Playing starcraft 2 totally consumed my life from about 18-22. It was very similar to a drug addiction except I convinced myself it was positive because I would eventually be a professional. My addiction prevented my from working on the underlying issues that caused my to seek refuge in the game. It also left me with a host of physical RSI problems that have been a huge negative to my life + career. Although if I hadn't developed them I suspect I'd still be consumed by games.
In order to spend vast amounts of time playing video games you have to be at a certain level of privilege. I feel as if video games have cheated myself out of potential as well as those that my privilege obligates to help.
As with other addictions there are people who won't be consumed by it like I was, and prohibition isn't the solution, not sure what is tbh.
Very similar story to me: I played Starcraft 2 throughout college in a competitive fashion and made me feel worse. There was a period of time after that where after quitting I wouldn't touch a video game.
I've since picked up a Nintendo 3DS as an experiment now that I take long train rides to work, and it's been an amazing, relaxing experience.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, there are many different ways to enjoy video games without being addicted or even playing a lot. Starcraft 2 ladder play may be one of the more stressful ways of going about it from experience.
I feel like both of your stories could easily be rewritten and replace videogames with sports. Many people spend their high school and college lives completely dedicated to football, basketball, baseball, or hockey with the idea that they'll go pro eventually.
These folks can come away with wasted college time, physical injuries, and hideous aversion to the sport they once loved. I guess what I am saying is that I feel like this is an athlete/esports thing, not necesarily a videogame thing. Without the lure of a career behind it, it wouldn't be quite so dangerous a thing. But as with all fun careers, the demands are super high and the number of people who make it is super small. Acting is like this too, without the physical injuries.
I agree. Also, both with video games and with sports, it is possible to use the challenge as an opportunity for self development. At the very least, learning to play the games without getting repetitive stress injuries would be a mild physical accomplishment for GGPP.
I know people who replaced drug addiction with video game addiction. It's impossible to know how things would have gone if they didn't get involved with one or the other, but I wonder if some people are vulnerable to addiction through a combination of biology and life experiences, and it's just a matter of which thing they become addicted to.
If that's the case, video games are probably one of the most benign things that a person can get attached to. Not harmless overall, just less harmful than some other options like certain drugs. A little more harmful with micro transactions. But a lot of games offer a social network as well, which might help in development of self-awareness.
I just don't want to say that people are inevitably going to be addicted to justify monetizing addiction, but the fact that relatively harmless addictive products are available might serve a purpose.
Player Vs Player games are unique. They're designed around making players constantly navigate a shifting metagame, fighting each other to generate content out of the existing field.
It's sort of a recipe for unhappiness, as the entire system devolves into, "Who can find the most abusively unfair strategy first, and then exploit it." Since most of these games simply cannot have the time devoted to them to make them "balanced" at the breakneck pace the market demands, they never really achieve equilibrium and reward only the most heavily invested.
> "Who can find the most abusively unfair strategy first, and then exploit it."
I'm not sure I agree with this. "Finding" the best strategy rewards you for a week at most, until the community absorbs the strategy. Then you're no farther than the people you were beating last week.
Most games have co-opted the word "metagame" to describe this phenomenon. Someone discovers an effective strategy, it becomes the metagame, and competitive play revolves around polishing understanding and execution as it pertains to the metagame.
Imbalanced games tend to self-balance at higher levels - all the crap that doesn't work just disappears from high-level players' playbooks (except occasionally as surprise gimmicks).
> I'm not sure I agree with this. "Finding" the best strategy rewards you for a week at most, until the community absorbs the strategy. Then you're no farther than the people you were beating last week.
In most cases I experienced, exploitative strategies are only slightly improved, and require a fair amount of skill (usually games hotpatch outrageous exploits quickly). The people who find it worse train to use it first, and keep their advantage.
I mean... You said it yourself:
> Most games have co-opted the word "metagame" to describe this phenomenon. Someone discovers an effective strategy, it becomes the metagame, and competitive play revolves around polishing understanding and execution as it pertains to the metagame.
The "shifting meta" is exactly what game designers of big competitive games want, because it requires ongoing engagement to maintain mastery. A chess player may be rusty after a year off, but the game doesn't fundamentally change. Someone playing League or Overwatch cannot say the same as balance has substantially changed.
> Imbalanced games tend to self-balance at higher levels - all the crap that doesn't work just disappears from high-level players' playbooks (except occasionally as surprise gimmicks).
I've been part of the "highest levels" of two competitive gaming communities now, and I can tell you they do NOT self-balance in my experience. And it was incredibly frustrating to watch the rules change deliberately to break up our strategies, even though what we were doing was simply a function of understanding and practice.
Very few pvp games ever "balance out." That's why they have "shifting metas." Indeed, many gamers claim prefer this because they claim it makes it easier for new players to enter into the higher brackets against more experienced players. But really what it does is create a treadmill you can reach the front or back of.
