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August 28, 2011 5:37 PM

How Games Saved My Life
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn (68 comments total)

How great that people have definite, relatable positive chains of events they can share related to video games. They're so often seen as a negative in our culture. This is like witnessing to their positive and transformative power.

Thanks for posting!
posted by hippybear at 5:41 PM on August 28, 2011 [3 favorites]

(Side note: the site is maintained by Ashly Burch of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin' fame.)
posted by danb at 5:43 PM on August 28, 2011

House arrest for smoking weed? Where do they live, Singapore?
posted by dunkadunc at 5:47 PM on August 28, 2011 [2 favorites]

Also from Destructoid: How Games Ruined My Life.
posted by Nomyte at 6:07 PM on August 28, 2011

House arrest for smoking weed? Where do they live, Singapore?

In an "ongoing investigation", admitting anything to the cops ("sure, we were smoking but...") could do that for you, Singapore or not. Do not talk to police.
posted by vorfeed at 6:09 PM on August 28, 2011 [3 favorites]

A broken x-box saved my friends real x-box. We called it the faux or f-box. It worked.
posted by clavdivs at 6:36 PM on August 28, 2011

¿Yes, but are they art?
posted by Omon Ra at 6:41 PM on August 28, 2011

Games shaved my wife.
posted by tumid dahlia at 6:45 PM on August 28, 2011 [4 favorites]

Escapism ftw
posted by The Biggest Dreamer at 6:49 PM on August 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

Games are pretty much the only thing that really relaxes me.

Gears of War makes me want to become a man.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:50 PM on August 28, 2011

House arrest for smoking weed? Where do they live, Singapore?

Certainly some fascist nightmare of a country, because nothing like that would happen in a free country where citizens are allowed to choose how to live.
posted by CarlRossi at 6:50 PM on August 28, 2011 [9 favorites]

Gears of War makes me want to become a man.

Real men play Pac-Man CE.
posted by JHarris at 6:57 PM on August 28, 2011 [12 favorites]

I credit the over powering addiction that is WoW with helping me kick a 18 year pack a day+ cig habit. Kept my hands busy and indoors. No smokes for almost 4 years. And now I kicked that stupid WoW habit too! (granted I still crave cigarettes)
posted by T10B at 7:09 PM on August 28, 2011

Escapism ftw

Everything you do is an escape from something.
posted by empath at 7:14 PM on August 28, 2011 [9 favorites]

Well, I've certainly met some seriously great people playing games, people who remained friends 5+ and 10+ years out. But I also know I got so into Dark Age of Camelot followed by Everquest II followed by WoW, that I lost a lot of years doing art and other things that were important to me, and I am now way behind as a result, and that is all on me obviously, but it is an oft-repeated tale. I still play games but only because I figured out how much is too much.

I have absolutely no doubt that games are a positive force in a lot of ways, including many ways for me. But I am also pretty sure that the negative stories outweigh the positive ones. Take relationship stories. Lots of people meeting in games for happy endings, certainly. But there are far more with the broken-up kind of endings.
posted by Glinn at 7:19 PM on August 28, 2011

I find that the frequency with which I play video games is directly proportionate to how depressed I am. The less depressed I am, the less I play.
posted by to sir with millipedes at 7:37 PM on August 28, 2011 [5 favorites]

What a cool idea for a blog. Thanks for posting this!

TRUE STORY: I won a science academic competition-y thing in middle school by a single point because I knew from the Final Fantasy games that osmosis involved sucking something from something else (MAGIC POINTS) even though I had no idea what it meant in biology. I was able to narrow down a multiple choice question and get the right answer. Second place went to a guy who went on to be salutatorian from my high school who got a perfect score on his SATs. So games didn't save my life but I felt obnoxiously self-important that day, and STILL DO! Really though, I bring this up because it was the first time I was conscious of the idea that video games were useful for something.

