enjoy” category, the better my life has become, on average. And part of that had more to do with changing how I engaged with tasks than the specific tasks I was doing.
The simple and even tedious things in life are worth embracing and engaging in whole heartedly and with all of your attention.
currently thinking about how to build a system that plays klondike solitaire for me based on my previous games, so it only presents me with deals that i "woulnd't be able to beat" (based on previous games)
- Ram Dass
I had that realization a couple of years ago. Happiness for me is doing less things I don't enjoy and more of the things I do enjoy.
Gaming is nice because there is little effort to start. Just sit in front of a PC and play.
Something like surfing requires more effort, getting changed, getting to a beach with waves, etc. I hate the setup, but it's possible to minimize it by living somewhere warm (no wet suit needed) and on the beach so you don't need to drive.
That's how I live my life nowadays. Doing very few things I don't enjoy, minimizing the effort required to do the things I do enjoy and doing things I actually enjoy instead of things I'm indifferent about (like watching garbage Netflix shows).
I think exercise is pretty key and applying the philosophy above of doing the type of exercise you like and making it easy to do is very helpful.
- Alexander Chalmers
So I finally upgraded to an AMD 7800X3D, nvidia 4070 12GB, 64GB DDR5-6400 RAM.
All to play Factorio! :D
Apart from a strange error where Linux will crash if I have 2 DIMMs in the motherboard, it's been a great upgrade. (I'm going to submit bug reports to Fedora, but I'm assuming some combo of the MSI B650 motherboard, CPU, and memory are contributing to the error. Memtest says the memory modules are OK)
Now I have a PC that can handle the modded-Factorio huge railway city block maps I like to play. Each block of space is surrounded by 4 lanes of railway, with interchanges. It's really nice to organize the refining and production into specific tasks, like "deliver lead ore, process it into lead oxide, combine that with carbon blocks to make lead ingots". Now the distribution method is via railway station so it's far more flexible than simple conveyor belt outputs. Loads of fun! And very complex too, but that's half the fun. Needing "blue science" which needs circuit boards, which need solder, which needs lead and tin ingots, etc etc. I can lose hours of time to this, moderated only by my back hurting and making me take breaks.
A nice bonus is that my new PC is capable of running smaller LLMs locally, so I can mess around with learning the new hotness technology. Plus new toys are always fun.
You can try OCCT to check if your memory overclock (even with Expo and especially with XMP, those are overclocks) is stable.
You probably have Hynix memory (check your 4 main timings and XMP/EXPO advertised speed) - if you do, these are very save timings you can do that'd probably make up for going down to 6000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlYxmRcdLVw
Well, nice CPU to be burned down. Thanks, AMD.
This year, the snake has entered my garden in the form of an RTX 3060 that I bought for AI and media production applications.
My wife has bought me a flight stick for Christmas, so I can play DCS myself, instead of watching other people's videos.
I worked so hard avoiding escapist leisure in favor of physical exercise and 'maker' hobbies that it's difficult to switch off the discipline, and go have some escapist fun.
I'm retired and have all the resources needed to indulge in pure fun. I'm gonna take advantage of the opportunity.
Dont forget VR might make it one day, and in the meantime you can always get a slight productivity satisfaction by making mods for your favorite games.
For instance, I too love video games and have found immense enjoyment in them for many, many years but if I add up all my play logs and realize I’ve spent something like 5-10% of my life playing video games, it begs the question if that time could have been better spent? Has that really helped anyone, myself included? Has it made the world a better place in any way?
Lately, I’ve uninstalled all games and am seeking hobbies that still challenge me but also can bring joy to others. To list a couple: Cooking - An art really but also quite a bit of science involved. Chiefly though, food brings people together and there is nothing quite like feeding people with your very own creation and hard work. DIY - DIY helps with my engineering itch, saves a lot of money for the family, and also can greatly benefit others who might otherwise not be able to afford something they really do need.
I have nothing against video games, I’ve played far more than most my age. I really just wonder when it comes to hobbies, is maximum satisfaction achieved when not only you satisfy your own needs but are also able to add to others’ lives? FWIW, this can be achieved in video games through friendships and community formed… I’m just not good at making that an important part of why I’d play a video game.
In hindsight, I attribute my strongest mental skills to all that gaming. Abstract reasoning, strategic/tactical thinking, english fluency...things that separated me completely from my peers once I began my career.
Life's long and you never know. If you enjoy cooking, sure, it stacks with a lot of other benefits. I think that's a good framework to keep in mind. But there's no reason to believe nothing good can ever come from some hours spent on Call of Duty. Heck, if you enjoy them that's enough good gotten.
I have a family of my own now so that has played no small part in shifting my perspective.
I moved from gaming to tennis and the gym myself.
“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. ... There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
I have 5-6 people that I can play with
…one?
