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Comment by jeremyarussell | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how that researcher in that article is okay with saying that if someone is spending 10 - 14 online but isn't ruining employment, relationships and children he's fine. The reason he doesn't have a job, a relationship and children is probably directly due to not wanting to leave his game world and enter the real world. It's like he's saying oh well this guy already had no life so he's good to replace it with one online, while if he had ruined a real life by going online that would have been a bad thing.

Original quote. "I've come across very excessive players - playing for 10 to 14 hours a day - but for a lot of these people it causes no detrimental problems if they are not employed, aren't in relationships and don't have children."

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Your entire comment is presumptuous and predicated on the assumption that playing for 14 hours a day inhibits those things, which is not necessarily true. Playing might be the symptom, not the cause.

To be fair, that only leaves 10 hours a day for the person to do anything else, and presumably 6 - 9 of that is sleeping. Optimistically, that leaves 4 hours a day to do things like eating, grooming, chores, job hunting, etc. So the extreme amount of gaming may start as a "symptom" as you say, but I just can't see how that person could really ever effect any change in their life when they spend literally almost all of their time gaming.

14 hours being the high end certainly pushes the limits, but of the remaining 10 hours it would be possible for only 4-6 to be sleep (4 hours a night may not be great for you, but they might sleep exactly the same amount with or without gaming), an hour for eating/grooming/etc., if they live with parents they may well have few/no chores/cooking/etc.... So perhaps not for everybody, but it certainly isn't possible to play 14 hours a day and spend a few hours looking for work. Even more so if you are at the 10 hours a day rather than 14.

You are correct as far as you go, but gaming that heavily is often caused by (and hence a symptom of) other problems, such as depression.

If you simply force the gamer to quit, the underlying problems persist, and may continue to manifest themselves in similarly harmful/unconstructive/however-you-choose-to-describe-it behaviour such as a 100-hour-a-week TV habit.

A gaming habit is frequently (usually?) a symptom rather than the root cause of the problems, although poor life decisions can exacerbate depression making it hard to disentangle the two.

I'm not trying to be presumptuous, but I've never seen someone defy laws of physics by still having plenty of time to live while also spending over half that life online. It's simple math is all I'm getting at. I go through this with some friends of mine often, they insist that they still get stuff done while spending every waking moment on games and touching their computers to program or what have you for a half an hour and getting frustrated. Guess what they do to get past frustration, play games. It's not a good cycle.

Btw, I hold a full time job and played over 8 hours of Prototype 2 yesterday(just to get the platinum trophy). On days I work I still end up playing 2-3 hours a day, I don't spend 5-6 hours playing games though because it would get in the way of my programming.

Man, the real world is the hardest game you could play and it has, like, no difficulty ramp.

Yeah, but it takes lots of grinding to level up.

No difficulty ramp? Are you kidding? The first several levels are essentially an extended tutorial, then about a quarter of the way through, you're thrown into the real game, the objectives are no longer marked and half the lessons the tutorial taught you turn out to be untrue. (On top of that, the real world is very poorly balanced, so the difficulty curve is odd. In general, you're either ridiculously OP or you're going to have a very rough time, because there aren't many rubber-band mechanics.)

By "no difficulty ramp" I mean it throws you into the deep end right away. But you're right - it does have a difficulty ramp, an insane one. It actively deceives you as to the rules of the game before dumping you in the hardest part.

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