It turns out it goes a lot deeper than that, though: I learned a lot of helpful sociological stuff about how people think/feel from playing WoW for a long time, and it's been very helpful in real life; pretty contrary to the idea that MMOs atrophy your social skills. I get along with a lot of people better than I use to, and I'm more introspective. Games in general, but especially WoW, taught me how to cooperate with difficult people and try to see where they're coming from. Plus I still see over half a dozen of my WoW friends in real life fairly regularly, despite the fact most of us quit playing two and three years ago. Our guild definitely had our share of people who had fake online personas, but for the most part everyone is pretty much the same outside the game.

Games are also the reason I learned to program when I was 11, and both playing games and learning to program hardwires some good problem-solving abilities. I would have never gotten as far as I did in math if I hadn't had the practice programming and manipulating equations more concretely than my classes could explain it. Games have also helped me think faster and manage time efficiently; handling quest paths in WoW (sort of a post man problem of how to avoid covering the same ground twice) has helped me clean the apartment faster, run errands faster, schedule side jobs more efficiently, etc. When I was a waitress during college, it was the same sort of thing.

DDR helped me get in decent shape for the first time in my life when I was younger, and DDR, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band (and other rhythm games) have helped my physical dexterity and musical abilities a lot; you still learn some things about rhythm and song structure even when you play fake instruments. I've always sang since I was a kid so that's where my original music interest came from, but I was never great with instruments for ergonomic reasons, and then drums were out of the question in an apartment. Holding down guitar strings hurts my fingers, but I understand a little more about how guitars can be used in a song by playing those games. Drums are my favorite because I had NO real idea of how they fit into a song before I played them in Rock Band; doing some of the harder songs on Expert made me feel like I learned a lot, even if it's not a perfect analogue. Same goes for keyboard when it's not doing an obvious melody. When I had tried to write my own music in the past, I would get caught up on thinking nothing should be repetitive, but playing Rock Band in general has made it clearer that the majority of a lot of songs are repetitive and you really only should change a handful of things at a time to keep it from sounding repetitive; as you can imagine, the things I tried to write in the past just sounded noisy.

My friend learned how to play piano because of Nobuo Uematsu video game scores, which then lead him to learn how to sing, and now he has a successful band in addition to his day job. He's expanded into a lot of other instruments and song-writing now. When we were 16 or so, we got into the high school talent show with him playing piano and me singing "Small Two of Pieces" from Xenogears, and back then he was just getting to play piano decently and couldn't sing at ALL. Today he's one of the best singers I know.

Games, I think, are like a lot of other things in life; yeah they can amplify existing problem areas, but for other people they have the opposite effect. My husband grew up playing a ton of games too, and he works at NASA now. We both frown whenever parents worry their kids should be doing something "useful" instead of playing video games, especially if their kids are doing well in school and all that, because neither of us could imagine our lives without them.

Also, and this is a BIG deal for me because it's taken me a while to realize it, but video games are a way I've been working on my ADHD, not something that caused it; when I had my worst ADHD I couldn't even play a video game, and forcing myself to sit down for hours like I used to when I was younger and just hammer away at getting better at something actually does carry over into focusing better in other areas of my life. For a point early this year I was struggling to read as much as I'd used to in addition to not having focus for anything else, and I got out Bayonetta and didn't let myself move forward in any level until I'd done all the challenge portals. After two days of this at eight hours a stretch, it was considerably easier to read for long periods. It seems counterintuitive because you'd think, well, a game seems like a bad idea to treat ADHD because you're just craving intermittent rewards, but I think it depends on the person; my problem wasn't so much needing intermittent rewards as being unable to quit thinking about everything at once at all times, so it was worthwhile to practice thinking about only one thing and blocking everything else out. Using the internet and reloading stuff and bouncing all over will totally fuck me up, but games really help me regain my ability to focus. Once I'd gotten back into that habit, I could sit and read for eight hours too. Medication played a part as well, but I was on medication when I still had that bad slump where I couldn't focus again.

Also important: games have made me feel better about failing, and simply regrouping and trying again. You don't get so many low-stakes opportunities to practice this in the real world.

