Why are video games so popular these days? I will answer this question from my own experience—probably some of the thoughts I will put here will mirror some readers' experiences.

Type of games

First, we should point out that there are many different sorts of video games. What kind of games people are drawn to may be a useful type of "personality test", ha!

I was always drawn more to "story" and "puzzle" games and while I did enjoy cool game mechanics in action games, I was never drawn getting really good at some action game. Lots of other people are just the opposite; a fast-paced shooter where reaction times are key may be the bestest game ever.

On the other hand, many people are drawn towards "sandbox" or "world-building" type games that don't really have some goal. Whereas I enjoy the clear beginning and end points of working through a puzzle or story, some people are drawn to games where "farming" or just overseeing stuff by doing some repetitive task is the main thing you do.

Why I lost interest in most games

I think one of the big reasons people play games is to exercise some kind of agency and for escapism. I remember wanting to play games after a long day at school, doing homework, and so on. Whereas most of my day was structured on coersion—more or less being forced (rather than "asked") to do all sorts of stuff, video games offered a place where you could build out things how you like (RPG), experiment and lose a lot and still keep playing and get better (action games), or just engage some story different from what you've been told about how the world works (story-driven games).

Many kids grow up without many responsibilities. Besides going to school and getting grades, they aren't given much control over stuff. Even "cleaning one's room" can be hard for some people—parents and others might object to throwing away stuff, doing major re-organization, etc. So the comfortable default is to kind of just let stuff keep on going how it is, even if the space could be better used. This I think is one of the most important lessons I got from moving out—even if you don't have everything else figured out yet, taking control of your own space puts you in a different sort of mindset.

This is to say, there's a difference between "digitally designing your dream room" and then going out and re-arranging stuff in a space. Digitally, lots of actions are easier such as: creating a new thing, deleting stuff, undoing actions, etc.

On the other hand, using physical materials, all of these actions come at a price. So spending your time doing anything becomes a much more costly endeavor. If you go to work, even working a job that does not pay so much, you get more resources to work with in exchange for your time/labor. Here, you know that trying something new (e.g. picking up a new hobby) costs something precious—suppose you work 9 AM to 5 PM, 5 days a week, like many people do. You want to be to bed by 11 PM.

While we are younger, time doesn't seem as valuable (whereas money/resources often do, more so than for more established people). So young people often play a lot of games. I've played my fair share of games (I wouldn't ever call myself "addicted"), but I've certainly spent many hours playing games I could have put to some other more useful purpose.

You can find countless YouTube videos of people documenting their experiences, including getting out of addiction.

Putting the Pedal to the Metal

I lost interest in video games by becoming a full-time LARPer. ¹ By this, I don't mean faking/pretending, but rather using useful ideas which are often modeled in video games in order to get results in the "real world". For example, in many games there is an aspect of "grinding" or "farming"—doing some repetitive task that may actually be kinda boring. Oftentimes people will enjoy listening to music, podcasts, and so on while doing this.

If you're going to "grind", why don't you at least get paid for it?

Depending where you live, this might even be kind of fun. For instance, do you think spending 8 hours picking strawberries is a better 8 hours spent than training some game in a video game? There are many things you will notice/learn while working outside—from the bugs and birds around you to how people organize themselves and of course the task you're directly doing. You'll better understand strawberries better than you ever have before if you spend a bunch of hours with them.

My "exit" of games came through earning my first paychecks—very modest at first, from part-time work while at school and then later my monthly-stipend as a graduate student. What happened though was I had enough to live on my own so I could start trying out and figuring out how stuff worked outside of games. I was born into the "matrix" of education (schooling works very differently from the "real world") where you really aren't allowed much freedom and the things you learn are often things you should probably unlearn (and it isn't getting better in most parts of the USA, from what I can tell).

If you're coming from a family that already has some money, you might not "have to work" in the sense that say... your parents have their house paid off and you are able to live there indefinitely if you wanted to. Others have to learn really fast to take care of themselves—

The point here is that when you do start working and have agency over some resources (namely your attention, time, money...) then you can start applying the big-brane strategies you may have read in video game guides but to your own life.

