[bhouston]

Does he have children? Time for computer games dwindles if you have kids, except for the computer games you can play with your kids. :)

I think games are fine as long as you are living an otherwise full life. Games are only problematic if they are an opiate that prevent you from achieving goals outside of virtual entertainment. Games should not be a present day "soma" to paraphrase some words from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

Also 1000 hours for a game can be similar to how many hours of TV many watch in a year, at least games involve more active engagement and problem solving.

[bnralt]

Sure, but perhaps it is worthwhile to ask when these games have become "soma," or at least become that for certain individuals. The above poster was reacting to someone saying they put 1000+ hours into a single game. Maybe we'll reach the conclusion that it's time well spent, but I don't think it's wrong to at least ask the question of what this impact is on society. People don't seem to have the same antagonism to the question when it gets asked about, say, social media addiction.

For what it's worth, I do think we should ask the same questions about TV, or browsing HN. There are a lot of things that it's easy to mindlessly do for hours that, if given some reflection, we might find we'd rather not spend so much time on.

[Pulcinella]

You don’t realize how much text even simple video games have until you try to play them with your kids before they have learned to read!

That said, I have been impressed by mine’s abilities to memorize what each menu option does in menus that can go 4-5 levels deep.

[jacobolus]

Side note: If you want to teach your kid (age 3+) to read, with the assumed prerequisite that you read lots of books aloud together and the kid wants to learn, let me recommend Bloomfield’s book Let's Read from the 1960s, about which you can see tokenadult’s recommendation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466

The book is organized so that in the first ~100 lessons only one new spelling–sound association is introduced per lesson and all words use strictly regular spellings. Lessons have (initially somewhat stilted and then gradually more natural) sentences constructed from previously seen words, so that there is a natural spaced repetition built in. This is much more efficient than most reading curricula, because despite many exceptions English is at its core a phonetic system.

It takes about 10–20 minutes per "lesson", you can do maybe 2–14 lessons per week (we aim for about 1/day), and there are ~250 lessons, so overall it ends up taking about 6–18 months from start to finish, maybe 50–100 hours in total. Afterwards, your kid will be ready to read pretty well anything they can understand, and after a further year or two of practice (reading whatever kind of material they want) will be a strong and fluent reader.

Only real prerequisites are that the kid is interested and can sit still for 10+ minutes at a time, can recognize the letters of the alphabet, and can more-or-less make all of the sounds of spoken English.

[egypturnash]

If you would like to feel this on a more visceral level, I have been playing "Tunic" recently and it is a really interesting simulation of "you are a child who can barely read one word in twenty in the manual but you sure are having a lot of fun bumbling around in Zelda".