08-22-2004, 07:05 AM
(This post was last modified: 08-22-2004, 07:22 AM by Occhidiangela.)
A Jefferson Starship (or Airplane?) lyric:
Black wants out of the street
Yellow wants the country
Red wants the country back
White wants out of this world.
Note: In the 25 or so years since that song came out, the stereotypes have changed slightly, but the theme remains. Travel to Mars? *sings* "Fly me to the moon . . ." OK, I'll stop, not in the shower at the moment.
That lyric came to me while I read a short article by Rayburn Odom in Computer Games Magazine, July 2004. ( Their Site, though I read a paper copy) Game Addicts Anonymous comments on a the slightly tired topic of addiction to electronic games. What he did not explore in sufficient depth, space limits I suppose, is a root motivator of immersion into fantasy lands: escape, a contributor to indulging in compulsive behavior. His question is, or was, how far will escape go as games become increasingly "real?" How much more appealing will the next three generations of PC 3D games be than the current load? I wonder if he knows how many hours are lost every day by people playing Minesweeper?) He asserts that PC games are in their infancy, and that in 10 to 20 years game addiction will compete with alcohol addiction as a societal ill. Bottom line: Gaming addiction is a problem that we should not ignore. I wonder if his mom had trouble with his dad's golf habit. ;)
Escape is not a new societal phenomenon, via movies or TV and the allegedly healthier escape, reading. IN excessive escapist reading, as in wandering into alcohol or heroin induced oblivion, one lets go of control and floats on the story, the show, or the buzz. No carpal tunnel syndrome there, but a key difference in those escapes, versus these pernicious computer games, are lack of person to person interaction, a modest shortcoming of SP only games, and the absent creative, problem solving process. The escaping action is not the same, in that one is an escape from and the other an escape to with the key ingredient being the level of control an activity or hobby affords the escapee. (I realize that the alcoholism tie in is tenuous, since alcohol or smack can be used in conjunction with any number of escapes or hobbies. However, since that is the comparison he used, I feel bound to retain that linkage in this critique. The creative process of writing is undertaken by the author, which can be another addictive behavior!)
Escape is the theme, but escape from what?
From the mundane. That is not by itself bad, for any leisure activity is a form of evening out the life's strains, challenges and frustrations. Up to a certain point, it is healthy to even out the strain. Of interest to the author, and for most of us who frequent this forum, is finding the threshold where a hobby becomes a false refuge from life. Many of us "here" know times when we've crossed that line, and what it takes to come back from the artificial structure and control that an addictive hobby affords us.
"Hi, I'm Occhi, and I'm a Legit Diablo II forum addict." (My post count is evidence that is hard to ignore!)
Forum participation fits into this genre of hobby, or creative escape, of the on line sort, due to its harnessing creative impulse, be it in crafting screen shots or a well worded flame.
Take a look at a RL hobby, to distance the conversation from the allure of the filtered human interaction that the PC and fiberoptic network affords. Consider golf, and then table top Dungeons and Dragons.
In golf, you enter an artificial environment, the course. (The Map? The Room?) You have in your hands tools. You control to a certain extent how the game progresses. There are hazards a plenty, and rewards for both excellence and luck. You can play it solo, which can be very relaxing, but playing it with friends or other people adds a beautiful social flavor, a frequently enriching human interaction (coop). Playing in its original form (PvP) for a wager large or small, adds a completely different flavor and enjoyment. The let down from leaving the course and returning back to life varies, particularly if the comeraderie transitions to the 19th hole and goes on for hours. "Don't you people have homes?" asks Judge Smails of country club memebers playing cards in Caddyshack.
Golf at its best combines a test of skill with a human leisure and social setting that promotes friendships and person to person interaction, outside the context of jobs, challenges and general stress. Yet it costs time and money to indulge in, time and money that can be chosen for golf, or for any number of other activities. (Painting the garage door?)
