Gaming: the dangerous, harmful hobby?

It has "Lollipop" in the name. It must be for kids!

I often find myself defending games from the negative attention they can receive. Games tastelessly promote and glorify violence, teaching kids how to use real-life weapons, all while making you stupid and anti-social. While I believe that games can exercise your brain, and like any media, should be taken with parental guidance, it's always hard to convince others of that.

Recently, however, as I get older and older, I've been noticing some things about myself I'd like to improve upon. And when I try to think of the source of these bad habits, my mind first turns to games.

Now, I know it's been said before, but games give us a sense of accomplishment and productivity. It's easy to play them to make up for not feeling productive or accomplished in "real life." Of course, I think that if games make you happy, and they are a serious hobby, it's completely fine to feel accomplished for clearing a difficult part of a game or to feel productive for working toward a goal in a game. You just have to realize that it's not a substitute for progress outside of the gaming world, too.

But simply escaping from life's failures is not the only bad habit that this sense of productivity can entice.

I've realized that I have developed a problem with committing to long-term goals, something that I didn't feel like I had a problem with before. As an artist, I'm used to the stages of beginning and accomplishing a big project. I plan out the process, set smaller goals, plan out each stage before starting, and generally have a pretty good work ethic. I apply this to all the part-time jobs I take around town as well (I'd consider myself something of a freeter).

But now, as soon as I get to a step in my progress that seems a little difficult to overcome, my initial reaction is to just give up and start some new project. Instead of putting forth a little bit of extra effort, I'd rather just start over from the beginning of something else, where the feeling of progress comes rapidly and the new goal is fresh and exciting. Over time, I feel like this has gotten even worse. If I don't feel like going to work one day, I feel like I should just quit and hope I find another job soon enough. Luckily, I haven't gotten to the point where I actually have started quitting jobs, but I certainly consider it, and it seems like a good idea more and more often.


Screw this. I bet I can get all the trophies for Hannah Montana!

And when I think about it, this is how I play games. If I get to a stage I can't clear or a boss I can't defeat, instead of practicing or trying to find a new strategy, I just quit the game and start another game. And when I start a new game from the beginning, I get all kinds of accomplishment rewards. I'm clearing stages easily, achievements and trophies are popping left and right, and everything is exciting and new. It even makes me want to go out and buy new games constantly, because that feeling of easy reward is so addictive.

I also have noticed that I have a problem with procrastinating by using "junk projects." I may need to get a blog written, or an art project finished, and instead, I'll just write drabbles or draw doodles. Somehow, even though this isn't working toward anything and it's so effortless that it's barely able to be called practice, I feel like I'm making progress and doing something useful with my time.

Win or lose, playing Hexic HD 100 times is an "achievement!"

And this, too, I realize, is how I play games. Sometimes instead of starting a new game, I'll just mess around in the game I'm playing, working toward some achievement like "Use your special attack 10,000 times over the course of the game!" or something else that requires absolutely no effort at all. But because you're rewarded for just repetitive, non-productive actions in games these days, even just sitting and mashing a button to spam an attack against a wall seems like progress.

It really makes me wonder--has my lifelong hobby of gaming started to chip away at my productivity outside of the hobby itself? Has gaming turned me into a lazy person who only wants easy rewards? It's scary to think that one of the things I love most is turning me into a slacker with no work effort.

So I started playing games a lot less. I'd play some quick bouts of DoDonPachi Maximum or Collapse on my Windows Phone 7 when I was waiting in line for something or sitting in the car (as a passenger, of course! Don't game and drive, kids!) or something like that. But other than that, I was trying to avoid playing "big games" or even turning on any of my home consoles. I'd limit them to certain days -- like I'd only play my Wii, and only on "off days" when I wasn't working on anything anyway, once or twice a week.

But the problem didn't seem solved. I was still procrastinating and giving up on projects and work. I still felt like working toward things was wasting my time. In fact, it started to get even worse. With all of my extra free time, I felt more wasteful than ever. I was more paranoid about doing the wrong thing that I didn't want to finish anything. I stopped all of my art projects, seriously considered quitting my job, leaving my band, and more. I kept starting new projects. I went through a dozen ideas for new projects, and made even less progress than I normally would.

After even more introspection, though, I've started to reconsider. I think this is a classic case of assuming that correlation implies causation. In other words, people assume that if two attributes increase at the same time, one is causing the other. The more fatty foods you eat, the fatter you get. The more lazy games you play, the lazier you get. Stuff like that.