So: fuck yeah, games!
posted by Nattie at 7:41 PM on August 28, 2011 [25 favorites]

Everything you do is an escape from something.

oh.......this hurts. Life isn't an evasion! Yes, I work to escape not being able to pay rent. But it's reality, not an evasion; not an escape into fantasy. I spend time with people I love, partly to escape loneliness, but it's different from drinking every night to escape being lonely, right?

I like this blog. Video games are like weed, like sex, like TV, like being lazy. Labelling them as 'good' or 'bad' takes away our responsibility to think about them and use them (or avoid them) in whatever way is best for our lives.

There are some horrific WoW addiction stories, and I wonder if it's now just too easy to replace reality with virtual fantasy.
posted by beau jackson at 7:55 PM on August 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yes, I work to escape not being able to pay rent. But it's reality, not an evasion; not an escape into fantasy.

And when you work, do you focus 100% on the task at hand, and only think about or do what's necessary to get the job done?
posted by empath at 8:14 PM on August 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

Games are also the reason I learned to program when I was 11

I'd be surprised if there were any programmers on this thread for whom that isn't true. Not astonished, but surprised. Getting a career from gaming may not be a 1-up, but it's gotta at least count as a fire-flower.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:25 PM on August 28, 2011 [3 favorites]

I'm preemptively wincing a little bit, because this is the kind of nice, earnest thing that the internet loves to sink its judgmental teeth into and tear to pieces. But I like it. There's something qualitatively different about the gaming experience compared to other ways of experiencing narrative... I don't really know how to articulate it, though.

I played hundreds of games over the course of 17~18 years as an 'active' gamer, and I've forgotten a great deal of them. I don't really relate to most of gamer culture anymore, and find that I lack the patience to play anything more involved than Plants vs. Zombies most of the time. But the ones I remember, I really remember. Planescape Torment's how do you change the nature of a man? is something I continue to think about whenever I look back on my life and see patterns in my repeated mistakes, despite not having played the game in a solid decade.

I had started to lose my drive to play by the time WoW came around; I tried to play it in a serious way twice, and I found myself losing interest both times as my friends advanced far past me, being more willing to put in the time than I was. But I used to play on this one MUD (which, incidentally, informed a lot of EverQuest, as Brad McQuaid was one of the players, though I didn't know him personally), and was one of the best players of my class in that particular game. The population was large enough to feel varied but small enough that I knew of just about everyone, even if I didn't know them personally. Eventually that lost its luster, too, as people moved on and communities broke apart, as the advent of EQ and then WoW sundered those old text-based games. But the experience stays with me because, at a time in my life when I desperately needed a boost, discovering things I was good at--in this case strategy, problem-solving, writing, communicating, leading--and having a community that valued those qualities in me, was in its own small way integral to laying the foundation for all of the real-world successes I would later have, and continue to have, based on those skills. Rather than encouraging me to stay in my shell, it played a part in convincing me that there was more to me than I thought, and that the risk of leaving the shell was worth it. (Still a work in progress, admittedly.)

I'm not sure if I can entirely credit playing games with planting the seeds for those realizations. In gaming's absence, I may have discovered those skills in some other way. But it happened the way it did, and speculating otherwise is kinda pointless. Either way, it filled a void for me at a time when I needed a void filled. I'll always think of it fondly for that, and continue to believe that the answer of "what's the value of gaming?" is considerably more complex, and individual, than traditional takes on it would have us think.
posted by Kosh at 8:25 PM on August 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

They're doing it for me right now.
posted by I love you more when I eat paint chips at 8:40 PM on August 28, 2011

I spend time with people I love, partly to escape loneliness, but it's different from drinking every night to escape being lonely, right?

Objectively speaking? Not really. More effective, absolutely, but there's no cosmic rulebook that says it's different on some meta level.
posted by Justinian at 9:00 PM on August 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

I spend time with people I love, partly to escape loneliness, but it's different from drinking every night to escape being lonely, right?

Objectively speaking? Not really. More effective, absolutely, but there's no cosmic rulebook that says it's different on some meta level.

