Mostly to draw dicks on the map when my friends aren’t looking (because if I don’t they will do it before me).
Playing videogames is completely non productive and like all hobbies that’s what makes it based. “Wasting” your time and potential from a capitalist lens is good and should be encouraged. Life should be enjoyed to the extent we are ethically able. Production should not be the goal
i believe you will come to find that the purpose of all life is oboemaxxing.
Wasting time like life isn’t a gift to be enjoyed. What? Is your life some kind of obligation? Some kind of resource to squander? God’s going to want some kind of P&L report at the pearly gates? If God’s an author then they’ll be there excited to see you again, “So, what did you think of the sunset? Pretty cool, right?! I was experimenting with purpose, love, connection, and joy. What did you think?”
Most of the time you can sit in a park at sunset even if you’ve gotten a pretty raw deal or you’ve fucked up pretty bad.
The oboe is as productive as videogames, broadly, but I’d argue anything thats broadly fighting entropy is productive even as a hobby. I think the understanding here, that productivity is just what you do in the context of wage labour or similar isn’t that great. Cooking, fixing shit, bugfixing open source projects, anything like that. I’d go further, it’s probably good for one of your hobbys to be something like that.
If we’re attributing value, I like to think that, within capitalism, a good hobby is one that fosters connections and cooperation between groups of people.
Games that develop cooperation and combat social alienation and anti-social behaviour? Based.
Any other type? Life-waster at best.
I disagree solely because some of us need quiet by ourselves hobby times so that we have the energy and capacity to be intentionally present socially. Not every hobby can or should be social. As someone who loves social activities I absolutely need my own quiet time or I can’t be who I want to be with others
I agree with the sentiment, and I feel the same way most of the time (work has been intense and I have social anxiety).
I don’t know enough games to give good examples and make my point, but I guess a “good game” category wouldn’t necessarily be built on multiplayer strategizing or whatever, but would also include stuff like Stardew Valley and Don’t Starve.
I’m thinking of a specific feeling, the one I used to get when I was in a Tolstoy’s short stories binge. There’s this warmness that I rarely get from any other literature, and I think it mostly came from the connections between the characters, or between me and the characters. I felt warm, included, even hugged sometimes. Then, back in real life, connecting to other people was infused with this magic that I can’t explain.
The reading itself wasn’t (immediately) a collective effort, but it was instrumental in pruning anti-social behaviour in teenage me.
Trying to describe how gaming was different than playing music made me realize how similar they could be, I agree it has a huge dependence on the game itself. Playing music generally fosters cooperation and teamwork and the use of intellect/mental energy that is superior to what the average western capitalist-derived games evoke. Good music can soothe emotional distress and enhance class consciousness. Good games can do this too, and bad music can have socially negative effects.
As a hobby, either is fine. As a skill for personal and social development, I would debate that music is superior, but that particular games could probably be just as adequate. In my own experience, even the best games do not ease my mind or enhance focus like playing music does.
Art in general has a possibility for both of these (social and skill development) that is way more intense than with video-games IMO, and I think this is the threshold that the latter still didn’t cross towards an art form.
Of course, there’s different types of art just as there are different types of games. Making art can also be alienating and toxic, but there is still nothing quite like playing music in a gathering of friends, or getting together to make paintings, a silly short film or even a sand castle at the beach.
By the way, some of my fondest memories are of a bunch of friends going to someone’s house to play GTA San Andreas, FIFA or Need for Speed for the whole day
so reading books is wasting your life too i suppose. i think you’re painting vast amount of art with a broad brush.
so reading books is wasting your life too i suppose
Some books can be, or even outright toxic (and this is also for games, music etc). Reinforcing or propagating social alienation is the criteria I’m using here. I think I made myself clearer on this in another comment.
Yes Shawn, but have you considered: Number go up?
Time enjoyed is never wasted
spoiler
Just make sure you’re actually enjoying yourself
-someone with 2k+ hours in Destiny 2
That’s true, but there are enjoyable things that improve you and enjoyable things that don’t. I usually feel better about the time I spend on the first type of things.
That’s cool! Just remember that feeling joy and forming happy memories is justification enough!
Man who has 1600 posts with no likes on Bluesky angrily tries to explain why other people are wasting their time by having fun
Haha imagine making 1600 posts on some random irrelevant social media
it’s relevant to me, dammit [cries]
I’ll have you know I’ve accrued dozens of upbears over the years!
I don’t post here on my “free” time, I post here when Im “outside”.
Hexbear and Bluesky are indistinguishable in the way most users are liberals and also extremely susceptible to baitI have never fully understood [why my children prefer to stay with their mother and play video games over the weekend instead of coming over to my apartment and watch me play the oboe]
At this point in my life, I’m somewhat sympathetic to their argument.
