This is a perfect example of why video games are MOSTLY a bad thing.
POSTED BY: Wishimay
UPDATED: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 14:28
VIEWED: 26336
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"Unless you'd also describe all movies generally as porn?"
Movies tend not to be addicting (except porn). I was proposing that the game addictiveness specifically was from the feedback. Imagine you're playing a 'shooting' game, but when you hit the target nothing happens, except perhaps it freezes. That's not very rewarding, I don't think. You'd be shooting and hitting, and shooting and hitting, and ... nothing. What a pointless chore it would become.
Let me just point out that the author left out vital relevant facts in the opinion piece. Doing that is known as cherry-picking. And whether you do that in the news, in discussion, in debate or in opinion, when you distort the facts, you've changed the nature of your communication into propaganda. But WE don't have any of THAT in the US, do we?!
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Quote:
Originally posted by NAVYSEILS:
I maintain that you have failed to show that they're mostly a bad thing. You've just shown that you don't like them very much.
You saying it over and over doesn't make it true.
I have more than proven that video games can be very harmful and addictive. I mean, they've done Jack a world of good, right? Or me?
By and by, don't let the dead or intellectually dead kids mean anything because....FUN. We wouldn't wanna get in the way of millions of 12 yr olds pretending to kill millions of people. But that doesn't mean ANYTHING... right?
I'd love to revisit this issue with you in thirty years when we see where it leads though.
PS You also don't know video games wouldn't be a problem for you with children or relationships, as I'm sure many people didn't think they would stomp or starve a kid to death because of their addiction.
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Oonj likes ComPuter Games very much.
My brother Joe worked for Apple for several years. [This is a long
digression. Last 2 paragraphs are relevant.] Each year, they gave
him a computer. In his 2nd year, he gave his first Apple ][ (2) to
my sister Lyn; it made sense to him as she was a retired computer
programmer. One year, they gave him an Apple /// (3). It was Apple's
offer to small businesses; people stayed away in droves; it was
Apple's biggest failure. But the Steves learned from this, went back
to the drawing board, & designed the MacIntosh. Lyn didn't want Joe's
Apple 3, so he gave it to me. ... Its best trick: it could emulate
8 kilobytes of Apple 2 & play Apple 2 games. I tried to learn to
program the Apple 3 in Pascal as per Lyn's suggestion. I learned:
Oonj has little aptitude for programming. So it was always in Apple 2
emulation where I played Wizardry I & Ultima I without ceasing.
But ... I did Not neglect my Cats!
Then came the Gruds, Dark Forest, Sirius Software 1981. A turf war.
The main part of the map was divided into 23 (I think) small areas
marked A-W. The dark forest part of it in the south were X,Y,Z. You
could see how many Gruds populated all the other areas, but not how
many in the dark forest. I also don't recall how many men/areas I got
to start with. I'll guess 6 or 7. On every new round, the Gruds got
1 new grud in each of their territories; when they got 20 guys in a
territory next to mine, they would attack me. I also got 1 new man
for each territory I held. But could I just put all my men into the
crucial border spots? Or did I have to move some of them up from
the rear? I forget.
I do recall if I started my kingdom in the A-F lands in the northwest,
I could always beat the Gruds. But if I started my guys in the east,
it was much harder ... maybe more of their lands bordered mine.
The other day, I got the notion that I wanted to beat the Gruds one
more time from the East!! But maybe Sirius only made it for the
Apple 2 in the 80's ... I can't get it anymore (sigh).
To find it, I 1st searched for the games I used to play in the 80's
& 90's that were not Gruds. Came across the word "abandonware" &
searched that. ... Quite a few sites still discuss and even offer
very olde games software. ... I chose one & paid a small monthly
fee so I could start pillaging their collection of 5,000 games for
the PC, 9,000 games overall. > Old-Games.com
Yesterday, I began to check out their 310 Educational Games.
Some pretty interesting stuff in there. Most of it is for kids,
including little kids just learning to count, read, write. A
great collection of how to make learning more fun than it already is!!
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
I've given up looking for the meaning of life. Now all I want is a cookie.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
Oonj likes ComPuter Games very much.
But ... I did Not neglect my Cats!
I don't know it's possible to neglect a cat
Kidding, but really a cat takes five minutes of attention a day. A kid takes about a hundred times that.
I'm all for educational games. I hope one day we can put away the first person shooter crap for good (unless you are military maybe). There is a HUGE difference in the level of addictiveness for games like that and say...
