Well you’d bet wrong. Would you also bet that everyone who binge drank in college continued to do so for the rest of their life?
Almost all of the people I used to raid with played games obsessively before WoW and did so after WoW, but now between jobs and raising families most of us just don’t have that kind of time to put into a game anymore. And games just don’t have the same sort of pull anymore either. Like I said, more interesting games have not translated to more draw. It was about who we were, not about the games themselves. Most of them are more interested in board games than online games now, in large part because playing games is a social activity, not a hide-from-the-world activity.
I just don’t think this is true. Since you brought them up, how many hours do you think the average farmville player put into the game? At their peak, how many hours a week were they playing?
The typical online game player plays a few hours a week. They don’t go on forums to talk about the game. For most big games only about 1 in 10 people who play it finish it because people just don’t devote their lives to games. Gaming is ubiquitous - I see a dozen people playing video games on public transit every day, many of them look like professionals on their way to work. It is something people do to pass time when they are bored, not something they choose as a lifestyle.
There was a time when video games were essentially an outsider activity, and so they typical player was an outsider, which means they over-represented all kinds of traits that would make it hard for someone to fit in, including obsessive disorders.
Again, I say there are far more people who have become obsessed with and lost significant parts of their lives to cards than to all online games combined. Sure, cards have been around for a lot longer, but I would be surprised if online games beat out card games in any year. And back to poker, 40 million people are playing online poker right now, with many others playing in person. Even if people who ruin their lives with those games are the “exception, not the rule” that’s still a lot of people. Lost homes, bankruptcies and suicides lie in the wake of card games, and they always have.
In find this link extremely dubious. I know lots of kids and they all love to go outside and play. Some of them would probably do it a lot more if only they were allowed. I think if you want to find the source of the obesity epidemic you should be looking at land use planning (need to drive somewhere to do anything) and our cultural obsession with safety of children (the same generation that talks about the good-old-days when they used to go out and play all day won’t let contemporary children do the same). When I was a kid and in university almost all my friends played video games. Some of them were fat and some were thin - you know, just like the general population.
I don’t know if we are living in different worlds. I grew up as a video game geek and made friends with other video game geeks. Our children are certainly interested in video games but they like to do all kinds of things. But on the destructiveness of video games vs. the destructiveness of card games, I think you are just factually incorrect.