There were multiple reasons I slowed down. I was interested in my academics. I looked back at all the time I had played pre-university and (rationally) lamented the time lost. The genre I liked had died (adventure games), and I really didn't like 1st person shooters. And I didn't want to deal with the headache of upgrading my PC every 2 years just to play a game. Also, I switched to Linux, which didn't help.
I bought a PS3 in 2010, but it was only for Blu-Ray and streaming. Then in around 2016, on a whim, I decided to check out a game from the library. I picked The Walking Dead (Telltale version).
I loved it. I started checking out other games. Someone bought me an Xbox One as a gift. But this all lasted a few months before I stopped playing again.
Finally, around 18 months ago, I felt guilty that I had spent $100 on games back in 2016 when I got the Xbox (some big sale, so quite a few games), but never played them. So I told myself I'll try a few.
The first one I played was Life is Strange. Loved it. Then Oxenfree. Loved it. It's been 18 months and I haven't stopped playing.
Before, I'd spend 30-60 minutes per day watching some TV show. I've merely substituted that time with gaming. And it is so, so much more rewarding than watching a TV show - even a great show. It's counterintuitive, but I find it both relaxes me and invigorates me at the same time in a way a good show on TV wouldn't (and I love good stories). With TV, you're just staring. With games, you're actively thinking. It's more dynamic. You make decisions. You're in control. And games can have great storytelling.
I remember times in my life where my work was really stressful. Looking back, I wish I had played games back then.
The funny thing is, while I had earlier lamented all the time in my youth spent playing games, when I look back now I have only positive feelings. I still have good memories of certain games - heck even certain achievements in games, from 30 years ago. That time wasn't wasted.
I always find it amusing when someone belittles gamers as losers, but then they go watch TV.
My other half on the other hand, has no such interests, and thinks that I'm wasting my life away, while sitting on the couch watching netflix.
One of my favorite things to do on HN is to read much older article from the authors/posters to see their change over time. Major props to the author, as they appear to have significantly improved their English over the last 8 yrs: http://plumshell.com/2015/03/01/why-nintendo-doesnt-release-...
Writing in another language is always a challenge. I learned Hungarian a decade ago, and I still struggle to write “natively.” Major props!
In my teens and 20s it felt amazing to finish homework and have a late night ahead of me to really sink my teeth into an RPG or something. But for the past decade that magic is just gone.
I don’t want to declare “I’ve grown and changed and maybe gaming just isn’t my thing” because I badly want it to be.
With very limited gaming time available I’ve been searching for other games like that with limited success, apart from Hitman Go, FTL, and Into the Beach. But none of them scratch the itch quite as well.
Even though the stories we tell are goofy and not worthy of a pulp fiction novel, it feels like actual play and engages a part of my mind that’s seldom used anymore. It’s not often a video game can capture a fraction of the fun we have paving our own crazy story. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the closest I’ve seen in awhile.
Games are not your thing, whether be sure of being grown up or so etching else. And there is no intrinsic value of gaming unless you like it a lot. Forcing yourself into it makes zero sense.
Maybe, just maybe, it makes sense to try different things and chances are one of them will be it.
It looks gorgeous, even on my not-top-the-line-PC.
This will give me years of fun. After I get bored with the base game I will have a dozen DLCs/extensions to try.
This past year it was Civ 5.
Also - this article ends on such a weird note given the message that the rest of it delivers. The author has finally realized how valuable it is to have something that gets them going, regardless of whether or not it ends up being "useful", but then immediately stumbles over the fear of it not lasting and failing to achieve greatness in it and sharply concludes with that sentiment.
Perseverance through intermediate-ness into greatness is irrelevant to enjoyment. Sure, be great at your hobby if you're driven to be great, but if you're looking to maximize enjoyment, it's much better to focus on a) embracing intermediateness, and b) exposing yourself to new things so you can find the next hobby that will light you up.
- (a) be available at precisely midnight EST every day for an entire month. That would be 6am for me, not really feasible on working days for a full month.
- (b) be extremely good at a weird flavor of programming competition -- more often than not you don't win at AoC by writing better solutions, you just have to crank out a solution that you don't too long to type.
I like competitions, I really do, done them my entire life, but AoC is just not that interesting to me.
I'm just doing the problems every day ignoring the leaderboard, 48/50 stars, this year I'm on track to get 50/50 on Christmas day :)
I looked at the leaderboard one day there were a lot of people who finished the problem set in 3-4 minutes. I spent more time than that reading the problem description.
It’s still a lot of fun. Some days I’ll solve the problem more than once just to try different ideas.