Pong. Now they have forums and Cons and whole segments of culture dedicated to the damn things to help ramp up the addict level.
BTW I just found out The Oregon Trail game was recently released here...
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos
My kid spent a whole hour and a half playing that
I don't know if what you are looking for is in there though.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Wishimay:Quote:
Originally posted by NAVYSEILS:
I maintain that you have failed to show that they're mostly a bad thing. You've just shown that you don't like them very much.
You saying it over and over doesn't make it true.
I have more than proven that video games can be very harmful and addictive. I mean, they've done Jack a world of good, right? Or me?
By and by, don't let the dead or intellectually dead kids mean anything because....FUN. We wouldn't wanna get in the way of millions of 12 yr olds pretending to kill millions of people. But that doesn't mean ANYTHING... right?
I'd love to revisit this issue with you in thirty years when we see where it leads though.
PS You also don't know video games wouldn't be a problem for you with children or relationships, as I'm sure many people didn't think they would stomp or starve a kid to death because of their addiction.
No more so than you repeating that they're a bad thing makes that true.
If you have proven games can be harmful and addictive (and you have given some examples of this) then I have also proven that games can be harmless and good. I mean, they've benefitted me and many others I know.
I'd love to revisit this in 30 years or so with you. I'm nearly 30 now, I've been playing games most of my life and they haven't had a detrimental effect thus far. I've travelled, I'm educated, I played many sports, I read, I play music, I have a degree, a good job, good relationships, no debts... I don't know what you think they're doing to me. Doesn't seem like too terrible an addiction. I know plenty of men and women in similar positions, some married with kids too. They tend not to be as up to date with the latest releases though, on account of the not neglecting their kids and thus spending less time on their games. Like normal people. So I think in 30 years time games and the people playing them will be doing just fine. We just might have more VR headsets or something. Wouldn't that be neat?
Playing first person shooters doesn't make me violent. Not agreeing with you doesn't mean I'm an addict. Playing video games doesn't mean I'd be a neglectful partner or parent.
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It seems that the disagreement is over "how much" games are addictive, not "if". NAVY offers up himself and a few people he knows as examples of non-addicts. WISHI offers up news items.
My own limited experience at work tells me that this is a signficant problem.
On the one hand, there are a few 30ish young men in our workplace who are gamers who are not addicted... they seem to have active social lives, show up to work on time, work diligently and intelligently, and have other hobbies/ pursuits, and seem to have had throughout their young lives. OTOH, we have specifically selected for these people out of approximately 400 candidates, it's possible we just sifted many, many addicts out.
On the other hand, every parent of every late teen to early-20's male that I know of at work, which amounts to five teens/young men all together, complains of the same thing: their boys spend endless hours gaming, to the exclusion of everything else except eating. Now, moms and dads have managed to pry their children's hands of the console around college-time, but even then video-games still negatively impact their coursework.
The only way to figure this out would be a decent study.
This one indicates a rate of addiction in the USA to be about 8%.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/5/594.short
Across the globe, prevalence from about 3% to 10%.
Quote:
Internet addiction (IA) has emerged as a universal issue, but its international estimates vary vastly. This multinational meta-analysis fills this gap by providing estimates of its global prevalence. Two hypotheses were formulated to explain the cross-national variations. The accessibility hypothesis predicts that IA prevalence is positively related to Internet penetration rate and GDP per capita, whereas the quality of (real) life hypothesis predicts that IA prevalence is inversely related to a global national index of life satisfaction and specific national indices of environmental quality. Multiple search strategies were used in an attempt to retrieve all empirical reports from 1996 to 2012 that adopted the Young Diagnostic Questionnaire or Internet Addiction Test for assessing generalized IA. The data set comprised 164 prevalence figures derived from 80 reports, including 89,281 participants from 31 nations across seven world regions. A random effects meta-analysis showed a global prevalence estimate of 6.0% [95% CI 5.1–6.9], with moderate heterogeneity (I2=44%, p<0.0001). The highest prevalence was in the Middle East with 10.9% [95% CI 5.4–16.3], and the lowest was in Northern and Western Europe with 2.6% [95% CI 1.0–4.1]. Moreover, IA prevalence was higher for nations with greater traffic time consumption, pollution, and dissatisfaction with life in general. The prevalence rate of IA varies across world regions. IA prevalence is inversely associated with the quality of life, as reflected by both subjective (life satisfaction) and objective (quality of environmental conditions) indicators.
