Quit Video Games: COUNT THE HOURS.

I challenge people say if you think the
number of hours that's acceptable per week for playing video games is greater than zero what is that number because I think the truth is if we can just be honest with ourselves it's you're gonna make me say one hour you're gonna maybe say two hours like over the whole week but that is about it the math doesn't go much higher than that without this being a real source of regret and remorse if I could actually focus and sit down and play the games that I bought I could get through a few 80 hour games a year with the free time most people most people work like eight hours a day nine hours they get homeless eight hours you cannot be gaming more than four hours a night at most at most are you kidding and getting this lit and getting up for your job and next morning people do it they do five six hours a night yeah what are they what are they on speed like her lifestyle gamers man all right six times for 24 hours and then each week and they're doing point ten hours a day then they're living life on microwavable soup and mountain dew whatever that's why we can universal health care there it is we changed priorities as we get older we don't have time to sit home anymore and just play tons of games like by making these games at people before I don't know oh my god it's gonna take me a hundred hours to complete this you you are turning some people off I think at the same time you know some people might just want a shorter game as you'd have a vocal minority I want to play game 450 hours well most people don't you know I have a regular customer who I'd mentioned this stuff before but it's on my mind because I have this regular customer who came in yesterday he was just saying that you know he was talking on how there are certain games that he likes but he can only play them on weekends because he gets home from work and he's tired and you know by the time he starts these games dragged so much out that it doesn't feel like you can ever really get a meaningful one-hour play session in of some of these titles is really doing anything it doesn't feel like you did anything because everything just takes so long yeah I just yeah you know like you can't really you can't really throw on fallout you know fallout 4 especially if you've never played it before and play for an hour and feel like you've really done anything for any merit yeah it's weird I just looked up I'm trying to compare to something like like books because books can take a lot of time to get through there's no book that takes 30 hours to read I don't think I looked up one of my favorite books that's all big book I think it's 700 pages or so great expectations classic Dickens I love that there's there's a website gets that tracks how long it takes to read it takes six hours and 22 minutes to read great expectations and that's a long book that's a long quality book with no filler sure yes it's not interactive like video games I get that but I'm just trying to compare different mediums with each other it'd be like no one would say wow I wish great vacations took 12 hours to read no one does that with breaks are there are there that many people there can that can buy multiple 80 hour games in a year and not be phased by them and just be like alright I'm fine there are and I mean they have jobs I mean are they kids there's nothing wrong with stating your ethical claims in such simple terms as good and bad I think actually there's a kind of cowardice very often when people refuse to state the claims they're making that simply that honestly that directly but it's also often important for us to challenge ourselves to calibrate what we mean by good and bad because most likely if we try to put a number to it if we try to put a quantity to it it's neither gonna be zero nor is it going to be a hundred we get into some interesting questions of what good and bad really means in practice now an example that might seem surprising to some of you would be learning a foreign language if you tell people that you're learning French if you tell people that you're learning Chinese if you tell people that you're learning Japanese if you tell people that you're learning Sanskrit any sort of challenging foreign language they're very likely to say to you that's good people think it's good and wonderful to learn or study a foreign language whether that's as a hobby or as a job or as a course of education you're paying money for and in some capacity you're paying to take lessons you're paying a teacher people just say that's good that's positive and the vast majority of people do not question what good even means that this context and they don't question the opportunity cost right opportunity cost is a technical term in economics they don't question what you could be doing with that time that you're not doing because you're studying that language so if you just changed a little bit if someone says to you they've decided to start learning Chinese you say oh that's good that's one of them then they say to you yeah they've got a they've got a two-year-old daughter and they never see their their daughter because they're so busy studying Chinese say oh yeah I'm stunned Chinese forty hours a week so I barely see my kid all of a sudden you think wait a minute maybe that's not good maybe that's bad if someone tells you oh yeah they're learning Chinese like oh yeah it takes so many hours it's so much hard work I'm failing my classes at school you know they're studying some other topic they're studying chemistry yeah I'm neglecting my my classes at school because I'm studying Chinese oh yeah you know I'm almost getting fired from my job and providing more professional I've got some study chains well guess what you know it takes hours and hours and hours to study Chinese it's a huge commitment it's a huge sacrifice and the fact is there is something else you're sacrificing there's something else you're not doing in order to learn Chinese and already the question of what good means it starts to take on a different meaning if you think okay so if you think learning Chinese is good is it good for two hours a week is it good for 10 hours a week is it good for 20 hours a week it's a good for 40 hours a week and in case you hadn't guessed these are questions I've had to ask myself my life there may also be implicit assumptions about about this this simple word good that are linked to the outcomes right like the assumption is after five years you're gonna be completely fluent in Chinese or maybe even there's an assumption of a particular career or a particular university degree a particular credential you're gonna get after five years working in the language certainly and what if you don't get those outcomes what if that assumption what if that optimism was false that you work for five years you don't get that outcome so again real quick example it's easy for people to say writing a novel is good many people encourage me to write a novel because they've they've read my writing and they've seen my YouTube videos they know the kind of stories I can tell and they know I'm