Monuments of Wasted Time
A friend once told me video games are a profound waste of time.
We'd spoken at length about what exactly he meant by that. At a surface level I don't think he's wrong. What is produced when you play a game? What is learned or gained? What did you actually get for your efforts?
It seems a bit reductive to comment on a leisure activity like this. I mean, most people play games precisely to not be productive. But it's important to think about considering the vast amount of time people spend playing video games.
Clearly people get value from playing games. The video game industry has ballooned into a multibillion dollar industry in the last several decades. There are now more people playing games than there has been at any other point in history. Each have their own reasons.
They could range from escapism to forget about their day by living a power fantasy of "ripping and tearing," or the opposite end of escapist fantasy by way of managing and growing a farm in a pixelated pretend world. It could be the pursuit of competition and refining one's skill playing any number of different competitive games whether FPS, MOBA, RTS, what have you. It could be puzzles to stimulate the mind or wanting to experience a story through a different lens. The reasons are numerous and the players diverse.
Video games have taught me many lessons over the years. I'd learned how to apply myself to something, the refinement of a skill and experiencing incremental improvements. They helped me learn how to be a team mate and be a part of communities. They expanded my world view from a small rural town to a global scale.
I'll never forget the unique experience as a young teenager playing online, and hearing people in VoIP talk about life where they're from. Hearing someone speak and realize they were from Oklahoma and afterwards someone from California chiming in and listening to them compare and contrast regional differences blew my mind. Realizing that I could connect with and talk to people from states away was transformative. Exponentially more so when I realized I could talk to and befriend people not just from states away, but countries and continents away.
It's a moment of brilliance when a motley trio of teenagers from America, Britain, and Sweden can quickly find common ground and form a bond in a server on a silly block game. When folks at school would ask how I spent the weekend, and I told them how and who I spent it with, I could never understand the mildly perturbed looks I'd get in response.
"Who? How did you even meet them? That's... I guess that's cool man..."
With each new person I met from states and continents away I no longer felt as isolated or alone. People stopped seeming as strange, as distant and far away as I once thought. The outside world stopped seeming so inaccessible, and my personal world stopped feeling so small.
In that conversation with that friend I argued that, yes, video games are a profound waste of time. Yet there are still many things of value which video games have produced. The community surrounding games has produced some absolutely wonderful things.
They've seeded and grown careers in music, writing, and various forms of visual art. They've seeded countless careers in computing from programming to IT. It was my extracurricular endeavors surrounding gaming and the adjacent communities which led to my current career in IT. I had to learn how to host game servers, how to troubleshoot, and how to communicate with folks to do the things I wanted to do in gaming - which are all skills that apply to my current profession.
I can't deny that video games have profoundly altered the course of my life, arguably for the better. Yet there are still countless times I tabulate the hours on my Steam account and feel as if it's all a monument to wasted time. That I could've, or should've done something else with all that time.
My Steam account alone has recorded over 10,000 hours of playtime across many different games over the last two decades. And that's nothing to say about all the other time spent playing games. On consoles, in arcades, on a friend's couch, in different launchers, etc.
They say it takes 10,000 hours to master something. What skills or other things could I have focused on and built instead? What kind of people could I have met, what kind of places and spaces would I have gotten involved with in person? How different would I have been? I could've learned to be a master craftsman of almost any discipline. I could've learned to sail the seas or fly a plane. I could've dedicated myself to doing something of "value" rather than spending all of that time ostensibly doing... nothing.
I used to make videos for a small indie game at a time when there was no one else making videos for that game or community. Each time I'd play the game I'd record the session, and if cool stuff happened it'd all get edited into a video and posted for people in the community to see. Playing the game itself was fun, but after a while those videos and the act of creation became its own intoxicating draw.
Times change, people change, and life moves on. Eventually I stopped playing that game, and the videos stopped with it. For years I felt a restlessness and that something was missing from my life. I did miss the game and community and what that meant to me, but I so deeply missed the process of creation.
Getting those clips, selecting the most compelling ones, putting them into the timeline and getting the scenes and transitions between them just right, expanding the creative process by trying out new editing tricks and tools, having a style develop and refine over time. It was such a sublime feeling. A feeling I missed so dearly.
It took me a long time to realize I missed the act of creation. I spent so many of the years in between playing video games instead wondering why it just didn't feel the same as it did before. Even after realizing what I felt I was missing, it took an even longer time to actually do something about it. The allure of escapism is strong.
I suppose it's all what you make of it. I can frame all those hours spent in video games and lament it all as a vast amount of wasted time and believe it just as easily as I could glean value and lessons learned from all that spent time. I've hedonistically indulged and regretted, and at points in time, produced things because of games and felt something greater than blind indulgence or escapism.
Video games are still one of my primary leisure activities. Some of my closest friends of upwards of a decade are folks I've met online and bonded with over games. Some weeks I play more than I should, and others I can barely muster the motivation to play anything. The scariest feeling though, is the occasional feeling that I'm only continuing to play games because it's just what I've always done.
It all seems to converge on being honest with yourself on why you're actually doing the things you're doing. This isn't an indictment on leisure time if video games are your way of unwinding from a long day or week. Rather, ask what you're giving and ask what you're getting if so much time is being spent on a given thing.
Don't be afraid to reprioritize and change course.