I was wrong about quitting video games: go ahead, ruin your life.

all right we're gonna be talking about
world of warcraft classic and as these things go i've gotta lay down my bonafides i have been playing world of warcraft since launch i have been playing world of warcraft a lot since launch i have been playing world of warcraft a lot since launch i have the ivory raptor which involved farming of 1000 gold within the first six months the game was out and i did that in like three a few years ago blizzard sent me this nice little statuette commemorating 10 years of unbroken subscription to the game which means that this is a cute little gesture from a company that made a game i really like but also kind of yikes i have my brawler's guild rewards mage tower rewards swift flight form and even the absurd realm first illustrious jewel crafter why did i get this why did why did i do what needed to be done to get this point is yes i have played a lot of world of warcraft [Music] [Applause] [Music] and in this video i want to talk about youtuber isil mazzard's opinions on video games and why you should quit them he's also known as but i don't want to try to pronounce that at all most people in this audience they know what it's like to stay up till 2 a.m playing a video game and they may know what it's like to stay until 6 a.m or to find their their room like this is this is common this is widespread not everyone can research the cure for cancer not everyone can live a life as exciting as mine i went to cambodia and did humanitarian work i did research you know my life is interesting in different ways i get that but like my perspective is you still matter i still care about you i still care about what you could be doing productively with those three hours a day i don't accept the notion that you have zero creativity zero potential whether that's politically or otherwise to make the world a better place zero artistic potential whatever i really believe that you can do something better with those three hours a day and if you don't believe it what do you think of yourself so he says you can do something better with those three hours a day but why does everything you have to do have to be the best possible thing that you could do at any given moment like the amount of stress that would put on your life and how much it would affect your health in the long term we are not perfectionists or we shouldn't be because there is no perfect so instead we should just aim high and that's where balance comes in now i can get his perspective here if people are spending too much time playing video games they're probably not learning about a lot of things they could be they're not doing stuff that could potentially help them make the world a better place which let's be honest we do need more people who are actively trying to make the world a better place because most people are just you know leeching off of the planet and don't care at the same time we all need activities to de-stress to be our best you need to reduce stress to be most effective in anything you're doing video games are a source of creativity inspiration it's a piece of art that you're dealing with especially if you're dealing with the best video games and people who don't play video games or like them very much might not agree with that but i can tell you for those of us who have really fallen in love with any video game that we've played at least a few of them we can tell you that those experiences were tremendously worthwhile it made me fee it makes me feel good it's not enough i can i can literally say with you so for example most of my friends in vietnam they are now living a life that you know um yo go go to work go to school go to uni and then go back home do whatever they like you know like playing games shopping going to the property and um do all kind of stuff watching movies netflix you know i'm at the back of my mind when i do those things when i'm playing games when i watch netflix you know i love the strength of things to be honest i love stranger things that episode is amazing i really want to watch it every day but whenever i watch it i just keep asking myself i'm not asking you know i'm not intentionally asking myself but somehow my subconscious mind giving the warning it keeps it keeps giving the warnings that hey bro hey bro hey hey what about you what you know why are you doing this what are what are the you know the you know you know the when playing games the the experience bar right experience bar all right so it's like i'm i'm i'm at level one i have to gain experience step by step stone by stone to to reach um enough uh you know experience one two to get into the the level two the level two and then keep going keep going and i'm actually you know um gotten to the level three and four and five and level six and the more experience i got you know the the the the the you know the higher level i got all right so i'm keep thinking in that way that's that's not bad an analogy so i'm keep thinking in that way and then thinking man why you keep watching netflix when you give playing games when you keep hanging out with friends that don't even matter to your future to your life and you even like when you hang out just just don't say anything like meaningful just just hop on the phone and go into the facebook on social friends when when when we are social like socializing that's that's crazy right so i'm just thinking that man i feel i feel that kind of feeling really guilty feeling when when i'm doing the thing that i like but it's not giving me the the results that all the the the goals the achievement that i want on this subject i don't completely agree you know i believe in moderation like balance anybody who has achieved a ton in their lifetime will tell you i'm sure that balance was incredibly important for them you know i i can't you know i can literally a little literally play games for five years watch next week for five years and look at the result i got nothing but instead of doing that i expand my my but because i know the way that the only way that get getting me better is is to constantly every single day 15 minutes 20 minutes 45 minutes put myself into books put myself into the audios put myself into you know talking with strangers and go go go to the internet read about the business the all kind of things the self development so here we learn that apparently it's the quantity of time that makes isil think that you should quit video games well you know what you can manage your time and play games in moderation and maybe it's not 12 hours a year but maybe it is for someone like me at least also i understand where he's coming from here to an extent like you don't want to waste too much time playing video games and i do think that the message to play less is actually a good message and i used to be addicted to video games when i was younger for sure and i still love video games but you know i don't play them