imagine that all this energy, time, effort and cash would be spent on some tangible issue. the revolution in ukraine, a movement for civil liberties.
there are very creative minds at work within EVE, reading the mittani is amazing. those guys would run circles around the organisers of, say, occupy wall street.
to put it dramatically and over the top - the world is burning and the brightest minds play games. sort of an inverse ender's game.
Creativity and talent aren't fungible resources that you can just decide to apply to whatever is most noble. If you put a top level EVE player in charge of Occupy Wall Street instead, do you really think he'd have the passion and interest to do as good of a job as he does in EVE?
People are good at what they like doing, and there's no reason to be bothered over the fact that they aren't passionate about what you think they should be doing.
Refugees from war torn regions need medical care, not yet another JavaScript framework.
Refugee health doesn't happen solely in Syria. There are Refugee Health Centres in most major cities, and refugee health is only a small facet of medicine, and medicine is only a small subset of activities that can make the world a better place.
Writing a better javascript framework will not make the world a better place.
There is no reason anyone should be ashamed of doing what they love (unless of course, it's genuinely shameful). Yes, some things are more noble than others, and some things help people more directly, but the world needs a complete diversity of interests to be wholly "good". We shouldn't just rank all tasks from most to least noble, pick the most noble one, and pursue that solely.
Oh please. This kind of smug self-congratulatory attitude is what makes me hate echo chambers like HN. You enjoy writing code on the side? That's fine.
But don't pretend that your competitor to Uber (or whatever other startup that gets funded and is only really valuable to people in first-world countries) makes you a humanitarian.
All I said was that inspiring someone to enjoy life and to give them the tools to live a good life is something valuable, and is something worth doing. You're the smug one, by choosing to misinterpret what I said so that you can feel righteous about being the only person who acknowledges their trivial life.
How can you be so short sighted to believe that unless you are working on a cure to cancer, that all your efforts on this planet are for naught. Does this mean if I am able bodied and finically stable, any service that benefits me and my 70 or so years on this planet are "a waste of time?" A guess every and all artists should kill themselves for not being good enough for becoming doctors right? Art never changed the world and those smug artists shouldn't believe that their paintings actually mean anything.
Someone should have told Gates back in 1975 to give up because building a better BASIC interpreter would never change the world.
Please quote where I said this.
He didn't claim he was one. But you started out basically implicitly demanding that we all be humanitarians. It's fine to help people, but it's also fine to build web-apps for cat pictures. If you feel so strongly about humanitarian work, just go to Syria or where ever, and help people yourself.
And you can't work all the time. It sucks the creativity out of you. At least for me. So hobbies are important to make the other side function well.
Once you've done all that, come back here and link to a blog where you explain how you did it, so that we may follow in your shiny, saintly path.
Until that moment, you're a whiny little bitch who thinks their opinion on what other people should do with their free time and money means more than diddly squat. (It doesn't).
He was pretty much as exceptional in-game as he was out-of-game.
Those can be used or applied IRL. I like to think.
Also, playing video games or other kinds of entertainment has a role in life. Sure, that energy could be applied to other, greater goods, but the fact of the matter is, nearly nobody has that kind of infinite energy supply, that kind of motivation, etc. There's a few that seem to do, which turn into people's role models - but those are the outliers. You can strive to be like those, but in reality, you'll just burn yourself out.
Relaxation has its role in life. Always has, too; sure, cavemen could be out hunting more food instead of sit around in their caves sharing stories of their ancestors, but they didn't. To name a random example.
Guy: "So, how much do you smoke" Girl: "I smoke a pack a day" Guy: "If you smoke a pack a day, that is 365 packs a day, 3650 over 10 years, and at $20 a pack that is $73,000. if you do that for 30 years, that is $219,000. Just think, if you didn't smoke, you could afford a ferrari" Girl: "Do you smoke?" Guy: "No" Girl: "Oh, so where is your ferrari?"
Playing an intricate game of strategy/deception/organization/finance can be a form of "practice" for the other things in your life.
Well, you can look at the games like EVE as a big social simulations - they're sandboxed worlds very much resembling the real one, but they iterate faster and you (i.e. the authors) can alter the constrains and see what happens. I think MMOs should be studied in greater detail.
People wasting time is a sad thing, but failure to learn from any good data that comes out of it is also sad.
I'm a gamer, and I was an organizer of Occupy Wall Street. That you would even compare the difficulty between running a virtual guild in an online video game, to attempting to organize a real world dissident political movement from scratch, boggles my mind. I've done both, but you clearly don't have the slightest clue what you are talking about.