Can Gamers Be Productive People?
Jul 17th, 2007 by Edward Pollard
E3 has come and gone and it seemed a good time to muse on an issue of personal interest to me: the time commitment required to be a “gamer”. I participate in a number of gaming related communities, and universally I find that in those groups I’m typically the individual that actually participates in the hobby the least. If I can find 5 or 10 hours in a week to devote to video games or gathering people around the table for a board game I call myself fortunate.
Last month I mused that the industry was producing too many titles, but did not reflect on the time required to consume even a fraction of the huge number of games out there. I recently started a classic Gamecube role playing game - Tales of Symphonia - that staunchly professes to feature over 80 hours of gameplay on the back of the box. Thats two weeks of what is considered by many full time work and all for only one of the many, many role playing games out there. My personal RPG backlog still reaches back to Skies of Arcadia, so even if we account to typical advertising overestimation where will I find even 60 hours to spend with this game?
The answer? I won’t.
I’ve consistently borne a personal opinion that other gamers are just willing to make sacrifices that I am not. I have a house, a pair of dogs, a kid, two careers, and am constantly busy from the moment I get out of bed to the moment I return to it. There is a lawn to mow, a house to keep clean, projects to advance, and meals to get on the table. Typically, if I think on this issue, I envision gamers as a troupe of stereotypical college students with little regard for personal hygeine let alone the world around them, free to expend their time and energy on the hundreds of hours of meaningless frivolity they seemingly consume month to month. This is, it seems to me, the new status quo step between childhood and adulthood: The fuel behind the flow of half-conceived media in all forms be it music, movies, and games.
This is perhaps just a facet of growing older, that the subculture I used to identify with now begins to take on strange and alien attributes. But my inability to rationalize the non-productivity of the gaming masses is what takes hold of me. I’ve previously related my inability to tolerate obsession well, and a lot of that is borne out of personal experience. Speaking from personal knowledge, I know that my modest pursuit of the “gamer” lifestyle has accumulated a significant degree of personal debt, and a mountain of games that have gone unconsumed in any form. The more I game, the more I need to spend my free time seeking extra income to keep the bills low. By the standard objective measurements economists use to measure affluence, my income is neither meager nor excessive. My family lives a fairly comfortable lifestyle, but we do a lot of work to keep it that way.
I don’t know how people can do what I see them doing. Are they running off into thousands and thousands of dollars in personal debt just so they can post on the internet about the massive collection of games they half-play? What should we think of the people who do that? Taken to an extreme, the consequences are dire. Should we place people who abuse their children to play games and those who leave their homes messy or their debt accumulating on the same continuum?
I am thus lead to some cynical conclusions that individuals deeply ensconced in gaming - be they the 40+ hour a week video gamer, or the chronic board game junkie with 500+ board games on their shelves - are deeply unproductive individuals. I measure this only by the degree of non-productivity I’ve had to include in my life to get where I have gotten, and the internal discontent I feel when I approach leisure as a goal rather than an occasional indulgence.
Leisure as a goal? That certainly seems to me to be the best description of people who wade so deep in the pool of recreation subcultures. There are questions of addiction, perhaps, that follow when people develop elite levels of expertise at tasks that are by definition peripheral - if not flat out contradictory - to productive work.
Obviously I am applying layers of value decisions, based on my own personal definition of productive. Perhaps I am doing so unfairly or unkindly, and there was certainly a period of my life where such a conversation would be fueled by envy. I don’t think that is the case any longer, and I reflected on this while reading the chapter on Sloth inSkipping Towards Gommorah by Dan Savage. There is value in relaxation, in being slothful, but a subculture that relishes in, pursues it as a goal, constructs hundred-hour long endeavors to immerse in it, well, that seems problematic to me.
Great post. It’s funny you should mention Tales of Symphonia. I started that game in the summer of 2006 (or was it 2005?), played it for hours and hours (an hour per evening, maybe), and finally gave up. I pulled it out again to play some more, and the in-game Journal helped me discover where I was, but I just can’t get back into it. Who wants to play an 80+ hour RPG anymore?
I used to be proud of the fact that I (board) gamed something like 10-20 hours per week, now I realize it cut me out of a lot of time I could have spent doing something more productive and equally enjoyable.
I find myself in a similar position, but I love it. I love being a casual gamer who doesn’t have to play everything. I always have an excellent game to occupy my time if I want it too, and it isn’t that much different playing a 60 hour RPG or reading a (real litterature, mind you) book. I spent way more than 60 hours on Dostojevski. But because of time constraints, I choose to read short stories and play short games. And quite frankly, I appreciate a short game more than a long one. They’re like poems. Anyways, very well written.
Great post! I’ve been thinking a lot about this, too. What prompted this is moving to a new house and realizing that I have a lot of games that I’m never going to play again and have to liquidate. They’re a remnant from a past when I could spend an entire day on a weekend gaming. With kids, job, and a household to maintain, I’m happy if I can squeeze a couple of short games in per month. Liek you, Ed, I feel this increasing disconnect from the world of “real” gamers who buy every new release, play it 100 times and write detailed articles on their exploits on Boardgamegeek. I’m more into games than almost everyone else I know, but when I spend a lot of time in Internet gaming circles, I feel like I’m the weird one for not devoting my spare time to games. Thanks for making me realize that I’m actually pretty normal!
“Leisure as a goal?” Duh.
Having the luxury of being able to sit around and do whatever one desires, which may include playing through an 80 hour RPG, is a very worthy goal for our extremely short human lifespans.
I actually have a friend who is doing his Phd on this exact subject. I have forwarded this post to him, but I am sure he will have something to say on the matter (AkA: I won’t steal his thunder…)
I think what you have identified is important - the idea that these things are “work.” There is much work to be done in the active gaming lifestyle, but it is not work that anyone values - the opposite in fact. Y
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