Why? I’m not the only one who feels that way, so I’d be interested to know why you disagree so strongly.
I haven’t played Bioshock yet, though it is on my list of games to play eventually. I have played Fallout and Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim (but not Deus Ex)— and Planescape: Torment, which also has a fantastic story— and I still think they haven’t quite reached the level of capitalized Art. They’re enjoyable and do try to tell a coherent and engaging story (well, modulo Oblivion, at least); I just can’t honestly say that they rise to a level above, say, a pulp fantasy novel. I think part of the problem is that those are all more or less sandbox games, where the primary goal is to present an interesting world that the player can interact with (which they do well), not to create compelling characters with moral dilemmas. Maybe it’s just the fact that the modern video game industry is about 20-30 years old, and we’re just now getting to the point where the technical considerations are no longer the major obstacle in developing games.
For me, one of the attractive things about video games is the opportunity for meaningful interaction with them, from anything to choosing dialogue options, to role-playing, to making choices that significantly affect the plot, to creating custom content and taking advantage of other players’ custom content. That isn’t the case for most other kinds of art, and it’s something that really is remarkable.
Agreed. They’re much MUCH more boring.
But come on, you’re better than this. The only that makes gaming a colossal waste of time in your eyes is because you’re bad at them and don’t want to put in the tiny amount time required to understand them. And why should hobbies be “productive”? But for the record, I consider gaming very productive.
Despite the fact that I play a lot of games, I’m extremely resistant to identifying myself as a ‘gamer’ for the simple reason that I’m largely repulsed by quite a lot of mainstream gaming culture and have no desire to be associated with it.
Something that bugs me is the whole “are videogames art?” debate among gamers. Far too many seem to think that once games get labeled as ‘art’ they’re magically going to join the pantheon of great cultural works, with sophisticated critics dissecting the latest Bioshock game with the same intellectual vigor as The Godfather. It’s a pretty juvenile attitude because of course games are art, they’re just not good art. The vast majority of games fall short of even a Michael Bay movie in terms of worthwhile storytelling, and they’re going to continue at that level for as long as game writers keep trying to write movies as squeeze in gameplay around it.
That being said, there are a few bright spots, games that create an experience that could not be replicated in another medium and are worth talking about seriously. Planescape: Torment is one. It poses a serious question about the nature of identity and explores it in a way that could not be done as a book. Spec Ops: The Line, even though most people tend to focus on the less interesting aspects of it, is one of the most powerful anti-war experiences I’ve encountered. There are bright spots and potential, and the “games are still in their infancy” line has been bullshit for at least a decade.
Why? Because they get you outside and there’s some magical benefit to being out in the sun? Seriously. All of those are complete wastes of time. Especially golf. And I PLAY golf.
Hobbies EXIST to be wastes of time. If you didn’t have time to waste, you wouldn’t have hobbies. You’d be subsistence farming or whatever.
WRT to Bioshock as gaming’s ‘Citizen Kane’ - well, okay. Fine. Maybe the original Bioshock is, I dunno, I skipped it, but Infinite was a travesty. It would’ve made a fine movie, perhaps, but the gameplay elements like rummaging through trashcans and using vigors to do…stuff were basically total shoehorns. Lemme see if I can the article that summarizes it better than I can…
I think Leaffan hits right to the crux of the OP’s question- he considers them to be “a very unproductive way to spend time as an adult”.
However, there’s no real exposition as to WHY this is the case, and why video games are somehow different than say… reading romance novels, pulp sci-fi, watching inane crap like the various “Real Housewives” shows, playing golf, etc…
I agree with Airk- hobbies are explicitly a way to spend time doing things that aren’t “work” and that are enjoyable. By most definitions, that describes activities that are unproductive and a “waste of time”. Some may have side benefits of fitness, hand-eye coordination, critical thinking, etc… but it’s not in the definition. Also, leisure-time activities that you don’t enjoy and that you do strictly for the benefits aren’t a hobby either; they’re just a category of “work” that you do on your own time.
The prejudice in my experience is very much due the mental segregation of video games into a “childish” category by a lot of people. In their minds, they’re looking at adults playing video games as being in the same league of activities as adults playing make-believe with Barbie dolls or a bunch of adults playing Duck-Duck-Goose.
There’s nothing childish about a great many games; in many ways, they’re more enriching than even games like golf. For example, you can learn a great deal about history, sports, technology, physics, etc… from playing video games. And in many cases, the games spur the players to do more research about game subjects. Video games also enhance hand-eye coordination and can sharpen critical thinking skills and problem solving skills.
Thing is, you have to play real games to get most of these benefits, not crap like Candy Crush or Farmville. But for some weird reason, those are acceptable, while playing something like “Dead Space 2” isn’t.
What’s really funny is that golf video games are so well done that I’ve met a few old duffers who bought a console and copy of Tiger Woods 12/13/14 so they could practice in the winter.