Yeah, games help stop me from being lonely when I'm forced to spend time at home. And then I play them too long and the 'lonely game' effect triggers (no real link for that, but its been discussed on Selectbutton).
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 9:07 PM on August 28, 2011

I find that I can't play games as much as I used to. I just lose interest more quickly and go read or something. But I don't spend time with people I love, because seriously, fuck those guys.
posted by adamdschneider at 9:24 PM on August 28, 2011

Objectively speaking? Not really. More effective, absolutely, but there's no cosmic rulebook that says it's different on some meta level.

yes. hmm. yes. I suppose that I choose to believe that there is a difference. That's all that I have. And I'll admit it's a personal preference. I would like to think that if I had a lonely friend, it would be better for her to find solace in relationship with real people than with booze. What is more real than that kind of sentiment? Even if life has no meaning.

And when you work, do you focus 100% on the task at hand, and only think about or do what's necessary to get the job done?

Sometimes I check out metafilter at work. I look out the window too. It's not necessary to get the job done. Not in the least. I don't see how that means that everything I do is an escape from something.

I do like to escape. I sleep late, I smoke weed, I masturbate and I watch movies. I like to remove myself from reality. But I believe in reality. I know that my perspective is subjective, but it's all I have and I'll make the most of it while I can.
posted by beau jackson at 9:46 PM on August 28, 2011

I do like to escape. I sleep late, I smoke weed, I masturbate and I watch movies. I like to remove myself from reality. But I believe in reality. I know that my perspective is subjective, but it's all I have and I'll make the most of it while I can.

Yeah but you can't quantify these things. I spent way too much time playing Red Dead Redemption, and then I went to a party and someone had the RDR map on their wall so we talked about that. Gaming can connect you to the common culture. It can also relax you and let you decompress from all that socializing.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 9:51 PM on August 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

Escapism ftw

Everything you do is an escape from something.

Can this emptiness, this void, be filled? If not, can we run away from it, escape from it? If we have experienced and found one escape to be of no value, are not all other escapes therefore of no value? It does not matter whether you fill the emptiness with this or with that. So-called meditation is also an escape. It does not matter much that you change your way of escape.

How then will you find what to do about this loneliness? You can only find what to do when you have stopped escaping. Is that not so? When you are willing to face what is — which means you must not turn on the radio, which means you must turn your back to civilization — then that loneliness comes to an end, because it is completely transformed. It is no longer loneliness. If you understand what is then what is is the real. Because the mind is continuously avoiding, escaping, refusing to see what is it creates its own hindrances. Because we have so many hindrances that are preventing us from seeing, we do not understand what is and therefore we are getting away from reality; all these hindrances have been created by the mind in order not to see what is. To see what is not only requires a great deal of capacity and awareness of action but it also means turning your back on everything that you have built up… everything that we call civilization. When you see what is, you will find how loneliness is transformed. — Krishnamurti

posted by esprit de l'escalier at 9:56 PM on August 28, 2011 [2 favorites]

I ask you to forgive me for saying that this is a sordid argument and I regret not having the willpower to restrain myself from contributing to it. I want my words to stand on their own. I can only speak about my own realizations and experiences. I have no authority to generalize to the experiences of others.

I've heard the arguments about the skills various games help practice and develop. A lot has been said about the psychology of play in humans and non-human animals alike. There are literal reams of research published on the topic. And these observations completely agree with my own experience. Games, especially before they had a strong online community element, were a wonderful sandbox for learning by doing. It took visual memory to explore and navigate a complex level in a platformer. It took patience to save money for a new set of equipment in an RPG. It took fast decision-making skills to defeat an opponent in a fighting game. All of those are cognitive skills that each one of us relies on in daily life: impulse control, planning, goal maintenance. Games trained all these cognitive skills in a low-risk environment where failure only meant having to start again another day.

But all the same, gaming remains a sandbox, a playground, a simulacrum of the world where I often can't just restart the level or press continue. At some point the training wheels come off, and I have to demonstrate my existing skills. When I drive, I have to plan and remember routes. When I buy stuff, I have to budget my money. When I talk to people, I have to think about their feelings.

