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"The Only Thing I Know"
"Video games were to blame"? Really? You're sure it wasn't your apparent lack of self-control that was to blame?
"There is NO place on a resume for X-box achievements"? Seriously? There isn't? Well how about that. Guess I won't be the last starfighter after all. How disappointing.
"Overwhelming negative effects [of video games]" coupled with a picture of open bottles of prescription drugs? Wow... just wow.
"Do things that create value, not consume time"? A laudable goal indeed, but kind of undercut when you follow that with "read all 7 Harry Potter books" as one of the things you could have done had you not spent all of your time playing WoW[1]. For that matter, what value are you creating by driving from NYC to LA 3 times? You're... what? Supporting the auto industry? Site-seeing? Polluting the air unnecessarily? Oh wait, that last one isn't valuable at all.
Anyway, yeah, it's pretty blatantly obvious (or at least it is to people who aren't this guy, apparently) that video games aren't the be-all, end-all of existence and that people who spend every waking moment in front of a TV or computer monitor with a controller in hand are Doing It Wrong. It took this guy thirty years to come to this shocking revelation? And then he had to quit cold turkey just because he apparently couldn't trust himself to do things in moderation like normal people do? And then he spent however long it took to make that video to share this startling realization with the rest of the world?
And honestly, as is always the case, this can be said of many things that people do to kill time, be it watching TV, going to the movies, reading a book, or whatever. I don't hear many people saying "stop reading so many books when you could be out there doing something productive!" Or at least, not anymore, now that TV and video games are around to become the new scapegoat. And in any case, would it be any more valid if people were saying it about these other things? I just don't understand why some people get so seemingly up-in-arms about how other people spend their free time, as long as we aren't actively harming others.
When I first watched this video, I kind of went "Huh, this guy may be on to something." And then I watched it again and actually listened more closely to what he said. The more I mull it over, the more this video seems just shy of simply being yet another attention whore-ish, Jack Thompson-like vidjya gaems are teh evil!!! thing, except draped in flowery music and soft speech and claims by him that he actually doesn't hate video games or the people who make them (while simultaneously exhorting everyone to stop playing them).
[1] - Not knocking the Harry Potter books there, obviously. I have read all 7 Harry Potter books, for what it's worth, and they're pretty cool. I'm just not sure how doing that is "creating value, not consuming time" any better than playing video games is.
"Video games were to blame"? Really? You're sure it wasn't your apparent lack of self-control that was to blame?
"There is NO place on a resume for X-box achievements"? Seriously? There isn't? Well how about that. Guess I won't be the last starfighter after all. How disappointing.
"Overwhelming negative effects [of video games]" coupled with a picture of open bottles of prescription drugs? Wow... just wow.
"Do things that create value, not consume time"? A laudable goal indeed, but kind of undercut when you follow that with "read all 7 Harry Potter books" as one of the things you could have done had you not spent all of your time playing WoW[1]. For that matter, what value are you creating by driving from NYC to LA 3 times? You're... what? Supporting the auto industry? Site-seeing? Polluting the air unnecessarily? Oh wait, that last one isn't valuable at all.
Anyway, yeah, it's pretty blatantly obvious (or at least it is to people who aren't this guy, apparently) that video games aren't the be-all, end-all of existence and that people who spend every waking moment in front of a TV or computer monitor with a controller in hand are Doing It Wrong. It took this guy thirty years to come to this shocking revelation? And then he had to quit cold turkey just because he apparently couldn't trust himself to do things in moderation like normal people do? And then he spent however long it took to make that video to share this startling realization with the rest of the world?
And honestly, as is always the case, this can be said of many things that people do to kill time, be it watching TV, going to the movies, reading a book, or whatever. I don't hear many people saying "stop reading so many books when you could be out there doing something productive!" Or at least, not anymore, now that TV and video games are around to become the new scapegoat. And in any case, would it be any more valid if people were saying it about these other things? I just don't understand why some people get so seemingly up-in-arms about how other people spend their free time, as long as we aren't actively harming others.
When I first watched this video, I kind of went "Huh, this guy may be on to something." And then I watched it again and actually listened more closely to what he said. The more I mull it over, the more this video seems just shy of simply being yet another attention whore-ish, Jack Thompson-like vidjya gaems are teh evil!!! thing, except draped in flowery music and soft speech and claims by him that he actually doesn't hate video games or the people who make them (while simultaneously exhorting everyone to stop playing them).
[1] - Not knocking the Harry Potter books there, obviously. I have read all 7 Harry Potter books, for what it's worth, and they're pretty cool. I'm just not sure how doing that is "creating value, not consuming time" any better than playing video games is.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 05:06 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 05:45 am (UTC)From:I thought it was cute. THe guy was obviously a hard core gamer who realized what is "common sense" to you (and me, and others), had an epiphany, and felt like he needed to testify to others. As far as testimonials go, this one is easier to bear than my boss'.
also, re: common sense -- a LOT of people think the way the guy did. I used to know some of them in college. Only some of them grew out of it.
also also, re: negative aspects -- There are some things you can connect to gaming. LOT more young folks have repetitive stress issues than ever did before computers and videogames, for instance. Carpal TUnnel used to be an obscure disease for super secretaries and longtime factory workers. 'course, iirc, there was a rash of thumb tendinitis and eye issues in kids when the Potter books came out. Now I probably would've gotten arthritis in my hands on my own, but the tendinitis is pretty directly related to all the typing I do (and my prescription painkillers directly related to the tendinitis). Videogaming, like everything else in life, is not a danger-free activity.
(heh, sorry about the mini-rant. due to the aforementioned hand and wrist issues, i overreact when stuff like this comes up. "Take breaks when you game! don't end up like meeeeeeee!" *shakes her hands up and down so the joints snap and pop like a bag of potato chips*)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 08:01 am (UTC)From:Yeah, you're probably right. I'm so used to attacks by Jack Thompson and other such "insane jackasses" (as Jon Stewart called them, though he was talking specifically about Congress at the time) that when I see anyone saying things like "games were to blame," it puts me on edge and I perhaps get a bit overly defensive about it. I certainly don't think this guy was being actively malicious like those other guys often are, true enough. If he feels it is in his own best interests to give up gaming altogether, that's his choice and more power to him. I just didn't take a shine to the fact that he seemed to be projecting his own shortcomings almost entirely onto the actual video games themselves.
Or that he kept calling them "valueless," and then citing the somewhat ridiculous examples of reading Harry Potter or driving from LA to New York as though these were somehow objectly more worthwhile activities. Yeah, that kind of thing tends to strike a nerve with me, given my own background.
But yeah, I saw more than a few people absorbed into the void that is WoW (which seems to have been this guy's drug of choice[1] as well) when it first came out while I was going to DigiPen. It was pretty ugly at the time, but most of them managed to extricate themselves from it after a while. This is part of the reason for my own sometimes militant antipathy toward MMO games in particular. Not because they don't appeal to me at all, but because I'm slightly concerned that if I ever did try to play one I'd potentially fall into the trap and end up like them, and so I tend to avoid them altogether. If it's not a game that I can play for X amount of time and then be able to say "Here, I finished the game. I am done now." then it's not really something that interests me all that much. (Though, I freely admit, when The Secret World comes out, whenever that may be, I will likely finally break my self-imposed taboo against MMO games. >_>)
[1] - Okay, "drug" probably isn't the best word to use there, but even so, I don't totally discount the possibility that "video game addiction" may be a real thing, unlike some knee-jerk defenders of the hobby tend to do. When you have, for example, guys in Korea or China or wherever dying of exhaustion because they spent four days straight playing WoW or Starcraft or whatever, there's definitely something going on there.