Maybe some people want that treadmill. I am not sure I do.
I played Action Quake 2 that way, for about a year. I was in a clan, all of that nonsense, and you're absolutely right. We literally spent hours training each other various tricks we'd found, virtually all of which exploited the geometry of a map, or strafe-running/jumping. We were at a level filled with young, skilled players... we wanted an edge.
It's exactly the same in sports... at least swimming and fencing, in my experience. In both cases (as with games) I realized that the fanaticism and total dedication required wasn't for me. I still enjoy games, I still enjoy swimming and fencing, but I'm done with the treadmill... it's only for the very young, or athletes of some description.
I'd argue this isn't unique to esports - Formula One has a similar thing happening - the teams develop new technology to make cars get round the track faster, and then the organisation decides if they fit within the rules. The rules change over time.
DOTA2 does this better than most - most strategies are accepted as a part of the game - in fact, a lot of things core to play now began life as those kind of exploits (pulling your lane creeps into neutral camps to deny enemies experience and allow you to farm the neutrals easily, for example). The game is balanced around those things, even if they were unintended.
Sure, the game is regularly patched, but the solution is very rarely to directly make something not viable any more - at most it will make it even by buffing other options or reducing it's viability (but not removing it).
The draft with bans also allows teams to deny the enemy team access to certain strategies, which means teams can't focus on one strategy, which is nice.
> I'd argue this isn't unique to esports - Formula One has a similar thing happening - the teams develop new technology to make cars get round the track faster, and then the organisation decides if they fit within the rules. The rules change over time.
The big difference is that the advances in F1 car design and even driving is that they can have some relevance in the outside world, in totally unrelated fields to race cars. It's very rare that experience in a video game leads to new engineering efficiency breakthroughs, materials science, etc. It sometimes happens that we see interesting models in economics emerge (EVE stands out here), but I'd say its rarer for sure.
Sure, but that isn't the reason people are Formula 1 drivers or why they watch it, it's just a reason so much money can go into the sport.
I was more talking about how I don't think that (shifting rules as strategies develop) is a dealbreaker when it comes to audience enjoyment or player investment.
A perfectly balanced game would be impossible to create, given strategy X compared to strategy Y, X will always seem abusive, but then strategy Z might seem abusive to X, to which Y seems abusive, etc.
It's a bit like rock-paper-scissors, if someone starts using paper, stop using your rock and replace it with a scissor.
Constantly changing balance patches from the game developers also become a treadmill and can feel even worse than trying to keep up with shifting strategies from opponents. Consider character X has your favorite ability Y which you know how to use very well. You take a 2 month break and come back to the game which has been patched in the meantime. In the middle of a critical fight you try to use ability Y only to discover it only does half the damage you are used to. That is not very rewarding for all the time you invested in practicing Y.
At the time it's kindof fun when the developers throw in a bone to cause some disruption in the strategies, as long as it doesn't happen all the time.
> A perfectly balanced game would be impossible to create, given strategy X compared to strategy Y, X will always seem abusive, but then strategy Z might seem abusive to X, to which Y seems abusive, etc.
I'm sorry, but within a reasonable margin of fairness you're just not right.
> It's a bit like rock-paper-scissors, if someone starts using paper, stop using your rock and replace it with a scissor.
Usually what happens is a grenade is revealed into the RPS dynamic and everyone has to concentrate on the grenade or very specific strategies to counter the grenade. The entire game ends up revolving around a combination that has an elevated winrate unless specifically countered.
This has happened in the international a year or two ago, it happened in League, it happened even in little spaces like Fractured Space, it happened during the overwatch beta (haven't been keeping up since launch). It happened in smash wii (oh god pre-patch Luigis were everywhere and you had to have specific options ready just for them).
And it's worth noting it's a negative feedback loop: games struggle to keep engagement (because the market is flooded), so the game companies flood their games with new content. This content can almost never be brought into perfect balance with the game dynamics as is, so they redefine it. This is viewed as "an active game" and gamers are taught they should prefer "active" games.
For PvE games, this is usually fine (inasmuch as the only people affected are the diehard super-optimizers). For PvP, this redefines the game and invalidates the meta everyone has to play.
Kids or other all-time-consuming life-changing events. It's why the core of the "idle hands are devil's work" moral - excessive gaming could be considered a vice.
When I played DAoC at a crazy level, I left just by quitting one day (it ruined a great long term relationship which prompted me to quit). I gave my account to someone and that was it. I had weird feelings about what to do at home for awhile, so I started power lifting. Then I went back to grad school. My problem is that I don't do idle well at all, so I need productive things to do.
In order to spend vast amounts of time playing video games you have to be at a certain level of privilege. I feel as if video games have cheated myself out of potential as well as those that my privilege obligates to help.
As with other addictions there are people who won't be consumed by it like I was, and prohibition isn't the solution, not sure what is tbh.