One skill many games reinforce is delaying gratification — saving up points to get an upgrade, grinding for gil in Final Fantasy, what have you. In my experience, the activity itself eventually becomes as meaningful as the payoff in the end. Many games are essentially one continuing grind that I gradually learn to enjoy. That may even be the essence of what games are — the process of coming to enjoy a mundane, repetitive activity for the sake of a payoff that never quite arrives.

It is, then, amazing to me that games have done such a terrible job of teaching me to enjoy the mundane, repetitive activities that actually matter to me in my daily life. Grinding for gil can yield me a better suit of imaginary armor. Motivating myself to go above and beyond at work earns me real respects from colleagues. Reading volumes of text about a made-up kingdom in FF Tactics wears thin fast. But there are tons of history books in the real world, endlessly detailed and varied. Why have games been so terrible at motivating me to become a better organizer, creator, inventor, scientist, or historian?

In the end, all a game motivates me to do is play more games. It doesn't open new doors to me. It reveals nothing about the physical world I live in. I already know how to save up gil for new equipment. I want the next-level skill. And, with vanishingly rare exceptions, no game wants to teach it to me.

I live in the real world, and the training wheels are off. Sure, I can learn to beat Robozzle. But I can also learn to program — program anything, even Robozzle. I can enjoy an RPG, but I can also learn to follow actual news from around the globe, in multiple languages. I can memorize moves in a fighting game, or I can work at improving my real-world physical fitness. Those are the skills I genuinely want to practice and improve. My life is richer and more open-ended than any game. And if games are incapable of helping me enjoy the sometimes-tedious nature of the tasks and obligations before me, then perhaps they're not the best use of my time.
posted by Nomyte at 10:04 PM on August 28, 2011 [8 favorites]

Games shaved my wife.

Ride zee Shoopuff?
posted by Malice at 11:02 PM on August 28, 2011

Games have definitely made my life better, and taught me various things. Playing games isn't a treadmill. Many share similarities, but playing in multiple genres helps, I think. My personal and professional life have ties to gaming (I am half of one of those couples that met via MMO), and it's fulfilling. Games haven't just taught me to be more dexterous and physical skills, but the puzzles honed my problem-solving skills, some of the reading of game text enriched my vocabulary growing up too. There was also the flights of imagination that a game could send me into.

There was a sense of healthy competition as well as cooperation learned in part at the arcade. Gaming introduced me to people who have had a significant impact on my life. Maybe I'd go as far as those people have saved me in some regard.

I can't go as far as to say that games saved my life, but they have certainly more than enriched it.
posted by cmgonzalez at 1:03 AM on August 29, 2011

One day my brother got Leisure Suit Larry 1. We spent countless hours on this game and I can guarantee you that it helped me a lot improving my english as a 11-year old french. I'm not sure the vocabulary in LSL saved my life but as cmgonzalez put it, it certainly more than enriched it.
posted by briac at 1:31 AM on August 29, 2011 [2 favorites]

Games made my teenage years more bearable. I had team based competition, winning and losing, respect and disrespect, whereas in real life I had no opportunity for those things. I am not rich or famous because of video games, but I am a little more adventurous, a little more confident.
posted by sonic meat machine at 4:48 AM on August 29, 2011

I sleep late, I smoke weed, I masturbate and I watch movies. I like to remove myself from reality.


All those things are part of reality.
posted by dubold at 5:43 AM on August 29, 2011

But all the same, gaming remains a sandbox, a playground, a simulacrum of the world where I often can't just restart the level or press continue. At some point the training wheels come off, and I have to demonstrate my existing skills.

Not necessarily. I "wasted" several of my teenage years in an online, text/avatar RPG, but the social aspect (in this case some pretty hideous clique-y infighting) and the effect on my spelling were real, in the latter case via the low tech method of typing every word I wasn't sure of into Word, so at the end of an evening's session I had a page long document with all my spelling demons.
posted by Phalene at 5:47 AM on August 29, 2011

If there is a non-drug-based pursuit that encourages more moralizing than video games, I haven't seen it.
posted by adamdschneider at 5:49 AM on August 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

I sleep late, I smoke weed, I masturbate and I watch movies. I like to remove myself from reality.