I'm not a video game hater—I've learned a lot from video games, they often have memorable visuals, characters, music, etc. However, I think that once you break outside of video games, you may find that the best parts of video games do not compare to their "base reality" analogs.

"Digital revolution?"

A bunch of nerds that hate (physical) work tricked much of the middle class into becoming useless, in terms of doing work directly on the physical world. Merchants, scholars and others have also been affected.

There are different "traps" people can fall into. For me, I fell into the "science/technologist" trap—I took the time to read many New York Times bestsellers and contemplate the implications of the worldview espoused by many silicon valley CEOs, public broadcasting, etc.

Our culture is permeated with images/ideas/idioms that reflect certain assumptions about the world. For instance, consider the game of chess. Not only can the boards be kinda creepy and masonic looking, the whole idea of the game is that "battle conforms to a fixed set of rules". The superior strategist who plays according to these rules wins.

Now, in the "real world", there are not fixed rules like this. For example, there is always the possibility of some weather event making movement from here to there slower or faster than anticipated. Similarly, life isn't "turn based". You can see how the rise of Real Time Strategy (RTS) games was an exciting development because it allowed game designers to model battles in a potentially faster-paced, more engaging way than board games like chess.

Talk of AI, robotics, and all of that, has gotten many people scared into persuing "knowledge" work. They hear a story like AI beat such-and-such at GAME, and then there is all this widespread fear about humans getting replaced. Returning to the chess discussion above, we see a fundamental misunderstanding about the world—that it is something that we can calculate given sufficient resources. I don't think that this is true for most "big events"; obviously you can get pretty consistent measurements for all sorts of processes (that's why cooking instructions work!), but I don't think you can do stuff like accurately calculate the age of the cosmos...

Bad Foundations

But as I've critiqued many times in this blog, oftentimes the "skills" that people learn in the modern world are often NOT BASED. For instance,

• SIMPing: being a subservient sycophant on a resume so senpai will notice you
• Bullshitting: look at just how many articles there are on "imposter syndrome"—maybe this is because many of the dogmas of modernity are in fact bullshit, and you can detect it
• Absurd Arrangements: for the purpose of money or convenience or something else, people will outsource all sorts of things they should probably do themselves (e.g. "early childhood education") while vainly persuing some "career" set out by corporate overlords.

There is nothing wrong with using existing technology insofar as it is useful and there will be many people that choose to develop new technologies. Does this mean that we need to adapt the entire worldview of many leading technologists? (look at talks sponsored by companies like Microsoft, Amazon, etc)

Different sorts of people fall for different traps. As I described above, I fell for the "brainy" worldview and considered myself a big-brane guy for thinking about these myths. Now I can see how that mindset acted against me as well as those around me. For others, buying into the current regime may take forms like,

• Believing naively what PR departments tell you—e.g. such-and-such organization says they're "helping kids" so they definitely are helping kids! ²
• Echoing/promoting parties with agendas you don't understand; e.g. "standing in solidarity" with a bunch of leftists because you want to oppose "racism"; repeating slogans
• Buying into "entertainment"

With regards to the last point—I think there is nothing inherently wrong with video games; they're a new kind of art form. Novels, likewise, I don't find evil. But we need to make proper use of everything—this includes art, music, games, and so on.

Gamers rise up!

The recent-ish "GME (GAMESTOP GATE)" story of normal "retail" stockholders using Robinhood to make the many members of the financial establishment sweat by exploiting market rules.

Lots of young-ish adults (zoomers, millennials, gen-x) realized that the "rules" they've been operating in largely according to how they were taught—e.g. aspiring to just get a corporate job and be well-paid, buy a house, etc—have cracks, and they found an exploit.

The gamers realized that if they could apply their gamer-tier strategic thinking outside of "games" but into the increased digitized world, that they could begin winning bigly in many aspects of "real life"...