The problem with this is that it only is realistic a small fraction of the time. Often, there's another factor that is the cause of the correlating events. For example, if I don't bathe, my hair will get greasy and my skin will get oily. I could say, the nastier my hair gets, the nastier my skin gets. But that doesn't mean that one is causing the other. If I shave my head, my skin will still be gross.


The default example. People love to kill when they eat ice cream...!

Plus there's no reason to say that the causation is one way over the other. I could also say that I became lazy with real-life work first, and that translated over into games. That real life was ruining my commitment to games. There's no way to determine which causes the other.

When I really think about it, though, the problem has nothing to do with games or work. As I get older, I get more and more paranoid about fitting into the roles expected of me. I'm supposed to have a committed "career" and work toward getting lots of money and whatever. But I'm not on that path, nor do I want to be. But every time I start some project, I feel like I need to give it up because it's not "the one thing I want to do with my life." And there is a lot of pressure to find that "one thing." It's affected my mindset about everything. I only want to put effort into something if I feel like I can get some kind of long-term gain out of it, no matter how happy it would make me or how much I enjoy it.

The more I learn to get over that pressure of needing to focus on one thing or else I'm "doing it wrong," the more I'm able to commit to and finish projects, and the more I'm motivated to do the work needed to get past obstacles. Even though this realization doesn't have a lot to do with games, I've also been finishing games more. It had been a long time since I even cleared an entire game before I finally got around to finishing Catherine last month. I cleared Sonic Generations, too, and even picked up my Skyrim game again after giving it up because progress gets slower the higher your level gets.

I was able to work toward overcoming my problem when I stopped blaming games and started trying to think about what was really behind it all. When I started to understand more about what I was unhappy about, my happiness increased both in and outside of gaming. I haven't completely solved the problem yet, but at least I'm not ignoring it by putting the blame somewhere it doesn't belong.

I think it's important to keep re-evaluating every situation. Just because we think we've come to a solid conclusion on what's causing a problem in our life doesn't mean it's the correct solution. It's even worse when we make these decisions for others. It's easy to say "My kids are doing badly in school because of video games." when it's possible they're doing poorly in school because they are bullied, and online games are a way to escape their feelings of loneliness. The two things are correlated--the lonelier they feel, the more they want to play games. But the loneliness and gaming are both going up because of another factor--the bullying.

And of course, it's not just kids. As social beings, we like to help others solve problems. We give advice to our friends, our family, our coworkers. And when we think we have a real solution, we become more adamant about trying to implement it.


If I play this, not only can I stop smoking, but I'll be FREE!

Games are easy to blame. But games can also be a perfectly healthy and even helpful hobby. For me, as an artist, games are a big source of inspiration. My passion for gaming inspired me to get into art. My passion for gaming helped me find the motivation to try hard in school so I could work in games one day. It was that passion that helped me get a 4.0 GPA. Games have been known to help improve critical thinking skills, help control anger management problems, boost decision-making abilities, and improve overall quality of life, among many other things.
And I'm not saying that games are always a good thing, either, of course. I've known people who have developed serious problems with games. I know a victim of video game addiction who quit her job and left her boyfriend, and even fell into theft to pursue her World of Warcraft vice. And I believe that unguided regular exposure to violent themes can help desensitize children to violence. (However, this is true for any media--books and movies included, even educational documentaries. The worst perpetrator is television news, where violence and tragedy bring in the most viewers and get ratings up, so they milk everyone's sadness as much as they can. But that's another article for another blog on another day... Games just tend to be the easy target, again, for parents who don't monitor their children's entertainment.)

But that doesn't mean we should just blame video games for every problem a gamer has. Like, I'm pretty sure games don't teach kids how to use guns. I play tons of games with realistic gunplay, and I still would have no idea how to operate a real gun. Other than pulling the trigger, I have no idea. And I'm pretty sure you don't do it by pressing Y to equip it and holding the right shoulder button to fire.

I think we like to blame things that are easy to blame. In a way, it's another form of escapism. If we can just say our problems are due to games, we don't have to take responsibility for the problems. We don't have to try any harder to solve them. We can feel like it's not our fault, and it makes us feel better about ourselves for doing "all we can."

It's important to keep looking at our problems and do what we can to fix them. Don't settle on a solution just because it's easy or seems to be a "good enough" answer to your problems. It's important to never give up and strive to always better our lives. It's important to discover what means the most to us and pursue it, even if that means playing games. Games don't have to be a vice. We have the power to control our fates and the world around us, and we should utilize that power as much as we can.