All those things are part of reality.

Of course. I was disagreeing with the assertion that "everything is an escape", those being some examples of how I "escape", how I take a mental break from reality.

Maybe I am reacting too strongly. I just felt like that kind of sentiment ultimately nullifies everything, including the usefulness of having a conversation about the positive and negative sides of playing games. Perhaps it wasn't meant too seriously.
posted by beau jackson at 6:23 AM on August 29, 2011

And if games are incapable of helping me enjoy the sometimes-tedious nature of the tasks and obligations before me, then perhaps they're not the best use of my time.

Overall, I really liked this response. But as I get older, I'm starting to realize that leisure time is an inherently good thing that doesn't need to be justified as a "best use." Since then, I've generally stopped trying to justify in terms of some eventual goal to reach.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:11 AM on August 29, 2011 [4 favorites]

or I can work at improving my real-world physical fitness

Nice moment of dissonance when, at a low point in my personal level of fitness, I found myself playing GTA San Andreas, taking my character to the local gym and working out. I kept that character in top shape!

I can enjoy an RPG, but I can also learn to follow actual news from around the globe, in multiple languages.

You probably mean video game RPGs, but I'm already reading this thread in terms of personal time-wasters, and pen-and-paper RPGs (though I love em) are up there for me given the amount of time I've spent on them, and some of the same issues apply (why Gygax and crew had to bastardize the mythology so as to ensure I was learning *nothing* about the real world, I'll never know). But the same applies to enjoyment of all fiction, of course -- read or viewed -- over nonfiction. At its best, you win insights from introspective engagement with fiction; at worst, it's a wank. Like most things, there are better and worse things you could be doing with your time.

Tangent: RPG characters are such workaholics. I'm always tempted to throw a few points to Laziness. Yes, at first level he was a keener and learned these skills. Second level he bumped this skill up and introduced himself to another. Third level? Taverns and womanizing, mostly. You never see that. The closest I've seen is Top Secret S.I., which sets your skill increases according to a mix of intelligence and willpower, at least implicitly conceding the issue.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 9:02 AM on August 29, 2011

Maybe I am reacting too strongly. I just felt like that kind of sentiment ultimately nullifies everything, including the usefulness of having a conversation about the positive and negative sides of playing games. Perhaps it wasn't meant too seriously.

Why does escapism nullify anything?
posted by empath at 9:26 AM on August 29, 2011

Like most things, there are better and worse things you could be doing with your time.

I don't understand this attitude, even when I indulge in it myself. I'm going to die. You're going to die. Enjoy it while it lasts. Do whatever, seriously. In the end, it won't matter.
posted by adamdschneider at 9:33 AM on August 29, 2011

Well hell, adamschneider, life is an RPG, and I mean that in the grindy sense. How many hours a week do you spend in service of future enjoyment rather than present?
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 9:37 AM on August 29, 2011

I have absolutely no doubt that games are a positive force in a lot of ways, including many ways for me. But I am also pretty sure that the negative stories outweigh the positive ones. Take relationship stories. Lots of people meeting in games for happy endings, certainly. But there are far more with the broken-up kind of endings.

I suspect pretty strongly that the negative ones are the ones that get the most press, rather than being the collective majority. It's hard to make a good headline about a community building lan-party in someone's basement .
posted by SpacemanStix at 9:39 AM on August 29, 2011

I guess my experience with both news and news junkies have convinced me that it has become another spectator sport. The current 24/7 news format demands filling the bandwidth with blatant speculation or a game-show format in which talking heads compete to feign the most outrage over a current political issue. The heightened sense of importance tends to bleed over to polarized interpersonal relationships.

In contrast, I'm pretty convinced that two of the best tools to develop relationships are a deck of cards and a soccer ball. It's something of a family tradition for me. I learned algebra and probability from contract bridge with my grandparents. Clean up after dinner and we break out the cards and board games. Computer gaming is just an extension of that.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 10:03 AM on August 29, 2011

Why does escapism nullify anything?

