I lean toward “efficient entertainment”, but I do sometimes wonder what that chunk of my free time would look like otherwise.
I thought they were going to say now there’s a 26 part video on beetles. The beetle man never went anywhere. He’s also on YouTube lol
I can’t remember the name of the channel, but I’ve followed a guy rehabilitating a grocery lobster, one that took care otters, another with sea monkeys, and people just cleaning carpets. People with niche interests didn’t go anywhere. If anything, they’re more accessible because of the internet.
Leon the lobster! The channel just uploaded a new video a week ago. Channel name is Brady Brentwood, if you want the update. I haven’t watched it myself yet.
Thank you!
Oh man, those videos of people cleaning rugs are fantastic.
Right? That and power washing videos. Just 👌🏾
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What this meme is really saying is “the main issue with video games is you aren’t developing skills that can serve capitalistic interests via monetization of hobbies”
Normally I would agree, but the deeper implication is contributing meaningful additions to collective human knowledge, and I kinda agree from an objectivist standpoint.
Agreed. It’s like how Emperor Hirohito did very important work.
Not the war. He spent the later half of his life meticulously collecting baseline data as a (rich and connected) marine biologist. It’s not exactly glamorous, but that data is a significant data point on how Climate Change is affecting ocean life. It’s a lot more pointed than “I swear there used to be more fireflies”.
(disclaimer: OP was more clear than I initially read it and maybe my original comment doesn’t hold up in reference to it. I’m just replying in reference to the bigger concept and it’s so long because I’m procrastinating pretty hard right now. I wanted to be clear that I’m not upset or anything, just putting off cleaning lol)
Hobbies shouldn’t have to be “productive,” whether financially or otherwise. Who is to gauge what counts as meaningful anyway? Not everybody can contribute “meaningful additions to collective human knowledge,” especially now. The bar to do so is so much higher than it was in 1820.
While Hypothetical German Lad could go collect beetles and have it be counted as a meaningful contribution as implied, I would have to (realistically, barring some 1 in a million happenstance) need a lab or something to make some big much wow discovery/contribution. If I went outside and collected beetles today, while it would count as a hobby, it wouldn’t be the contribution being implied here, I’d just be a bug collector. Mildly interesting, but no more productive than making some progress in Baldur’s Gate or doodling or whatever else menial pasttime.
I’m not interested in watching people play video games myself, but I’d argue it’s a productive hobby if it brings joy or information to others. In regards to OP: A 26 part youtube series about how to get all the rings in every sonic game is going to be useful to people trying to get all the rings in Sonic Generations or whatever entry they’re playing. There being 26 parts means they know that’s going to be a resource they can come back to when they boot up Sonic 8: The Ocho later. It’s still an addition to collective knowledge, just not all knowledge is deep cosmic understanding. I can have the knowledge of how to reach Burger King from work, bestow that knowledge upon a new coworker, but yknow nobody is going to write a book about me for it and that’s ok!
The world sucks right now and people are struggling, let folks have their silly hobbies without having to justify them. 🤷
I love video games, but creating content for a publically traded brand to post on an advertising company’s streaming platform is inherently more serving of capitalism than documenting bugs.
That’s not a “video game” issue though, it’s a social media issue. Re-reading OP, it is more clear than I initially read it as (when I made this comment I felt it didn’t make up it’s mind who it’s swinging at, gamers or ‘streamers,’) so in context of the image you’re right.
However, I stand by my bigger point of “fuck shaming ‘unproductive’ hobbies.” Let people find their dopamine where they can find it so long as it isn’t bothering anyone.
And I’ll watch every one
I’m in the computer industry, haven’t played video games in decades. The time sink that video games demand, on top of working with machines all day every day just isn’t appealing to me. From the outside, seeing the vegas style “no clocks, windows and plenty of air conditioning” gamblingification of the games industry, from microtransactions, loot crates, games as personal identity, leads me to reckon they’re absolutely a thief of focus, as that’s what garners the most revenue for the games producers themselves. It’s a snake eating it’s own tail, with lifetimes spent, just clicking away.
The time sink that video games demand
Video games don’t demand your time more than any other hobby… do you avoid woodworking because you’re scared you’ll make an elaborate wardrobe instead of a little box? Do you avoid swimming because you don’t want to go across the English Channel?
You can play small games and you can play for an hour a week, there’s no need to burn every hour of every day on it like a teenager.