Likewise Dungeons and Dragons tabletop, which cost me quite a few study hours in college, and cannot have helped my grades; a situation similar to Mr Odom's complaint that he hurt his grades with too much PC gaming. I made friendships in that milieu that last to this day. I stood for two of my friends at their weddings, my D & D bubbas. That hobbie led to an exploration into medeival and ancient history that lasts into this day, as well as into . . . the addictive world of Diablo, Diablo II, and Starcraft! Full circle, eh?
The lyric registered because PC game addiction, which I will confine to multi player environments and still be on reasonably firm ground, is a continuation the D & D addiction that preceded it. D & D received some very bad press for its alleged influence in encouraging evil, delusion, and amateur spelunking. But as a hobby, it harnesses our creative side, our imaginative side, by design anyway, and boosted interest in, among other things, arts and crafts and Rennaisance Festivals. Yet that hobby has not received quite the acceptance as the "he's out tinkering with that old car" hobby has. "Lost in the creative urge" would be the theme common to those two disparate pursuits.
Has the promotion of arrested adolescence that D & D was charged with, the escape from life that PC games seems to offer with an added filter, enabling personal interaction sans face to face contact, really in competition with alcoholism or recreational drugs as society's next major problem?
I'd suggest not, since alcoholism or drug abuse (and escapist reading) as escapes are a letting go, whereas creative hobbies are an empowering, a small attempt to do something over which we can exercise a measure of control. A measure, a wee dram, of personal power, and the escape into, the immersion into, the creative setting. Similar to but different from carpentry or gardening, stamp collecting, putting together stained glass, model building, et al.
Is the desire to escape, as the lyric suggests, "out of this world" and into such realms as Earth and Beyond, Eve, SWG, Civ 3, Moo, Azeroth, Sanctuary, or other make believe worlds a manifestation of cultural restlessness? Is this tapping into a slash and burn, conquer and move on spirit inherent in the primal American culture that eventually spawned Hollywood, as well both Dungeons and Dragons and the PC games that followed it? The active escapes into "other worlds" seem to echo the old "They don't like us here, let's try over there." The Hollywood escape, and escapist reading, is a new version of transporting oneself, on the wings of song or story, into the world of imagination and legend, an escape as old as mankind.
"White wants out of this world?" (The narrow model of the "mainstream" European based 'American' culture as "white" cannot of course reflect the immense diversity of PC gamers all over the world. Lineage, anyone?) Is the great escape from the world into an imaginary environment the next great societal problem?
I think not. When a hobby, such as fishing, becomes a passion, a passion that competes severely with the mundane occupation so many modern folks undertake to pay the bills, one loses oneself in the hobby. One escapes into the experience of angling for hours in hopes of a good fight with a bass or tickling a trout, of catching that perfect wave, or in the creative process of woodworking or painting. See also staging the next raid in Evercrack with your online buddies.
It's an escape into something, not necessarily from something, and it harnesses the active, creative process, rather than the passive escape into an altered state. That people waste time is a product of varied factors, which Mr Odom acknowledges by quoting T.S. Eliot's "Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." I'd take it a step further and suggest that "waste" of time is in the eyes of the beholder, to include my own dear Mrs Occhi! (Fear the Frumious Frying Pan of Spousal Vengeance, my Friends! :lol: )
Is there a point at which a hobby, any hobby, becomes an obsession, an unhealthy drain on one's time and resources, both spiritual and physical? Yes, and in the case of those with jobs and families, prioritization and time management are part of life's little puzzle to piece together.
Are PC games any worse than the hundreds of other hobbies, or time sinks, that already exist?
Not hardly. The problem, if there is one, is the susceptibility anyone has to compulsive behaviour (I number golfing, smoking, forum participation, and PC gaming among my versions of that flaw) and the level of self discipline and ability to prioritize and budget one's time that one develops as one matures.
Mr Odom has seen the light, having learned a bitter lesson while at college, and wishes to warn his compatriots of the dangers of the rocky waste he has just crossed, knowing that others will take a similar journey. The "problem" he postulates is no older than the habit of active, creative hobbies that sing the siren's song to us as we sail the mundane seas of our daily lives.
Sing
Sing
Sing to the sky!
Or was that just my dog, barking at the moon, or warning me of a tiger? :D
Black wants out of the street
Yellow wants the country
Red wants the country back
White wants out of this world.