that much i wasn't playing them hardly at all for like a decade and i got back into them with a final fantasy 7 remake and the upcoming call of duty is a lot of fun to play maybe like 50 to 100 hours that seems to be reasonable this is the part of the equation where even the most honest interlocutors seem to become very evasive uncomfortable and strained in their replies do you notice how many edits he had in that short clip before he suggests 50 hours per year i did not add those edits maybe like 50 to 100 hours that seems to be reasonable 50 hours per year 50 hours per year playing video games that would be four hours per month do you believe that this guy plays video games for only four hours per month the two games he mentioned one of them takes 40 hours to complete it's a plot-based role-playing game do you think he played for one hour a week only do you think he spread out those 40 hours over a whole year i don't the other game you mentioned call of duty people pour huge numbers of hours into that game i don't know how many hours this guy plays i think he doesn't know i think he doesn't know how many hours he's really spending playing video games because he doesn't want to know even the upper limit estimate he gives which again he seems to struggle to come up with a suggestion of 100 hours oh right so that would be that'd be a little bit more than eight hours per month right there are four weeks in a month think about how much time that would be per week think about whether or not that's really been true of you at any stage of your life when you play video games think about whether or not that's true about your brothers your cousins your friends your colleagues when they played video games was it really was it really eight hours a month and he talks about how he doesn't think he has a gym habit but actually i've heard him in past videos mentioned that he thought that he spent too much time working out so he is really focused on getting the most out of his time which is great but that isn't a necessity give yourself the time to do what you want to do because that is what makes it life valuable and i suppose my point is more fundamentally no matter what the real answer happens to be no matter how the math turns out if you have the self-discipline to really write it down and face the facts isn't it significant that so many of us struggle to be honest about this that it's so hard to face up to it and look guys it's not just video games all right i do have regrets about how much time i spend lifting weights in the gym ultimately 10 years from now or 20 years from now it's not going to matter how many push-ups i did this week and in some sense if i finish writing another chapter of the book i'm writing or if i finish recording and uploading this video and it changes just a few hundred people's lives in a sense that does matter in a sense both what i can learn and what i can teach others really matters in a way that doing more push-ups or bench pressing more weight can never matter at all and of course the comparison between exercise and video games really they're not comparable at all but you know i have a little orange book and i write down in it how many hours i spend studying the chinese language and it's sad you know it's sad to behold it's sometimes it's sad because i feel that i've worked so hard but really when you see the numbers written down on the page it's not that many hours and sometimes it's sad because i look at the page and it's so many hours it's so many hours of my life taken up by the study of this language where i can't really know what positive outcomes will come from where i can't really know if it'll matter if i'll really be able to learn anything if i'll be able to teach anything else it'll be part of my personal progress or if instead this is something that is holding me back sure for all of us a great deal of soul searching is in order but no i i just don't think that any of these excuses for playing video games make sense i don't think any of us has 50 hours 100 hours 200 hours 300 hours to spare and when you do the math if you can with detachment look at the numbers i think you might be a little bit saddened to realize how much of your life you've lost to video games so yeah it's a topic very much worth examining and i don't completely agree with isil on that but i do think that he's an intellectually honest guy most the time so in that respect it would be great to talk to him about it more on discord or on youtube but if not just take this opinion for what it's worth and do with your time which you think is best when you're really thinking about it and considering it this guy has the honesty to say that when he was younger he was a video game addict and i appreciate his honesty just hearing the sound of his voice talking about this guy in the purple mario brothers t-shirt you know he doesn't sound like a well-educated man he doesn't sound like an intelligent man let me tell you something there was a time when i didn't sound the way i sound either i can remember being a teenager not just my first year in university my first day in university and people thought i was in my 30s just based on my manner of speaking i really didn't look that old i remember a guy he was a professor at the university but his hobby was being a handwriting expert and he saw my handwriting before he met me and he said he had determined that my minimum age was that i was in my mid 50s based on my handwriting let me tell you something the contrast isn't just between me and this guy and the purple t-shirt i have a lot of brothers and sisters okay my brothers grew up obviously in the same culture i grew up with they don't sound like me they don't talk like me because they don't live like me all right the decisions this guy made in the past and the decisions he's making right now to play video games they have shaped the man he became and look when i was his age i was really a lot more rough around the edges could go into a long discourse now about how different i am now at age 42 from how i was at sage 22 but guess what you know the contrast between the man he is at his current age and the man i was at that age it runs really deep and you may not realize what it is you're sacrificing by making the choice to spend all those hours playing video games but what you're sacrificing is precisely the man you you could have become my perspective is you still matter i still care about you i don't accept the notion that you have zero creativity zero potential whether that's politically or otherwise to make the world a better place zero artistic potential whatever i really believe that you can do something better with those three hours a day and if you don't believe it what do you think of yourself your intellectual potential is something i can't know and it's something you can't know either but the one thing we can be certain about is that you're snuffing it out by playing video games [Music]