Dilbert’s take on golf sim games.
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on infinite, since IMHO it’s one of the best computer games ever made. And the original Bioshock held that title before Infinite.
You really should play the first one, though. The second is more of the same, so it’s also very good.
Bump, I’ve tried to illustrate why people perceive some hobbies/games as more ‘acceptable’ than others.
In the case of sports:
-Its something that probably has much wider appeal than video games. It lends itself better to being a spectator activity (since the whole business of professional sports is people watching other people play).
-It has rules that are concrete and seldom changed. There’s a wide variety of video games, which are constantly changing and innovating. But the downside is each game has its own rules (of which there tend to be many), and popular games often have the rules constantly change to try to make it more balanced; the Starcraft of the nineties is not the same game as the Starcraft of today, for example.
-Its a physical activity that promotes an active lifestyle, in a day and age when the majority of Americans are overweight/obese.
-It has widespread resources available, from youth leagues all the way up to college level. In a lot of ways, I’d say sports as a hobby is similar in nature and acceptability as playing a musical instrument.
Now, I’m not trying to claim playing sports is somehow a more legitimate hobby, because as most of us agreed, the nature of hobbies are ‘time wasters’ and thus purely subjective to everyone. But I think its disingenuous for some gamers to claim its ‘unfair’ that people find it acceptable take sports related hobbies more seriously than video games.
And regarding games like Candy Crush and Farmville, you need to understand that these games have a much gentler learning curve for non-gamers than many other games. That, and they have the advantage of being on mobile devices vs a console or PC. These games are more often used by laypeople as genuine time wasters, since you have it on your smartphone (I play candy crush at my breaks at work when in places where I dont get 3G internet signals, for example). Its unlikely someone that didn’t grow up with playing video games is going to jump straight to something like Marvel vs capcom 3 or Batman Arkham Asylum.
Incubus, I think you’re conflating playing sports with watching sports. Probably pretty much everyone would agree playing sports is a pretty good, productive hobby. However, I do think it’s pretty reasonable to question why merely watching sports is regarded more highly than playing video games. Watching a football game while drinking a lot of beer is pretty much on the same level of healthiness and productiveness as drinking Mountain Dew while playing Diablo.
I’m going to go against the tide here and say that hobbies shouldn’t merely be timewasters. I think of hobbies as something you do for fun, but also with a somewhat productive goal. I would separate them out from things I simply do to pass the time pleasantly or to relax but without anything to show for it after the time is spent. There would certainly be a big gray zone, though.
I’m with Garula - Incubus, you are clearly conflating “playing” sports with “watching sports”. Also, I feel that, overall, the only reason it has “much wider appeal” is that we have been exposed to these games for generations if not centuries now. If you asked people how much “wide appeal” baseball had in 1600 or something, the answer would probably be ‘not very much’. The technology of “the ball” and “a stick with which to hit it” have literally been present for MILLENIA.
Whereas Video Games are less than 50 years old. Well, okay, fine, apparently there was some super primitive attempt at this sort of thing in 1947, but in terms of “average people” being exposed to them - via commerical products, you’re talking about Pong in 1971. Not a long time for this stuff to embed itself in the popular consciousness.
I definitely see your point. Hobbies where you can create or accomplish something productive definitely garner more respect (since you have something to show for all the time spent). E-sports are still extremely young, and I don’t know if it will get the same popularity of physical sports outside of, say, South Korea.
However, getting back to the sports angle- you say sports have been around longer than video games, but among the most popular sports and events watched, not so much- Super Bowl I aired in 1967, not 500 years ago. The idea of people getting together to watch a game of Football on television isn’t that much newer than video games itself, but it is massively more popular. In addition, you could compare watching video games to playing them.
I don’t think productivity or physical activity have anything to do with the acceptability of a hobby. There are lots of hobbies which are a tad “weird” or “out there” that don’t draw nearly the obnoxious condescension and ire that video gaming does.
For example, R/C aviation, amateur astronomy, being a serious film buff, old (1970s-1990s) era computer hobbyism, etc… None of them involve any serious physical effort, and all were kind of out of the norm, but none draw the haters like video games. Even when R/C aviation is about as nerdy and geeky as things get, people don’t talk shit like they do for video games.
I think it’s probably some sort of oversplash from the large number of stinky, unwashed Comic Book Store Guy types who talk about gaming (and anime, RPGs, collectible card games, grownup board games, miniature games and comic books, graphic novels etc…) That would explain the way that video game hate is similar to the hate for those other things.
(of course, the irony is that despite the comic books and graphic novels being hated on, the latest round of popular superhero movies tend to draw directly from mid-90s graphic novels, especially the recent Batman movies.)