Note: In the 25 or so years since that song came out, the stereotypes have changed slightly, but the theme remains. Travel to Mars? *sings* "Fly me to the moon . . ." OK, I'll stop, not in the shower at the moment.
That lyric came to me while I read a short article by Rayburn Odom in Computer Games Magazine, July 2004. ( Their Site, though I read a paper copy) Game Addicts Anonymous comments on a the slightly tired topic of addiction to electronic games. What he did not explore in sufficient depth, space limits I suppose, is a root motivator of immersion into fantasy lands: escape, a contributor to indulging in compulsive behavior. His question is, or was, how far will escape go as games become increasingly "real?" How much more appealing will the next three generations of PC 3D games be than the current load? I wonder if he knows how many hours are lost every day by people playing Minesweeper?) He asserts that PC games are in their infancy, and that in 10 to 20 years game addiction will compete with alcohol addiction as a societal ill. Bottom line: Gaming addiction is a problem that we should not ignore. I wonder if his mom had trouble with his dad's golf habit. ;)
Escape is not a new societal phenomenon, via movies or TV and the allegedly healthier escape, reading. IN excessive escapist reading, as in wandering into alcohol or heroin induced oblivion, one lets go of control and floats on the story, the show, or the buzz. No carpal tunnel syndrome there, but a key difference in those escapes, versus these pernicious computer games, are lack of person to person interaction, a modest shortcoming of SP only games, and the absent creative, problem solving process. The escaping action is not the same, in that one is an escape from and the other an escape to with the key ingredient being the level of control an activity or hobby affords the escapee. (I realize that the alcoholism tie in is tenuous, since alcohol or smack can be used in conjunction with any number of escapes or hobbies. However, since that is the comparison he used, I feel bound to retain that linkage in this critique. The creative process of writing is undertaken by the author, which can be another addictive behavior!)
Escape is the theme, but escape from what?
From the mundane. That is not by itself bad, for any leisure activity is a form of evening out the life's strains, challenges and frustrations. Up to a certain point, it is healthy to even out the strain. Of interest to the author, and for most of us who frequent this forum, is finding the threshold where a hobby becomes a false refuge from life. Many of us "here" know times when we've crossed that line, and what it takes to come back from the artificial structure and control that an addictive hobby affords us.
"Hi, I'm Occhi, and I'm a Legit Diablo II forum addict." (My post count is evidence that is hard to ignore!)
Forum participation fits into this genre of hobby, or creative escape, of the on line sort, due to its harnessing creative impulse, be it in crafting screen shots or a well worded flame.
Take a look at a RL hobby, to distance the conversation from the allure of the filtered human interaction that the PC and fiberoptic network affords. Consider golf, and then table top Dungeons and Dragons.
In golf, you enter an artificial environment, the course. (The Map? The Room?) You have in your hands tools. You control to a certain extent how the game progresses. There are hazards a plenty, and rewards for both excellence and luck. You can play it solo, which can be very relaxing, but playing it with friends or other people adds a beautiful social flavor, a frequently enriching human interaction (coop). Playing in its original form (PvP) for a wager large or small, adds a completely different flavor and enjoyment. The let down from leaving the course and returning back to life varies, particularly if the comeraderie transitions to the 19th hole and goes on for hours. "Don't you people have homes?" asks Judge Smails of country club memebers playing cards in Caddyshack.
Golf at its best combines a test of skill with a human leisure and social setting that promotes friendships and person to person interaction, outside the context of jobs, challenges and general stress. Yet it costs time and money to indulge in, time and money that can be chosen for golf, or for any number of other activities. (Painting the garage door?)
Likewise Dungeons and Dragons tabletop, which cost me quite a few study hours in college, and cannot have helped my grades; a situation similar to Mr Odom's complaint that he hurt his grades with too much PC gaming. I made friendships in that milieu that last to this day. I stood for two of my friends at their weddings, my D & D bubbas. That hobbie led to an exploration into medeival and ancient history that lasts into this day, as well as into . . . the addictive world of Diablo, Diablo II, and Starcraft! Full circle, eh?