It’s possible, but it can really change the type of games available to you too. I used to love Skyrim and similar, but eventually found I needed a minimum session of 2-3 hrs, otherwise I hadn’t even done any real playing, just inventory management, or getting crafting supplies. These days, with kids and work, I like rally simulator games, it can be satisfying to just do one or two stages, which can take as little as 5-20 mins. But it’s a whole different thing, no story, character development, surprises…a bit like going from watching Kurosawa films to watching the sports highlights.
Agreed. It’s the same reason I occasionally pop in Madden or 2K. I can play a game or two and then just be done with it.
I want a TV show about wood working addicts. Please Jeff, you must stop crafting intricate cabinets. No more driftwood tables either. I’m sick of cleaning up resin goddamnit.
I want a TV show about wood working addicts.
If you look around, probably on YouTube, I bet you can find episodes.
I can see some indie games as being easy to pick up and put down without a huge time commitment.* However, we shouldn’t discount the fact that a lot of games today, especially some of the “AAA” types, are purposedly designed to be addictive.
*Despite being a small indie game,
CracktorioFactorio will ruin your life. The factory must grow.Bigger games can also be quick. A match of rocket league is like 10 minutes. There’s no story so you can pick it up and put it down whenever you want.
We also live in the golden age of indie games anyways, plenty of smaller quality games that don’t demand all of your life. I haven’t played a AAA game in ages. The biggest games I currently play are league of legends and that’s cause I started when it was an indie company before it became AAA and ff14 and I only do ff14 like 3 hours a week or so with my fiancee cause she loves it.
It’s way too easy for people to be exploited through video games, just as with gambling, for it to be “just another hobby”. They can also become addicted.
Yes, it can be a very nice hobby; with some games you can even show something for the time spent (As in skills, not “achievements”).
But it can also become a symptom of dangerous reality abandonment. The worst for this is in my opinion still better than substance abuse, but a danger nonetheless.
Yes, it can be a very nice hobby; with some games you can even show something for the time spent (As in skills
Nah, miss me with this mindset. Not every minute of your life needs to be productive, you should have at least one hobby that you can’t show something for the time spent.
Agreed, not every minute needs to be productive.
Hobbies (like woodworking, to which I was trying to relate my text) can be very self affirming, especially if you get very good at them. I was thinking about this self affirmation, not about productivity when I was writing that.
Anything can be addicting. I knew a woman who was literally addicted to maraschino cherries. There are people who are addicted to work.
Anything done to excess is an addiction. So choose yours’ carefully.
Yes, everything can be, but games are designed to be addicting. Most are designed to keep you engaged as long as possible, some even to profit as much as possible from the player.
Almost everything you can buy is designed to be addicting. From video games to peanut butter. Because that’s how you get people to continue to use your specific product.
So choose your addictions carefully and try to keep them as under control as possible. Sadly, some can do that and some cannot.
True. This might be a more personal thing for me, which is why I felt the severity might be higher than it actually is.
Personal bias about addictions is a real thing and you aren’t alone. The shrapnel of an addiction can leave some pretty heavy scars on those who have to live around an addicted person. And it matters not a whit about what the actual addiction is.
If you have those scars, I hope you find internal peace.
For AAA, live service, “games as an industry,” sure. However, there are plenty of examples of games that are passion projects, respect your time, and have mutual respect with their community. You just won’t see them advertised on billboards.
It is a crap shoot if an autist’s fixation winds up being something beneficial to a single soul.
I run a company that does something very specific for some of the largest companies in the world. Key infrastructure is only functional because of what we do. One of the key skills that differentiate our people from the rest is something I often see in some of the top video game and TCG players. I always wonder, “what if they had focused that weird brain of theirs towards X or Y”.
What’s the skill tho?
The ability to see the entirety of an environment as a single entity, find synergistic relationships and figure out how to exploit those relationships to force a system to do something it was not designed to do. Like those people that make really niche character builds that suck 99.99% of the time but given this unique set of environmental variables it will suddenly hit you with infinite fireballs with one million points of crit damage or something like that.
The problem is that a mind like that is one requirement, another is years of experience (been there, done that, I know what that is) and really deep and wide knowledge in the field, which is also very hard to find. Finding someone with all of them is like finding a jedi unicorn. These are the people that make very high six or low seven figure salaries.
I’m being relatively vague on purpose.
Explain your vagueness!
Just being cautious about security non-disclosure agreements. It is possible to inadvertently disclose client vulnerabilities by discussing how certain specific skills are necessary, how precarious certain environments are and how fragile they can be without said skills. It is also possible to alert bad actors to the fact that certain skill sets are a weak link in certain client’s infrastructure.