[Nerd Hat Time]
Computer Space beat Pong to the market. It was released in 1971 while Pong showed up a year later in 72. Computer Space is derived from 1962’s Spacewar! while Pong was patterned after Table Tennis, which was released earlier in 72 for the Odyssey (and both were based on Tennis for Two, which was designed for an oscilloscope in 1958).
If you want to get real technical, 1951’s OXO (a tic-tac-toe game) was the first video game.
[/Nerd Hat Time]
That said, video games are roughly 42 years old (counting Computer Space as the first). But counting the Super Bowl as the first instance of football ignores the whole history of the game from 1905 (the legalization of the forward pass) to Super Bowl I. Even if you use the founding of the NFL as the starting point, that happened in 1920.
It’s not a matter of hundreds of years, but compared to video games, sports are ancient.
But you also can’t determine what is or is not “productive” as a blanket statement. I do gain productive things out of video games, and not some nebulous “hand eye coordination”. Video games often have difficult problems, not in the sense of what it presents to the player, but on the backend. I’m a computer scientist by trade and when I’m playing games I’m frequently making mental notes and guess and poking at the inner workings of the game. I’ll frequently try and dissect possible ways to implement certain features, determine the reason certain bugs exist, or why certain features can’t exist in their framework.
Am I atypical? Yeah, probably. Do I do it all the time? No. But to say that people don’t gain anything productive from a given hobby is somewhat presumptive. I have more than once gotten a breakthrough on an assignment or project because I realized I could use a similar technique I saw in a game to solve the problem. It’s less tangible than fitness, or a new bench, but I, personally, have gained real and measurable benefits from playing games.
ETA: I make no claim that my dissections of the inner workings of the game are necessarily correct, but the point is that I think of ways to do what the game does, not necessarily the way it really is done.
My friends and I mostly discuss the game design/theory. As in WHY did they make the choices that were made when they built the game? How is the game balanced / how are they attempting to balance the game? What’s the target audience? How could they improve it?
To some degree this goes along the same lines as Jragon’s criticism (for lack of a better word), in that we try and identify hardware or software constraints while playing, but more often, it’s a little softer in that a lot of it is trying to figure out of certain behaviors and/or play styles were anticipated, or if they’re more of an emergent thing, and (usually) why these things would or wouldn’t be a good decision.
It usually boils down to the idea that the games are developed for a demographic more interested in flashy graphics and bigger explosions than realism, and that a lot of things just flat out aren’t anticipated by the developers, due to the extreme complexity of the games under the hood.
Setting the bar mighty low there, aren’t you?
Interesting thread here. My personal experience - grew up a big pinball fan. Tho I put my hours and quarters into Asteroids, Invaders, Duke Nukem, Doom, Mario Carts…, I never developed the affinity for video games that I had had for pinball. On one hand, it seemed as tho each game required specialized skill, as opposed to pinball, which was more transferrable from machine to machine. But also relevant is another point I don’t know has been made too strongly yet in this thread - video games lacked the “physical” aspect of pinball.
I really don’t care how anyone spends their free time. But personally, I tend to prefer the “real” over the “virtual.” I guess that is a part of my disinterest in much of technology. I tend to think that direct interpersonal interaction and physical exercise are of pretty high value - and in general you get more of those by walking down the block to play board games with a neighbor, then you do from focusing on the screen.
Perhaps it is prejudice on my part, but I also think that some “hobbies/interests” are of a higher “value” if they are more diversely applicable to more and different areas. Getting good at video games - in large part - does little other than make you better at video games. I’d contend that passive activities such as learning music, learning a language or a skill like sewing/woodworking/drawing, result in personal growth in more multifaceted ways.
I also have difficulty understanding why it would be preferable for someone to prefer existing in a fantasy world over learning about and interacting with the actual world around them. I think a “well-rounded” person would have interests that are both passive and active, social and solitary, stimulating and vegetative. I certainly do not think any less of a gamer than a sports fanatic who plays fantasy, watches ESPN and listens to sports talk radio, and spends their entire weekend watching “other peoples’ successes and failures.” (A line from - I think - a Reacher novel.) But, so long as they aren’t hurting anyone, heck, they can do what they want.
Finally, not sure why the hate for golf. Tho I play myself, objectively, it is at least a nice walk in a beautiful natural environment. (Note, I’m talking about walking and golfing, not drinking and driving.) If you want to be any good, there is some element of hand-eye coordination involved, and considerable mental discipline required. Walking a couple of miles with repeated twisting and turning conveys some more physical benefit than sitting on a couch or desk chair. I happen to enjoy nature, and golf courses are generally inherently beautiful sites, with tons of lora and fauna to observe as the seasons change. And 18 holes is 4 hours of interaction with your friends. Sure, there are folk who are golf obsessed - which I would not recommend. Others above have observed that any activity taken to the exclusion of others is likely not desireable. But I’m not sure why folk would consider golf a “less worthy” activity than - say - taking a walk in the park, hiking, birdwatching, gardening…