Joe Rogan says that playing video games is a 'waste of time' and worthless

submitted by [deleted] from independent.co.uk

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[–]Elysian 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

To be honest, I think most people just watched television.

[–]SeasideLimbs 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Even television was never as big of a draw as videogames, and yet it still went down in history as the great lazy-fier: the invention that created several generations of lazy couch-potatoes. There was nothing like it before then. Videogames are even worse due to their interactivity and the immense fun one can have thanks to it. There's a reason why television is dying and videogames are now the single most profitable entertainment industry. What I am talking about is before then, when there was nothing comparable to either. Television as a product in use by the average consumer wasn't a thing yet when Howard Hughes built his first radio.

[–]Elysian 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Are you sure that television wasn't as big a draw as videogames? I remember a time before videogames, you know - people watched television like it was a second job. Reporting (on the television) would tell us just how many hours we were watching, and how it was wasting our lives. Four or five hours a day, sometimes, and eight on weekends.

I've never really liked television and don't watch it now - but I do remember that most of the people I knew would just sit in front of the television all night, every night. And that's all they would talk about the next day. I would read books or go see friends and come back and my family was still watching. And they thought that I was the strange one.

Before television, we all used to go down to the pub in an evening, to drink beer and tell lies. :) I'm not even joking. That's what people did.

[–]SeasideLimbs 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Point is, people have always wasted time, something that I mentioned in my first post. There is a big difference between video games, television, going to the pub, and everything that people did before even that to waste time such as swimming or hunting for sport. The difference is that our leisure activities have become better and better at simulating achievement, which makes it easier to stay content

When you went to the pub and drank your time away, you felt like a loser and bored. When you sat down in front of the TV and passively stared at one sitcom after another, it was enough to pass the time but also boring - though not quite as boring as going to the pub, because of how varied and stimulating television was thanks to its narratives and the drama and romance and action and thrill, etc. Video games are more stimulating, yet. Thanks to their interactivity, we are engaged every second by having to ask ourselves what inputs to make next. Our actions have consequences. And depending on our actions, there will be different outcomes, like whether we die at the final boss and have to try again or whether we beat him and finish the game. More and more, what we do for leisure is enough to fulfill us to the point where we really don't feel like we're being unproductive.

You can play a game and feel content and accomplished. And that's a problem, because it means when you do, you don't have an incentive at all to do anything that's actually productive. And the more fun our media becomes, the more this is the case.

[–]Elysian 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

There is a certain argument that says the Great Filter is actually when an intelligent species creates a virtual reality so compelling that they decide to live there all the time, and turn so insular that they never try to find another intelligent species and eventually die out. But, to quote the film adaptation of Ready Player One, reality "is the only place to get a decent meal". I doubt we'd abandon it entirely.

Still, if your argument is that we're too involved in videogames to invent things, you would expect that the rate of invention would slow over time, which I think it is pretty clear it has not.

[–]SeasideLimbs 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

There is a certain argument that says the Great Filter is actually when an intelligent species creates a virtual reality so compelling that they decide to live there all the time, and turn so insular that they never try to find another intelligent species and eventually die out. But, to quote the film adaptation of Ready Player One, reality "is the only place to get a decent meal". I doubt we'd abandon it entirely.

Yeah, I heard of that. Who knows. That's a scenario with countless problems of its own.

Still, if your argument is that we're too involved in videogames to invent things, you would expect that the rate of invention would slow over time, which I think it is pretty clear it has not.

Not quite. First of all, my argument isn't just that we would invent less: purpose is a need. Without a purpose in life, people get depressed and feel aimless. It's one of the reasons why so many people used to be religious in the world and why after the role of religion began playing a lesser role in the western world, this vacuum of purpose started being filled with ideologies like communism and nazism. It doesn't take long to find countless rappers talking about how hiphop was what saved them from a life of violence and drugs. Video games provide some of this, but without the substance that allows a purpose to thrive long-term - hence why you have so many people express depression with their gaming habits, how much time they wasted on them, etc. A purpose requires productivity and video games are in no way productive. This aspect is unrelated to actual innovation. A person who has a purpose in life, even one usually associated with innovation like engineering or science, may never invent anything new. But this person is one less person trying to find purpose in such things as revolution, hatred, extremism. Consuming can never be a proper purpose.

Second, one can't directly map entertainment and its effects on society onto our current scientific and cultural landscape, for a number of reasons. Highly stimulating and engaging entertainment may actually already decline rate of innovation, and it's simply not leading to an overall decline yet due to other factors like a number of fields being having come across areas of research that were ripe with potential for innovation. (Think: MSM making articles about how BLM protests led to a reduction in Covid infection rates - misrepresenting that BLM riots actually did increase infection rates, but that a larger amount of people were staying home and not getting infected, resulting in an overall decrease of infection rates.) There is also the issue that the number of people is not staying the same. It's perfectly possible that if you looked at percentages and found a way to measure productivity, that the overall productivity of humanity is going down, but that the ever-increasing number of people in the world counteracts this. All of this is not even to mention the difficulty of measuring "rate of invention." Is the rate of invention not slowing down? Are you sure about that? The 20th century came with countless inventions and amazing scientific progress. Much of this happened before video games, the internet and television.

None of this counters the simple fact that I initially made either: that video games decrease boredom and, for a while at least, make it feel like one is accomplishing something, thereby leading to people spending time playing video games rather than doing something else - something that could be productive.