If you are a teenager with a very strong knack for synergy, build crafting, etc., please consider pointing your obsessive mind towards technology (not software development or tech support).
Imagine enterprise level applications as complex living organisms where one insignificant misconfiguration in a peripheral and, as far as everyone was concerned, unrelated system can snowball into bringing down and entire service provider. Sure, someone will eventually do an incident investigation and maybe figure out what went wrong back then, but it is far more valuable to have people that can look at a set seemingly unrelated and not at all concerning metrics and flag the lot as a priority action item BEFORE the system crashes. It seems like black magic fuckery to some, but what it really is about is a combination of deep and wide knowledge of all moving parts related to the application, experience, and the ability to think holistically and understand the synergies.
You can’t just tell us gamers that and then not tell us how to get that bag
Do you guys really need some intense clickers?
I would imagine every generation had their vices (lack of better word) that previous generations harped on. Why back in my day it was MTV (ok, occasionally they were right). But I’m sure when newspapers came out it was similar to tablets and phones. When tv came out, the radio-heads bitched about the “idiot box”. So on and so forth. Any history buffs out there care to elaborate?
“idiot box”
it was called the boob tube
“Stop sitting so close, you’ll damage your eyes! Sit farther back!”
Pastime I think is the correct term.
You can find newspaper articles from the late 1800s IIRC, that decry the slothful youth wasting all their time reading novels instead of playing outside like the glorious generation before them
Longer than that. 2500 years ago ancient greek philosophers complained about the youth in the same ways.
One of the oldest written works that we have, and can translate, was written centuries before the Roman empire and it is complaining about “kids these days”.
This crap has been going on for millennia.
The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …
Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
It is commonly attributed to Socrates or Plato, but apparently the real quote was made by some student for his Cambridge Dissertation in 1907
Well, I’d rather the youth were reading books instead of watching 5 second clips
Thank you very much for sharing that article! t’s an awesome read.
Yeah the people who were cataloging all the species of beetles in Germany were upper class types. Most people in 1820 were tilling fields or working in desperately terrible factories.
The 1800s gave us the likes of Michael Faraday the 2000s gave us the likes of Hank Green.
Don’t forget the insane rates of drinking and alcoholism in the 19th century.
That reminds me I need to swing by the liquor store I’m out of bourbon.
Came here to effectively say this. If we were people in 1820’s Germany, 99% of us wouldn’t have nearly enough spare time to even think about cataloging those beetles.
Hank Green is awesome.
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I will never understand fishing. You just throw the lure in and fucking wait.
Meditation.
Okay but I can do that without buying expensive fishing equipment.
The money needed can be less than the cost of one popular video game. And you can fish for years without fear of the servers ever being turned off…
You can also do it without buying an expensive plane ticket but that hasn’t stopped the idea of “raw-dogging a flight” from spreading
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Well sure. But there are 4 main issues.
- Meditation itself is free.
- I do not want to spend any money on fishing equipment.
- Where I live you need a fishing permit each day you want to actually fish.
- I dont like eating fish.
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Don’t worry I have mountaineering gear. I just struggle to find time to actually go and do it.
I generally do that waiting in a beautiful place chilling with friends. It’s the journey not the destination, etc. Although actually catching fish is great as well.
Such a great example of ‘reality is what you’re conscious of’, I feel! ‘Just throw the lure in and wait’ could for another person be ‘arrive at a beautiful waterside location, ritually prepare your tackle, cast it into the water (a skill that can be a minigame in itself, with all the associated space for practice, improvement, and intermittent positive reinforcement), then enjoy the wonders of being still in nature, but also focus on your task and be ready to react instantly.’ It takes all sorts.
I might just be influenced by all the fishermen I see fishing at my local lake. There is no peace to be found there due to all the tourists.
I see it as an addiction like gambling. You put in some time but don’t always win. That causes a bigger positive feedback for when you do win.
Then the win is a delicious fish and you’re hooked.
and you’re hooked
Ayyyy
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And therein lies the catch. I don’t like fish.
Y’all don’t need to eat them. I have a friend that is a avid fisherman, he doesn’t like to eat fish. But he loves to go fishing and catch and release them. He even enters into fishing tournaments a couple of times a year.
Yeah sure but you’re missing my whole point. I do not see the appeal in fishing. I think it is boring and also you get nothing out of the activity if you don’t like fish.
Then you have missed the point of fishing and generally being a part of nature. Which differs greatly from simply being out in nature.
Yes I do not see a point in fishing that is correct. I do however like being in anture and being part of it.
