> mostly a waste of time
I'm not trying to get you to change your mind about what you recommend to children but it's worth saying that gaming as a hobby is only a waste of time as much as any hobby.
> mostly a waste of time
I'm not trying to get you to change your mind about what you recommend to children but it's worth saying that gaming as a hobby is only a waste of time as much as any hobby.
Other hobbies build transferable skills, abilities, knowledge or muscles. A very small number of video games can do some of these, but it isn't the norm.
Not everything is about productivity and gains. People are allowed to be happy.
No, no, I'm crazy. Because some have kissing, we should ban TV and movies. They're a waste of time (because it doesn't promote me as a source of labor) and are a gateway to video pornography - the horror!
> Other hobbies build transferable skills, abilities, knowledge or muscles.
I'll go with a popular one with this crowd: chess. What "skills, abilities, knowledge or muscles" does playing chess improve other than things directly related to playing chess? I can think of game theory but that also seems like it could be improved by playing other games. I think you'd agree that chess is a game and a waste of time but you'd probably not agree that it's bad that it's a waste of time; wasting time is rather the point. Time flies when you're having fun, as it goes.
If kids were sitting on their ass for many hours a day getting fat playing chess, I'd be concerned about that.
So some people have an unhealthy relationship with their hobbies and that means... what, exactly? I seem to have lost track of the point you're trying to make. I was just saying that "mostly a waste of time" is what hobbies are supposed to be.
He wants the world to go back to the 70-80s where kids went outside... and did drugs, smoked, and generally caused chaos regularly with their friends behind the school or at a 7-11, instead of going home and playing league or some other game with their friends online.
Modern video games are frequently engineered to be addictive, and even when they aren't they demonstrably have a lot of addictive potential. Somebody who gets addicted to skateboarding will get active, get fit, and maybe break a bone. A few weeks later the bone will heal but the active habits will remain. Somebody who gets addicted to video games will stay inside, get accustomed to sitting on their ass, and quite likely get fat. Statistically, that kind of damage tends to stick around for a person's whole life.
Saying "its a hobby like any hobby" glosses over the obvious fact that not all hobbies are made equal.
> Saying "its a hobby like any hobby"
I didn't write that. I wrote it's "only a waste of time as much as any hobby" because the person I replied to wrote that they don't want to recommend video games as a hobby to children due in part to it being a waste of time. It's moot that the hobby is a waste of time because the point of it is to be a waste of time. They might not want to recommend games as a hobby to children for similar reasons as to what you detailed but that's different from not wanting to recommend the hobby because it's a waste of time.
Games are like books. Saying books are worthless because they don’t build “transferable skills” is absurd. But it’s obviously true of many books and sure, the most popular books don’t. But as a whole they definitely do.