Not escapism per se but the idea the literally everything we do is an escape from something. Judging by your responses I wonder if my understanding is different than your intended meaning.

I don't think I can explain it better than my first comment and I think I'll leave it at that.
posted by beau jackson at 10:12 AM on August 29, 2011

Why does escapism nullify anything?

By definition escapism is the escape from your most profound reaction to the world. There is no greater waste than that.

Look honestly at the emotion that prompts you to escape. What do you say to yourself in the moment you decide to start playing? Sometimes, it can be some genuine love for the game, but almost always, you're escaping from another feeling. Isn't that right?

What is the purpose of feelings? All feelings are transformative. By experiencing them, we change. If you feel sad about something, they you inevitably ask yourself why you're sad, and the instincts that put you in this position change — slowly, but ratchet-like.

Sometimes, it's hard to see at first what you can make of a feeling of sadness or loss, especially if the feeling is very painful. And though it may be meaningless to talk about a reason for all events in the universe, there surely is a reason for all feelings: they are the product of our individual psychology. If someone hurts you, you may imagine that he is the primary cause of the negative emotion, when in reality your psychology plays a role in bringing about that emotion.

Despite its transformative power, it's suffering that people so desperately escape. You have an experience that causes a negative emotion (e.g., your pride is hurt), and you run from the emotion by playing video games. So, the experience — which is the only way to transform yourself — is wasted. You'll have to wait for another experience to make you more perfect. John Donne said it: Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it… we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.

But, escapism steals more than a handful of transformative events. Consistently escaping emotions robs us of our capacity to engage with our profound selves. It makes the most minor emotions into catastrophes. Emotions become progressively harder to face until habit of escapism has made us into cowards.
posted by esprit de l'escalier at 11:42 AM on August 29, 2011

Oh nonsense.
posted by empath at 11:47 AM on August 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

What is the purpose of feelings? All feelings are transformative. By experiencing them, we change. If you feel sad about something, they you inevitably ask yourself why you're sad, and the instincts that put you in this position change — slowly, but ratchet-like.

You have feelings because you're a creature which evolved in an environment in which the genes which produce the capability of experiencing those feelings in human beings are more likely to survive. No more, no less. They aren't signs from the universe, and they aren't sent from god, and only meaning they have are what you assign to them.
posted by empath at 11:51 AM on August 29, 2011

Despite its transformative power, it's suffering that people so desperately escape. You have an experience that causes a negative emotion (e.g., your pride is hurt), and you run from the emotion by playing video games. So, the experience — which is the only way to transform yourself — is wasted. You'll have to wait for another experience to make you more perfect.

I mean seriously, read what you just wrote. Come on.
posted by empath at 11:53 AM on August 29, 2011

Look honestly at the emotion that prompts you to escape. What do you say to yourself in the moment you decide to start playing? Sometimes, it can be some genuine love for the game, but almost always, you're escaping from another feeling. Isn't that right?

These are purely rhetorical questions and you're not really interested in the answers. Isn't that right?

I think I read Simon Singh comment that the WWII codebreakers at Bletchley Park had regular cricket games in the afternoon. People who were hard at work cracking messages that meant life or death for thousands of other people, sometimes took time out for play. Games can be a form of avoidance, but then again, so can anything.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 11:59 AM on August 29, 2011

These are purely rhetorical questions and you're not really interested in the answers. Isn't that right?

What I wrote is my experience. I'm definitely interested in yours whether it's similar or different.

Games can be a form of avoidance, but then again, so can anything.

It's true, and there are times when games are not avoidance — when they're exactly what we most profoundly feel like doing. So, the same activity can be something wonderful or something terrible depending on the reason that one does it.
posted by esprit de l'escalier at 12:08 PM on August 29, 2011

I'm definitely interested in yours whether it's similar or different.

