My Love/Hate Relationship with Video Games

Computer games are fun. They have evolved from intellectual curiosities and simple challenges, to demonstrations of technology, to incredibly complex challenges and works of art. They are incredibly gripping, more so than television. Their is an entire subculture devoted to the creation, curation, adoration, and analysis of them. You know things are deep when there are intricate discussions of the Starcraft II metagame, and the feminist themes contained within the Portal series.

Television feeds the part of you brain that wants easy amusement. Video games walk a different line, encouraging you to take little challanges, then rewarding you somehow with loot, victory screens, intrigueing text, and other things. You can work with other people in cohesive teams and achieve something. Video games can hit buttons in the Monkey that Hollywood will never be able to reach.

The problem I have is that in playing video games, you never actually achieve something. The obsession, time, and energy that is invested does not form much in terms of intellectual or other capital. It's fun and interestings, maybe even deep, but at the end of the day, you're wasting your life and fiddling while Rome burns. Cancer will not be cured on the World of Warcraft battlefield. The resources you harvest will have no real economic value. Video games are simple simulacrums for the realities and challenges that surround.

I sometimes find myself wondering if I'm wasting my life and redirect the time spent on those diversions into doing, creating, something else.  Photos. Electronics circuits. Code. Bread. Beer. Something. I can't help thinking about the big things that could be done.

That said, I'm going to go play Starcraft.