I see being a good at a particular videogame as being good at playing the organ in a world where every single organ is almost completely unique right down to the keyboard layout and where more portable keyboard instruments like pianos do not exist. You spend so many hours practicing scales and chords for your particular organ, but if you go to your friend’s house, they have their own organ except their keyboard is wildly different from your keyboard so all those hours practicing scales and chords mean nothing because your muscle memories aren’t applicable to their organ. And it’s ditto for your friend as well. You both are just stuck in your own organs by yourselves. Sure, those hours spend by themselves were enjoyable enough, but what if you no longer want to play your organ? What if you want a new organ? What if your old organ got destroyed somehow and you’re forced to get a new one? It seems like getting stuck in a sink cost hole is almost inevitable even if you no longer feel joy in playing your own organ.
I’m at a stage of my life where I start to think about contingencies for my hobbies for lack of a better word. Whenever something new piques my interests and I could feel the hyperfixation start to kick in, I ask myself, “Would I still enjoy this hobby in 5 years? What happens if the hobby turns to shit or outside forces render the hobby unenjoyable (like how RAM prices have skyrocketed or how Linux has AI slop now)? What happens if I am somehow unable to enjoy the hobby like being unable to afford the hobby?” I don’t think it’s worth the investment in time in getting good at the organ only for the organ to change (patch notes, the community moves on, Wine no longer works on it, and so on).
Or perhaps to put it more simply and in another way, present me will always enjoy whatever it is that they’re doing. But now I start to think about whether future me would enjoy what present me has done as well. Part of the reason why I divested from videogames is that while I will mostly enjoy playing the game as it’s being played, I rarely had that same satisfaction reminiscing back months or years later. I am not one of those people who can play nothing but Doom WADs for 30+ years, so I inevitably would move on to a new game and spend time learning its mechanics, repeating the same cycle over and over again. I had a list that I’ve created a decade ago of games I’ve beaten, and I really didn’t like the feeling of feeling almost nothing as I skimmed through the list, barely remembering much of the games.
Someday soon you will die, and it will no longer matter whether you were good at a unique organ, or at whistling, or at acrobatics, or at any other skill.
The value is in the process itself. It is in the things you learn which can be applied to other skills (if you’re an expert at a unique organ, transferring your skills to a different organ will be far easier than building the skills from scratch. And your rhythm and ear for pitch and a number of other things will transfer without any effort). It is in the value that the process of learning anything has on your brain. It is in the positive emotions you experience in the process.
Sure, the process of mastering a skill itself can be self fulfilling, but that’s true for any skill. The question then becomes which skills should someone invest time in to get good at. Our life is limited after all, and not all skill acquisition is equal. Being good with cars means you can help other people with their car problems, which is more than what you can say for being good at videogames or playing the oboe or acrobatics. Being good at cooking food is means you can be the designate cook at any social gathering while being good at speedrunning means you can occasionally impress other people with your WR runs.
I have grown to dislike this attitude of “as long as you’re enjoying the process, you shouldn’t care if the skill isn’t useful” since I enjoy the learning process for both “useful” and “useless” skills since I just enjoy learning. Then the question becomes what happens when the high and novelty of learning something new wears out. I would rather have the fruits of that learning be something that could help other people rather than for my own personal enjoyment.
I don’t know if it’s a ND thing or not but sometimes I realize I use games a crutch when I’m stressed or have a lot to do. Because games have simple repetitive tasks with clear goals and ways to accomplish them, I find them comforting in some way? It’s like “I don’t know the next step for this thing going on in my life but I know how to get this special item in this game” and it just makes life make sense for a few hours. I don’t play super often. Probably less than 10 hours a week. But I do notice myself reaching for games the same way I bite my nails or pick at skin. Like a nervous habit.
Both are hobbies, what’s the difference. I hate gamers btw.
I thought we were friends! Nah, I’m kidding, I generally hate gamers even though I myself am one…
I mean, you could make the same argument about books? “I can learn things from a book”- yeah, and you can learn things from video games. You can also learn nothing from a book.
I think people go “video games” and think it’s nothing but Call of Duty, meanwhile you have Expedition 33 out there making people argue about unreliable narratives, abuse of authority, grief, so much fucking grief. etc
Art and experiencing art is like one of the main if not the main, points of existence? Telling our little stories and experiencing other people’s little stories in return to grow and further understand other people and our surroundings.
Not even getting into puzzle video games. Like, the amount of research that has been done on Tetris is mind-boggling.
What a hot take, just like any hobby the reward is the enjoyment lol
Actually the reward is that political power grows out of being the very best at pokemon battles.
What is with the gamer interiority complex on here? I swear people used to commit to the
Christman argument against videogamesLiberalization of the hexbear around the midterm elections.
So take the phrase ‘video games’ and swap it with the word ‘work’ or ‘job’ or ‘career’ and see if it still applies.
I get better at existentialism.
They targeted musicians.
Musicians.
Mournful melody on the oboe plays
I am saddened