I think hunting and fishing are mostly an excuse for meditation or hanging out with friends. I have some family members in hunting/fishing geographies and they never seem to care whether they actually catch anything.
Well sure but then I could just meditate without the need for an excuse.
I’ve meditated in my room and I’ve meditated on a deer stand. They are not the same.
Deer stand?
A place to sit and watch for deer when hunting them. Often an elevated seat, either on it’s own frame or attached to a directly to a tree. It gives the hunter a better vantage point to see the surroundings from. It’s amazing just how few critters actually look up. I have seen many wild animals going about their daily business from one. From little birds landing around me to rabbits, raccoons, fox, the odd bear. And ever so often I see a deer. Sometimes I have shot, sometimes I have let them pass freely.
But I find it an excellent place to look inward into myself. It’s a far better place to see deeper and more honestly than any room in any building.
Sitting still /= experiencing nature. There’s nothing wrong with meditation but it’s an unrelated exercise.
I can sit next to a lake without a fiahing rod.
Yep. They have reached the understanding of what it means being a hunter/fisherman. While it’s nice to bring home something to eat, it’s not a necessary. It’s the memories of that day that matter the most.
Nah.
You are hunting the right spot, with the right lure, with the right cast and return. You want to match the right gear with the right lure.
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This guy fishes. Glad to see you enjoy it. It is probably quite location dependent. Where I live there are basically no lakes I could go to and fish in peace even if I wanted to.
People many years ago didn’t understand the purpose of looking at, and even copying, the squiggly little lines found in what we today call books, so as with every generation, you’re in company.
What a roundabout way to say I am not alone in that opinion.
Fishing is hunting done on water. Sometimes you wait, sometimes you’re actively searching for your prey.
You do get the bonus of being outside, seeing the world as it is today, and if you hunt successfully you get to eat better than anything you can get from the finest restaurant. And even if you catch nothing, you get to keep the memories of just being there. Maybe alone or with friends.
I don’t like fish though. Especially fresh water ones.
No one says you must keep and eat them. You can catch and release them if you so choose.
Downhill mountain biking for me. When im injured from throwing myself off something stupid it gives me time to catch up on platinum trophies.
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Please, I need these YouTubers for things like the “Coin Collector” subset of achievements in Super Mario Sunshine, you really have to get every single one!
Either document beetles, or get REALLLY in to opium
And then there’s the voynich manuscript, an old hoax/fantasy book documenting plants and animals that don’t exist, in a made-up language.
That some people have dedicated their lives to “noble” pursuits and others to “wasting time” is entirely a function of who is telling you the story and how much money they stand to make off that other person’s work. You get one life, do what you want with it as best you can.
Generations of monks did nothing but pray, work, and copy books for their entire lives. Is that a waste because they weren’t writing novels instead? Because every one of them wasn’t Mendel, obcessed with growing peas?
Play some video games, work on stuff if you want, or don’t. Most people in history worked very hard and have been completely forgotten, all their works erased. With how easy it is to share your work online, you could even be famous for being good at video games (speed running, lore analysis, gimmick runs, etc) which may not change the world but objectively has more impact on more living people than writing small business websites or small farming rice in South Asia.
It is not clear that the Voynich Manuscript is a hoax/fantasy book. The plant illustrations, whilst ambiguous, do look like plausible real plants (though some have features of multiple species), and while nobody has decoded the text, the letter and word frequencies are consistent with it being natural language rather than gibberish.
Perhaps you’re thinking of the Codex Seraphinianus?
Hey I just wanted to say, thank you for sending me down the rabbit hole of both of these texts. Fascinating!
Regarding the Voynich Manuscript, and to be fair to the person you’re responding to, with no current decipherment, there is a good possibility it’s a hoax.
Churchill acknowledges the possibility that the manuscript is either a synthetic forgotten language (as advanced by Friedman), or else a forgery, as the preeminent theory. However, he concludes that, if the manuscript is a genuine creation, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author.
Also the Codex Seraphinianus is much newer and self-admittedly describes an imaginary world in an imaginary language.
Anyway, thanks again for the Wikipedia adventure. :D
Do what brings you joy? Like being a 🍌🦆!
If you really look through history, I think you’ll find that people did things like this because they were SO BORED. An entire town would come out to watch a small time trial because there just wasn’t anything better to do. Hell, my parents who grew up in the 70’s once told me “We’d be outside and bicycle around as kids all the time, after a while… we were so incredibly bored.” And during that time, tv and radio existed. I’m very happy we have the entertainment we do.
90% of them were so bored
the remaining 10% however
