This is going to be an off the wall explanation but something that I wish I had grasped earlier in life. I was browsing Reddit and saw this pic:
The second I saw this picture I immediately knew that I was wasting my time. The split second. I spent a lot of my youth playing video games and have absolutely nothing to show for it. The games are fun and entertaining but also a carnivore of time. Who cares how many frags you have? Or if you you’ve never heard of pwned.nl (I’d advise you to quit at 80%). I even remember getting stuck on levels or checkpoints during single player or have to try to finish the game because it didn’t save. I did the entire gaming ordeal for a while and I haven’t seriously played video games in many years. Video games are fun but do not add to life skills.
If I could have learned a language or spent more time on a single thing more valuable to life, I’d be better off than playing video games. I will never hate on video games, but I know that Real Life is more important. Pictures of real life events will always win over video games 99% of the time. Getting lost in a video game is a good way to not participate in life. Sad but true.
This era though will be the first of mankind to experience video games. Think about it, Romans and Greeks could barely wipe their ass and now we are controlling virtual people and living vicariously through virtual characters. This is the first generation to experience video games. In 2100, they will look back at our shitty 8 bit Mario and be like “what fucking idiots”. Hopefully they will read this post and say that at least some people realized it at the time.
Video games can be highly productive, skill-based learning tools. It seems that the influx of improved technology and integration with other devices, forums, etc. fosters a blurry line between life and “lives”.
About 7 years ago I met a UPenn PhD student (Linguistics) writing his thesis on the subset of language and social interaction norms, behaviors, etc. entirely contrived through headset gaming and community play.
The disturbing thing is that all of the devices and media formats society continues to expand upon developing are serving the same purpose – but the audience is growing into adults, business people, mothers, toddlers, etc. The entire life experience of our generation is conditioned into touch-screens, displays and “video-game” formats for experiencing our world.
The presence of “ease” and immediate formats compromises our ability to truly “learn” through experience – which is personal error, success, pain and happiness. There have always been “cheats” – but my 120 stars are still worth something damn it. I found Yoshi pre-Google.
We need more handles and less buttons.