The lyric registered because PC game addiction, which I will confine to multi player environments and still be on reasonably firm ground, is a continuation the D & D addiction that preceded it. D & D received some very bad press for its alleged influence in encouraging evil, delusion, and amateur spelunking. But as a hobby, it harnesses our creative side, our imaginative side, by design anyway, and boosted interest in, among other things, arts and crafts and Rennaisance Festivals. Yet that hobby has not received quite the acceptance as the "he's out tinkering with that old car" hobby has. "Lost in the creative urge" would be the theme common to those two disparate pursuits.
Has the promotion of arrested adolescence that D & D was charged with, the escape from life that PC games seems to offer with an added filter, enabling personal interaction sans face to face contact, really in competition with alcoholism or recreational drugs as society's next major problem?
I'd suggest not, since alcoholism or drug abuse (and escapist reading) as escapes are a letting go, whereas creative hobbies are an empowering, a small attempt to do something over which we can exercise a measure of control. A measure, a wee dram, of personal power, and the escape into, the immersion into, the creative setting. Similar to but different from carpentry or gardening, stamp collecting, putting together stained glass, model building, et al.
Is the desire to escape, as the lyric suggests, "out of this world" and into such realms as Earth and Beyond, Eve, SWG, Civ 3, Moo, Azeroth, Sanctuary, or other make believe worlds a manifestation of cultural restlessness? Is this tapping into a slash and burn, conquer and move on spirit inherent in the primal American culture that eventually spawned Hollywood, as well both Dungeons and Dragons and the PC games that followed it? The active escapes into "other worlds" seem to echo the old "They don't like us here, let's try over there." The Hollywood escape, and escapist reading, is a new version of transporting oneself, on the wings of song or story, into the world of imagination and legend, an escape as old as mankind.
"White wants out of this world?" (The narrow model of the "mainstream" European based 'American' culture as "white" cannot of course reflect the immense diversity of PC gamers all over the world. Lineage, anyone?) Is the great escape from the world into an imaginary environment the next great societal problem?
I think not. When a hobby, such as fishing, becomes a passion, a passion that competes severely with the mundane occupation so many modern folks undertake to pay the bills, one loses oneself in the hobby. One escapes into the experience of angling for hours in hopes of a good fight with a bass or tickling a trout, of catching that perfect wave, or in the creative process of woodworking or painting. See also staging the next raid in Evercrack with your online buddies.
It's an escape into something, not necessarily from something, and it harnesses the active, creative process, rather than the passive escape into an altered state. That people waste time is a product of varied factors, which Mr Odom acknowledges by quoting T.S. Eliot's "Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." I'd take it a step further and suggest that "waste" of time is in the eyes of the beholder, to include my own dear Mrs Occhi! (Fear the Frumious Frying Pan of Spousal Vengeance, my Friends! :lol: )
Is there a point at which a hobby, any hobby, becomes an obsession, an unhealthy drain on one's time and resources, both spiritual and physical? Yes, and in the case of those with jobs and families, prioritization and time management are part of life's little puzzle to piece together.
Are PC games any worse than the hundreds of other hobbies, or time sinks, that already exist?
Not hardly. The problem, if there is one, is the susceptibility anyone has to compulsive behaviour (I number golfing, smoking, forum participation, and PC gaming among my versions of that flaw) and the level of self discipline and ability to prioritize and budget one's time that one develops as one matures.
Mr Odom has seen the light, having learned a bitter lesson while at college, and wishes to warn his compatriots of the dangers of the rocky waste he has just crossed, knowing that others will take a similar journey. The "problem" he postulates is no older than the habit of active, creative hobbies that sing the siren's song to us as we sail the mundane seas of our daily lives.
Sing
Sing
Sing to the sky!
Or was that just my dog, barking at the moon, or warning me of a tiger? :D
Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the Men 'O War!
In War, the outcome is never final. --Carl von Clausewitz--
Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum
John 11:35 - consider why.
In Memory of Pete
In War, the outcome is never final. --Carl von Clausewitz--
Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum
John 11:35 - consider why.
In Memory of Pete