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When I very briefly used to play I just liked the pew pew pew boom bang splat experience. Maybe that’s why I never turned into a gamer proper. Never occurred to me that it had anything to do with Striving and Purpose.
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Video games offer young men a simulacrum of striving and purpose. They hijack deep evolutionary systems of risk, competition, status seeking. They obsessively circle what highbrow modern culture condemns and denies. They simulate ancient and essential ideals of male heroism. twitter.com/IllimitableMan
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I think they're great when you're young. RuneScape taught me about steel smelting and grinding to gain valuable, worthwhile skills. But in high school and beyond, video games were always an escape from responsibility. Either for genuine stress relief or pointless frivolity.
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I got a taste of it with World of Warcraft. For me it was an after-work sometimes hobby, but for some of the people I played with it was clearly their primary focus in life. Disturbing, sometimes.
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Probably depends on the person and the game. I've definitely had moments of very real feelings of accomplishment when completing some important task in a game with a decent narrative. But then you put the controller down and realize all you've really done is waste a few hours.
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