Sports : you sit on a couch and watch extremely well paid people you have zero control or say about anything they do try to win at a centuries old athletic event. You are not a participant - the only way you contribute is by spending money and guzzling beer.
Video Games - *you *are the athlete. Admittedly, it’s a sport for nerds and you aren’t getting any exercise and you are probably bad at the game relative to the pro gamers. But, you are contributing. In team and versus multiplayer games, your actions hugely contribute to the outcome. You are the leader who determines if your armies were victorious in an RTS game. **You **are the engineer who designs the superior spaceship in Space Engineers. **You **are the artist who makes the best pixel art structure or the most aesthetically pleasing house in Minecraft. You are the guy who covers his buddies as they try to raid the supermarket for supplies and ammo in the ravaged wasteland of Day-Z and it’s clones. (or the guy who has to go afk at a critical moment and lets his buddies get shot in the head)
I think sports watchers are utter losers compared to gamers, who may also be losers but not to as large a degree. Opinions?
I have done a lot of both in my day (though not nearly as much now), and I regard both as enjoyable wastes of time.
A football fanatic has no business looking down on a GTA 5 addict, and vice versa. Neither is curing cancer or feeding the hungry. They’re both just trying to have fun.
Come to think of it… is arguing politics on the SDMB any more admirable than watching baseball or playing Call of Duty?
Most sports watchers get off the couch when the game ends and do other things. Gamers play and play and play until they wear holes in the furniture, attract dirt and dust, and begin wearing diapers so they do not have to stop their game to piss and shit. Then they grow scales and potatoes sprout in their armpits.
Watching sports is a pro-social activity. Rooting for a team taps into a kind of tribalism that goes way back into prehistory. The warriors are out on the field of battle, facing off against the enemy, and you may not be out there with them, but everyone is in it together to defend the community.
Playing video games is an anti-social activity. You isolate yourself from society, lock yourself in a basement, and turn into this.
The first one is healthy, the second one is sick and disgusting.
BTW, I hate sports, and play a lot of video games. In case you’re wondering.
I’m not much of a sports fan, been that way most of my life, but recently became interested in watching baseball due to playing so much video game baseball and learning to appreciate the strategy. But the expected life on that interest is now fading, as all potential strategy has been appreciated and I grow bored of watching it once again.
I’m an avid football fan and watch as much football as I possibly can. Yet even I don’t find it ‘admirable’ to watch games. I consider it as well deserved downtime, because I work a lot and I work hard and I don’t want to be dull boy Jack. Video games came along when I was already married, so I never got into those, but I think they serve as pleasurable down time activity for a lot of folks, too. As with anything, you can’t let a downtime activity take over your life, but if you keep it in balance, it’s harmless and fun. But no, not admirable in any way.
I love video games and am replaying HL2 but a voice in the back of my head says its wrong to gun down people. But its fun. But maybe the rise of games like this explain the (miniscule number of) folks who shoot up places.
In 2015, the category “video games” is a much wider category than TV Sports. It encompasses interactive artistic expression (the Stanley Parable), cognitive puzzles (Portal), highly skill-based games against human opponents (DOTA2), and much more. Each of those is really quite different in terms of how social it is, how valuable it is in terms of personal development, how much of one’s life it occupies, it’s social value, and any other factor you might use to evaluate the worth of a pasttime. By contrast, there’s not a huge difference as to those factors between watching basketball or baseball or cricket.
I think you could make an objective argument that some versions of “gaming” are inferior to sports-watching as to some of those things. If you put in 40 hours of some MMORPG a week, that puts you in a very different category from the guy who plays a couple hours of Team Fortress 2 on the weekends, ISTM. It’s probably not worse than watching 40 hours of football a week (probably better), but no one is watching 40 hours of football a week, whereas tens of thousands of people are putting that time into gaming.
Please. Break down each sport like you break down each kind of gaming. Also, I can go to the park and play baseball. Try going to the park and playing rea; life Grand Theft Auto.
No. I’m suggesting there is a wider real life component to sport. Athletes are real people and anyone can play the sport if they are fit enough. Gaming is a fantasy that allows the weak to feel powerful but has no real world carryover save for the lone psycho.
