LessWrong gaming community

Do you mind going into detail about why you think video games devour life's potential?

Sure. The main thing is that, empirically, they tend to hijack peoples' motivational systems by providing fake utility functions and a constant stream of well-tuned rewards, to make them play for many hours. Those are usually hours that could've been spent on something much better. Some formerly-well-adjusted people end up spending a large fraction of their waking hours this way, particularly people who got suckered into setting up social reinforcement for their gaming habits (MMORPG players who meet friends they can only interact with through the game, and Facebook/Zynga game players who constantly receive and generate notifications to and from their friends about the games.) Even if you're only losing a small number of hours, though, video games are dangerous as a procrastination activity because they're immediately available and more tempting than most other procrastination activities, and they're hard to transition back from.

If you offered me a new shiny game that I would want to spend a lot of time playing if I start, I would refuse to start playing it, because I know that then I would spend a lot of time playing it, and I don’t want my time to be spent that way.

(Note, while this post starts off with evidence, A fair amount of this post is rambly/anecdotal. Please don't take those parts as evidence. I realized I started simply adding my personal experiences about gaming, but I didn't want to delete it, because it did seem relevant to the question.)

Jimrandomh also mentioned specific classes of video games, and to expound on his point, there are certainly some videogames which are substantially more devouring of life's potential then others.

First of all, there are those cases where people actually die from video games. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction#Notable_deaths

Those are rare, but they do happen, and certainly are a very literal example of Jimrandomh's point.

Also, there is a class of videogames that are designed, not primarily to be fun, but primarily as an engine to keep you online and spending money. As an excellent example of this, almost anything made by the company Zynga. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga

To be more specific, there are consequences if you don't play. Take Farmville. If you don't play, you'll experience disutility. Not just from "I could have leveled up if I had another hour to finish that quest." that you might see in any videogame, but an additional crushing of resources when all your crops rot.

Or in Zynga's cooking game, you have to cook at least once a day for 7 days to earn specific prizes. Played 6 days in a row and want to take a break on the 7th? No best prize for you, back to the beginning of the week.

Another characteristic of Zynga games is the way they guide you to the payment screen. "No Energy? Want to buy an energy drink for 8 coins?" "No Coins? Want to buy more for real money?"

Also want to get the best bonuses? Better get your friends hooked on the game to, you need their help to build your super stove. Well, unless you want to buy super stove parts with real money, we do that to.

This is not to say that Zynga is the only company that does this. But they make such a very, very good example of a video game that you should avoid.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that all games are this bad either. I remember having fun on Sundays playing Heroes of Might and Magic IV with my dad. It's hot seat, so only one of us could play at a time. My Mom would frequently take advantage of this to get whoever wasn't playing to do the dishes, and my Dad and I would switch off. This helped break up a boring task with a fun stimuli, while allowing me to enjoy interacting with my Family.

However, recently I was playing Dungeons and Dragons Online. I was feeling bored (and more then just a little sleepy), and I actually ended up being so bored/sleepy that I was dying and didn't even notice it (I had the sound off.) I actually had more fun cleaning up the house for my Inlaws then I did playing that game, In this case, the game had gotten so boring that the cleaning was the fun stimuli, and playing the game was the boring task.

In a twist, I had more fun playing through that exact same level again the next day, when I was freshly woken up, and thinking to myself "Alright, THIS TIME, I'm not going to let the boss kill me through sleepy inattentiveness." I then crushed the level by setting almost everything that wasn't me on fire. And it was fun.

Which brings up another excellent point: Games can be fun. But games can also make you lose sleep. This is not a generally not a good tradeoff. I specifically deleted my accounts on one game (Pardus) when I was bothered by the amount of sleep I was losing over it.

I think another reason that I stopped playing it is that my best friend had stopped playing it. This is something about games: If a substantial amount of your friends are playing a game, then playing the game is socially inclusive: It gives you something to interact with your friends about during times where you are socializing. This isn't limited to just video games either. People do the same thing with sports when they say things like "Did you watch the game last night?" and then talk about home runs and touch downs. If none of your friends are playing a game, then the game is exclusive. You feel more distant from people and no one really cares when you are talking about it. In my case, Pardus was being socially exclusive, which is another reason I stopped playing.