Kidding, of course, but that's pretty much how I feel about it. I haven't done any real programming in >5 years so I'm using it to dust off the cobwebs, get up to speed on C# language features and push myself to think about the problems functionally/recursively where I can, for fun. The freewheeling open-endedness is the best part because you can get value/enjoyment/satisfaction out of it a million different ways: you could golf the problems; use them to learn new languages; pretend you're writing production code and make it super clean and organized; do them with a partner or group; etc. etc. There's so much value simply in interesting, well-defined puzzles with a good scope, and the presence of the leaderboard is actually a really good example of not letting the need for greatness (especially by arbitrary measures!) stand in the way of enjoyment.
I'm in the same boat as you, I started late and I'm on day 14 or so with a couple skips that I'll get back to, hope to finish in January, and then maybe go back and clean a few of them up, reflect on them, write a little bit about them, and then start looking at problems from previous years.
You don’t need to compete or even do them on the day they release. It’s been fun solving them regardless.
Deliberate practice addresses these plateaus. I think you need to constrict your focus, zoom in, change the scale so the slowing of progress doesn't feel slow. If you can accept that, it can be just as satisfying. A great coach/mentor can help here [but how can you evaluate them?] As the frontier of your knowledge expands, there's more of it.
funfact: Usain Bolt hit a plateau as a teenager, but got a new coach who addressed a congenital spine defect with specific strengthening exercises, and to train less (he was overtraining).
That's simply too much, especially for 18 year olds...
From there i played the entire collection - the ps1 version, crisis core, advent children, and then remake again.
Those months were fantastic - either playing, listening to the soundtrack, thinking about materia combinations. And it’s likely to consume another 3 months of my life when Rebirth releases.
It is easy to get lost the pretty graphics of modern games, but to me well written story and characters are the best part of JRPGs
The story is alright, but the characters are well-written and I enjoyed the tactical gameplay more than the typical turn-based RPG fare.
The thing that unlocked it for me was taking a save state at pretty much every "scene" or big story beat. A lot of these games lack a good way of tracking where you are in the story, and picking up/putting down a deep game in short increments can be hard to get reoriented, so I got in a habit of loading one or two saves back when I restart playing after a break. Replaying a minute or so is usually more than enough to remember what's going on and what I need to do next.
An alternative is install something like retroarch on your smartphone and use a telescopic controller.
Accepting that I’m a filthy casual has been lots of fun. I should probably use that time to practice guitar, but I like the change of pace.
"無効なURLです。 プログラム設定の反映待ちである可能性があります。 しばらく時間をおいて再度アクセスをお試しください。"
Translating to English gives me:
"Invalid URL. It is possible that the program settings are waiting to be reflected. Please try accessing again after a while."
HTTP works fine though.
Maybe I just need more self-control, but I prefer non-games as hobbies. Programming, listening to music and podcasts, etc.
I tend to associate mahjong with gambling and smoke filled illegal parlors. The Asian counterpart of poker as it is played in western stories.
Probably a stereotype. Just as poker usually isn't played in saloons with revolvers on the table nowadays, but I wonder what kind of reputation it has, and if the money aspect is as prevalent as it is in poker.
I’m not sure about numbers, but I know many people in Japan who play mahjong with community friends just like I know many people in the US who have poker home games.
I have played both games in the casual community games, and they are generally very friendly even though money is involved. Typically, the amount wagered is “in the budget”, skill sets are usually in the same neighborhood, and ringers either self-moderate their winnings (this is me in poker and a friend of mine in mahjong) or get uninvited.
Im in the middle of "The Fisherman" and cant wait to get back to it everyday.
I honestly think that smart people get bored by the same-ness of every day qnd having a fantasy of some sort to slip into really helps.
I'm reminded mostly of schopenhauer's remark that reading is simply the replaying of another's thoughts, and video games, especially scripted RPGs, extend this notion of "replaying" to its dismal conclusion.
Is the implication here that reading books is also bad?
And as it turns out, replaying someone else’s thoughts can be highly rewarding. It transmits ideas and satiates the brain’s need for new information. It helps ideas spread, and can fundamentally alter the direction of one’s life.
Another way to look at this is that the words are a form of program that configures your brain. The act of reading changes the reader. What you choose to read will modulate this change. Characterizing reading as simply replaying thoughts really misses what’s happening, which is a fascinating transmission of information between biological animals who invented a word game complex enough for us to enable us to dismiss it as “replaying thoughts”. And for sake of argument, let’s say it’s just replaying thoughts. That’s pretty interesting/incredible on its own.
Video games usually scratch a different kind of itch. They provide challenging tasks in a structured environment with a clear feedback loop that indicates progress. The ones that include dialogue options layer on an additional level of interactivity/feedback.
What it unclear is why this notion has or must have a dismal conclusion.
https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEESchopenRead...
That seems like a more generous formulation.
Mindless video games where you chase dopamine hits and programmed stimulus and have no interaction with others isn’t the same.
> The most enjoyable time is when you feel yourself growing, but the real test is whether you can persevere when you hit that wall or if you’ll lose interest and give up.
Why does it matter if you persevere or not as long as you had fun?