People underestimate how incredibly hard it is to pull yourself out of habits born from socioeconomic factors. Video games give you an alternate reality, likely much better than your own.
It wasn't a criticism of video games and if you are suggesting I am underestimating something, I got myself off the street a few years ago of my own efforts.
I still play plenty of videogames. It's something I can drop at will as I get my act together, make the connections I need to make, etc. I like games and my kids always joked "Video games are our only education."
But the reality is I would rather have a life and if I had more of a life, that fact would drive a lot of my activities and there simply wouldn't be time -- or need -- to play games for hours.
You're so right - video games shouldn't even have been mentioned. As human ingenuity goes, there's infinite ways to "waste time".
I've spent many hours with the family playing MineCraft, and it's an amazing way to teach things like not being selfish, being cooperative, etc. to children because they experience the effects or lack of in compacted real time without permanent real-world impact.
I homeschooled my sons. After seeing how vastly superior Gungan Frontier and a similar Sim game were to my "pen and paper" style simulation in my college class on environmental biology, I went through their games and decided which games I would count as educational and for which subject.
Their joke grew out if conversations that went something like this:
Son blurts obscure historical factoid.
Me: "Where the hell did you learn that?!"
Son names video game he learned it from. Punchline: "Video games are our only education." (Vin Diesel movie line, so another excellent reason to say it to me.)
They now have a blog where that's the descriptor, basically.
Personally, I owe my English skills to videogames. While I later continued with proper education, the basics of grammar and vocabulary (as well as many incredibly subject-specific words) I've learned from, in order: Star Trek: Generations, Fallout, and StarCraft. I fondly remember me sitting in front of the first of these games with English/Polish dictionary and translating things on the screen word for word.
Based on the sound of his typing -- which sounds like his dad typing and I know his typing speed because I met him in typing class in high school -- my oldest son probably types at about 80wpm. This is thanks to online games with chat functions. You need to "talk" fast to coordinate with your teammates and stay on top of your duties in the game.
That's very true. Another related phenomenon that improved my typing speed is games that require execution of a lot of complex actions very quickly. Playing them competitively essentially forces you to master random access to your keyboard. In StarCraft, after grokking the core mechanics, your next primary improvement would be raising your APM (actions per minute). In terms of an OODA loop[0], most players are constrained by the Act part. So if you wanted to win, you had to master the art of issuing keyboard+mouse commands at a rate of 3 per second (= ~180 APM, which isn't even progamer level).
I honestly don't know if that's true. Everyone I have ever known who was supposedly being "lazy" turned out to have some serious personal issues, often issues that were not being identified.
In my experience, if you want to cure "laziness," the best thing to do is identify the underlying cause of the failure to get anything done and address that.
I homeschooled two special-needs sons who had a lot of issues that did not resolve for being lectured or something. They resolved by figuring why X was happening and addressing that.
Sometimes other people find it empowering to get that point of view put out there. It's an epiphany for some people that they aren't actually lazy like everyone has always told them. They just don't have the energy for some reason and addressing that can help make their life finally work after decades of frustration.
I still play plenty of videogames. It's something I can drop at will as I get my act together, make the connections I need to make, etc. I like games and my kids always joked "Video games are our only education."
But the reality is I would rather have a life and if I had more of a life, that fact would drive a lot of my activities and there simply wouldn't be time -- or need -- to play games for hours.