If that's the case, then a rhetorical voice that makes authoritative assumptions about the experiences of others isn't a good way of expressing it.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:11 PM on August 29, 2011

You play games because you're an emotionally stunted life-avoider. Isn't that right?
posted by adamdschneider at 12:18 PM on August 29, 2011

No, that's why I do drugs. I play games because I'm confused about the difference between fantasy and reality.
posted by empath at 12:33 PM on August 29, 2011 [2 favorites]

Let's get high and play Halo.
posted by beau jackson at 12:54 PM on August 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

I play games because it's, you know, fun.
And i don't give a damn if i don't learn a new marketable skill from them, it's *leisure*.
posted by vivelame at 1:06 PM on August 29, 2011

If you don't learn useful skills now, you'll be powerless in the afterlife.
posted by adamdschneider at 1:16 PM on August 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

I play games because it's, you know, fun.
And i don't give a damn if i don't learn a new marketable skill from them, it's *leisure*.

IMHO, there are qualitative differences in how one spends one's leisure time which have nothing to do with developing "marketable skills" (or any skills, for that matter). Fun is its own reward, but not all fun is created equal. I think this sort of thing is up to the individual, but I eventually realized that games just weren't providing enough fun-payoff, especially considering the time they take.

I certainly don't think playing video games was ever going to ~rob me of my capacity to engage with my profound self~, but "perhaps they're not the best use of my time" about sums it up.
posted by vorfeed at 1:49 PM on August 29, 2011 [2 favorites]

Take relationship stories. Lots of people meeting in games for happy endings, certainly. But there are far more with the broken-up kind of endings.

Most people who date end up broken-up, if not broken hearted. It's still only 50-50 for marriages. Lets throw those out too?
posted by Garm at 2:30 PM on August 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

I suspect pretty strongly that the negative ones are the ones that get the most press

Yeah, I thought about that, and it's probably true.

Most people who date end up broken-up, if not broken hearted. It's still only 50-50 for marriages. Lets throw those out too?

Um, what. Who is throwing things out? My comment about broken-up relationships related to gaming, for the record, was not based so much on news or blog stories about those things, but from the comments/stories of so many guildmates over many years whose girlfriends/boyfriends and sometimes wives/husbands left them over their gaming habits. That doesn't make my assertion that the negative outweighs the positive true, but it is my experience.

Certainly it's never the game's fault for breaking up a relationship, but the choices made by a particular person related to a game (and part of larger problems, probably).
posted by Glinn at 3:53 PM on August 29, 2011

I credit the over powering addiction that is WoW with helping me kick a 18 year pack a day+ cig habit. Kept my hands busy and indoors. No smokes for almost 4 years.

Video games helped me quit smoking too. For me it was the N64: when I craved a cigarette, I picked up a controller instead.
posted by homunculus at 4:15 PM on August 29, 2011

Games are pretty much the only thing that really relaxes me.

I can think of a few things off the top of my head that are much more relaxing, but most aren't things I can do whenever I have half an hour of free time and games really do have a relaxing effect on me that other mediums don't. I'll probably die without understanding why, but they do sometimes help with anxiety and emotional tension. Unfortunately, most games don't appeal to me or live up to their own potential and I tend to think the medium/industry/culture is sort of currently in freefall.

But this--positive personal stories involving but not specifically about videogames--is just what I wanted to read. Thanks.
posted by byanyothername at 4:16 PM on August 29, 2011

I don't buy the dichotomy between video games and games. If I didn't have computer games, I'd probably be getting books of chess puzzles and sudoku.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 5:14 PM on August 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

Video games are just sports for those whose lungs experience severe resistance with every deep breath.
posted by LogicalDash at 7:48 PM on August 29, 2011

Video games are just sports for those whose lungs experience severe resistance with every deep breath.

Sigh... yeah, and sports are video games for morons. Let's all have contempt for one another, shall we?
posted by IjonTichy at 11:35 AM on August 30, 2011

I think LogicalDash may have been using self-effacing humor, there. His name, after all, comes from a DDR song, according to his profile.
posted by adamdschneider at 11:37 AM on August 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

INTERNEEETTTTT! *shakes fist*
posted by IjonTichy at 12:16 PM on August 30, 2011

…spending warm summer days indoors playing slaying games with a buck-toothed girl from luxembourg…
posted by esprit de l'escalier at 4:53 PM on August 30, 2011