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by mihaifm
2638 days ago
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Addicting behaviour is dangerous, but you can get addicted to TV shows just as well. Gaming tends to be more addictive because it actively engages your brain, compared with traditional entertainment (movies, theatre, concerts) which are static, you just sit and watch. As graphics keep improving I would argue that it might even replace cinema in the future, to some degree. Also, gaming is just a vast area that it's hard to generalize the whole thing as "scourge". Some games improve critical thinking and can actually be great educational tools. Would you just read a boring history book or activelly engage in the political situation of medieval Europe by playing something like Europa Universalis. |
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The mechanism is strongly dependent on the person. I have much more of a problem with TV shows and fiction books than with videogames, because I'm a sucker for stories. A TV show or a book series can offer couple dozen hours of engaging storyline; most story-based video games are either much shorter, or the story is crap; the book-series-quality videogame storylines are few and far between. That's probably why I never got addicted to multiplayer games. By their nature they have no quality stories, so they bore me out quickly.
(I'm aware that there are people for whom the "active engagement" part is a core ingredient in addiction. I'm just saying that it's not the only mechanism, and different people are susceptible to different things.)