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by dragontamer 1680 days ago
You might be surprised. Take a look at Fly (DOTA professional gamer) for example:

https://www.gosugamers.net/dota2/news/47182-fly-and-s4-out-o...

Turns out that a healthy body is correlated with reflexes. You need a level of workout activity if you want to be a professional-level video game player.

The "fat and lazy" trope kinda-sorta works for maybe casual games. But a fit body means a fit mind, and a fit mind plays games at a higher level.

2 comments

People who play professionally are a very different population of people than what this study was looking at.

This study was looking at Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons players from the general population.

Also note that I didn't claim that gamers were "fat and lazy" as you suggested. I doubt that they exercise at a rate higher than the general population. I would guess they probably exercise at a rate similar to the general population, particularly because so many people play games.

Neither of those games seem correlated with the "Fat and Lazy gamer" trope. "Fat and Lazy" is usually associated with games with high-levels of grind, like World of Warcraft or maybe Genshin Impact as a more recent example.

Certain games suck you in and require abnormal amounts of time to feel good about anything. Other games, like Animal Crossing or Plants vs Zombies, are more casual, and have a better life / play balance.

IMO, the "dangerous" games are these grindfests, basically Skinnerbox games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber).

That’s correct, I don’t think they do correlate with “fat and lazy” stereotypes. I think they correlate with “similar to the general population”
> I didn't claim that gamers were "fat and lazy" as you suggested. I doubt that they exercise at a rate higher than the general population

The general population is on average "fat and lazy" and exercise at a rate that is near enough to 0 to make no difference. Age and wealth as factors will outweigh any other input when it comes to these benchmarks.

That’s not a great example. There’s plenty of fat successful Dota players - xinq most recently (and historical as well).