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2014.0317
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That link you gave there about world wide prevalence is for internet addiction, that's not the same as video game addiction. Interestingly, there is another study on the same site about drawing a distinction between the two and why its worthwhile doing so.
This thread is about why video games are mostly a bad thing. It was the "mostly" part that I take issue with. And it wasn't mostly because of addictiveness, that seemed to just be a part of it. The debate about how addictive they can be is, I think, not quite the same thing. I think decent studies in the long term is the only way to really try and resolve it though, because you won't take my word for it nor I yours. Sig, you say there are a few guys that play games that have no issues, but maybe you're being selective and ignoring ones with problems and go on to say that every parent with kids has issues. It totals about 4 or 5 kids. A few and 4 or 5 don't sound that different to me.
To go on a slight tangent that I think is maybe worth discussing: I think when the problem of video games is focused on it being a problem with how it's effecting the kids today, I feel like it comes back to a parenting issue. If it's about the content, the games go through ratings board and put up age and content guidelines. If it's about the time, step in. Don't buy you kids games, let them play all night and then complain about how the game is the problem. I think a lot of the issue is with parents who don't get the appeal of video games, and assuming that they're just a kids toy, don't pay much attention. And the idea that kids will play video games and let it effect their coursework? Well no shit sherlock. Kids prefer fun activity to homework, who knew. I'm reasonably confident that without video games, they'd find something else to do instead of homework. I know I did. I played basketball 6 days a week and rugby on the 7th in my final year, even when I should probably have been studying, because sports were fun and maths was not.
I think we need to make better use of what we have; the ratings, parental controls and generally just paying attention and stepping in, before we look at what to do next. That's not to say I don't think we can do better. I just question the value of putting new measures in place for parents to not use.
It is not my position that games have no negative effects at all in any situation ever. If this was a thread about some specific issues with games and how we might want to address them, maybe my approach would have been different. But my position is that they're mostly alright, and this thread was started to state the opposite of that.
Games are everywhere, there are all kinds of gaming experiences and all kinds of people from different walks of life are playing them. From kids in school to company directors and CEOs. On our tvs at home, on our phones on the move, on planes, in malls. Some people play alone, some people play with friends, some people play with family. When the numbers are so great, there are inevitably going to be a number of bad cases out there. However, with the numbers being so great I think if they were mostly a negative force it would be unavoidably obvious what a problem it was, and it doesn't seem like that's the case. Too often it still sounds to me like the same kind of problem people have with the folk all sitting together on their phones "ignoring real relationships", snapchatting, everyone looking at a screen on the train instead of chatting with the stranger next to them. Nobody talked to the strangers before smartphones were a thing either. It's a problem of it being different and them not getting it. I think largely these attitudes will go away with time. Issues will inevitably arise and be dealt with, happens with everything, but to claim that they are on the whole a negative force seems like it takes a leap in logic.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-video-games-jobs-emploment-2
0160923-story.html
Danny Izquierdo, a 22-year-old who lives with his parents in Silver Spring, Md., has found little satisfaction in a series of part-time, low-wage jobs he's held since graduating from high school. But the video games he plays, including "FIFA 16" and "Rocket League" on PlayStation and Pokemon Go on his smartphone, are a different story.
"When I play a game, I know if I have a few hours I will be rewarded," he said. "With a job, it's always been up in the air with the amount of work I put in and the reward."
The paper attributes one-third to one-fifth of the decline in work hours by less-educated young men to the rising use of technology for entertainment — mainly video games. The new study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the researchers say they are continuing to refine the precise figures. But other prominent economists who reviewed it for this story said it raises important questions about why so many young men have abandoned the workforce.
One reason young men are drawn to games is their extremely low cost, after the initial outlay for a computer or gaming system. Barry says he logged thousands of hours on an online battle arena game "and it cost me zero dollars." Recent research has found that households making $25,000 to $35,000 a year spent 92 more minutes a week online than households making $100,000 or more a year.
For the first time since the 1930s, in fact, more U.S. men aged 18-34 are living with their parents than with romantic partners, according to the Pew Research Center.
THIS. BIG TIME.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4353086/Stepfather-killed-daug
hter-computer-game-rage.html
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The men of my age at work have sons of THAT age, and I hear them complaining all the time that their sons are addicted to games. It's not just general old-age grumbling that I'm hearing ... these games interfere with their sons' studies and jobs and have real-world consequences. It's a problem for sure.
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
THUGR IS A DEEP-STATE TROLL
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