Another perspective on devouring lifes potential is that games essentially delete substantial amount of time where you are bored. If you didn't have games, you might think to yourself "I'm bored. Let me go write that story." or "Let me go smash that rotting bookcase into pieces small enough to fit in a trash bag." But if you are a gamer, you might instead think "Let me play some games." and then the more productive work doesn't get done.

Of course, this isn't necessarily the case. If you were to replace video games with rereading TVTropes, then it doesn't really matter: You weren't going to spend that time doing productive work just because you removed video games from the equation. I've been in both cases, although I haven't tried to gather statistics.

I suppose one factor which is likely to bias my opinion in favor of video games is that I met the first woman who I seriously dated, and who later became my wife, when she thrashed me in a video game tournament. That was Soul Calibur 2, specifically. But comparing Soul Calibur 2 with something like Farmville seems bizarre to me. I mean, yes, they're both games, and yes, they're both played on video screens, but they have so many large differences.

On the other hand, people do need to relax somehow, and video games are a good way of doing that.

Citation needed. Beware superstimuli!

I guess there might be considerable variation between people and games, but I personally don't actually relax through games, even though I thought I did. I paid attention to my happiness, level of concentration and general focus over the last two years and tracked them while playing games, and I found that games feel like they relax me, but they actually drain me. Especially my mood goes way down afterwards and needs at least as long as I played to recover, regardless of game played.

The only exception to that, I suspect, are purely creative / exploration-based games like Minecraft or puzzle games.

It is rather daunting to me to consider how to design a research study to determine if chess playing or go playing could be beneficial (in proportion to its cost) for young mathematicians or physicists or engineers.

It's especially daunting because it's so unlikely. One of the things that has impressed me researching my DNB FAQ is how rarely psychology tasks/games 'transfer' to anything we care about besides those tasks/games, and those are pretty precisely focused, carefully designed, and tested.

In order to determine whether they were beneficial we'd first have to be more precise in what we mean by 'making you smarter' and then test that skill in tasks unrelated to the training that use the same faculty.

For example, if we hypothesise Chess benefits working memory we would do a series of unrelated working memory tests on a sample of individuals and look for correlations with their chess ability (for ease of testing, the same individuals as they progress across time would be best). Similarly, if we hypothesise Poker contribute to probability estimation ability we would test them on non-poker related statistics questions.

Well, when I heard "Let's all gang up on the guy in first place", my thought process continued in his voice with "and then you'll be in first place, and we'll cross that bridge when we come to it!" So agreeing to the strategy would have meant dozens of turns of ganging up 4-against-1, which would be too easy, followed by being ganged up on 1-against-3, which would be too hard. Being ganged up on 2-against-3, on the other hand, sounded fun, given that we were already ahead and would have the element of surprise.

So instead of agreeing to the strategy, I feigned agreement, then warned the 1st place player what to prepare for and teamed up with him instead. After everybody built up their militaries, Mr. 3rd Place launched the attack on Mr. 1st Place, then I immediately launched the attack on Mr. 3P, whose army was now mostly bogged down behind enemy lines. The war basically broke in two, with a near-stalemate between 1P vs. 4P+5P in the south, while I made major gains against 3P in the north. By the time 3P was defeated I was far in the lead, decently defended against any possible betrayal by 2P, and had just successfully made a large amphibious assault on the wealthy-but-underdefended rear of 4P and 5P, so they all conceded.

Hmm... that first paragraph makes me sound brilliantly Machiavellian in hindsight, but that's not true. I did have those strategic thoughts at the time, but my "true rejection" was more along the lines of "1P showed mercy when he could have smashed me (perhaps profitably) much earlier in the game" and (despite my pro-gaming-betrayal stance above) I couldn't bring myself to violate our peace agreement after that.

Yup, thank you.