good at writing they don't good at telling these stories they're interested in my type of content okay if you think writing a novel is good we could repeat all the things I just said that you know well how many hours a day is it good for and what about the other things I'll be sacrificing like maybe I won't have time to make these YouTube videos because I'm writing this novel we have all those considerations maybe I'm neglecting my responsibilities as a parent as a student as an employee to write this novel but then what what did you assume about the outcomes the results when the novel was finished right like did you assume it would sell a million copies did you assume would sell 10,000 copies the vast majority of authors who are published in the year 2020 they don't even reach as many viewers as this YouTube video will reach alright yeah I used to work in the publishing industry we published really interesting really important original books that would sell 500 copies in their total lifetime so 500 copies in 10 or 20 years right in the first year some of them would sell 20 copies would just be a few specialized libraries or something these are important original books by the way you know really meaningful stuff so the life of an author if you're evaluating in terms of its outcomes and now to just switch very briefly to example something bad something that's perceived as bad you guys probably know I'm generally a pretty sex positive person and it used to be whether I did live streams or Q&A sessions people would ask me for my kind of moral position on pornography and it often kind of say look you know what's what's the big deal like come on men want to look at pictures of beautiful women women want to look at pictures of beautiful men like this is part of life like can't we just kind of have a relaxed attitude and then sometimes people would write back to me and they'd talk about cases of pornography addiction or you know people they know in their lives and they write back it said well you think it's no problem but what if it's four hours a day what if it's a fee for four hours a day and I've got it okay so now we're calibrating it now we're putting a quantity now we're putting an amount of time to it and that that didn't even occur to me because I assume I completely utterly assume we're talking about like five minutes a day like maximum maximum 30 minutes a day but I think most heterosexual men would find it really boring for more than 10 or 15 minutes to look at you know this kind of thing okay but I don't even know I don't know the percentage I the statistics they probably exist out there out there somewhere but this is not even engrossing in the way that watching uh watching the news is increasing I mean I'm interested in political news I spent a fair bit of time watching and listening to the news so to me those things just aren't comparable that's not conceivable that's not even a problem I would imagine if you're asking me about pornography cuz I don't even calibrate the problem that way okay um so we're talking about video games yes I can make a simple statement video games are bad and I think I think it is cowardly when people refuse to say that playing video games is a bad thing to do but it's also important to look past the simple adjective and ask what are our assumptions what are our assertions on either side about what bad really means when you put a number to it when you quantify it I have to tell you I don't think of myself as an extremist on this issue I think of myself as a moderate because I've said repeatedly I'm willing to admit there's some quantity of video games that's so low and we could even say there's some quality of video games that's so low that they won't negatively affect your your life in these ways there was a time when I played the original black and white space invaders while I was exporting and transferring files between my two computer it's not worth describing the situation but that would take kind of three minutes and would be annoying and I had this copy of it's really primitive really simple game space invaders I don't play it for a couple of minutes while I was doing this technical tasks I had to wait for the computer to the computer action no I still don't think that's good I think it would been more meaningful and more useful even I just sat there and stared at the wall and thought about my life or thought about what I'm gonna do today for three minutes I think that's more positive but this is this is qualitatively such a simple or primitive video game and also quantitatively it's so little time I'm willing to concede this the qualitative element I normally don't talk about in this channel but I admit now a video game I would be interested in playing still to this day you can guess how I remember this game there was a game I never played called Gemma fighter who was also marketed under the name Pocket fighter and it's actually a parody of other video games it's very simple it's very primitive just like what I said before about pornography I cannot imagine playing this game for even 30 minutes I would probably play this for five minutes or three minutes at a time or ever it's incredibly simple it's incredibly primitive there is a qualitative dimension we could look at something like this and say well this is not equivalent to playing Skyrim this is not equivalent to playing any of the first-person shooter games that people find it so addictive and this is not equivalent to playing Starcraft world of warcraft final fantasy these these current immersive there's a little bit of a dimension there for talking about the simplicity versus the sophistication games but then as we all know the most important quantity is time I think if you're really being honest with yourself if you just think about three hours a week you can say this is too much this is something bad and wrong I would regret no matter what the game is and no matter what the circumstances are in my own life so if you think it out of a seven-day week if there was one day of that week there was a Saturday where you sat down and played a videogame for three hours I think you would look back at that and regret it I think you look back and then that Wow I could have done something better with those three hours and I think that even if the three hours are spread out you know over three days or whatever it is there was one hour a day for three days I think if you're just being honest with yourself you can look at that and say this is something bad and wrong I regret I could have done something better I wish I'd done something better even if you had spent those three hours listening to the news I mean we don't have to compare this to something tremendously positive in your life it could just be something like that you're learning a little bit about what's going on in in politics but again I think of myself as a moderate when I challenge people who will just last few days and be coming out to me and saying that they think they think it's acceptable to play some quantity of some video games and they think they can still lead a meaningful life and a positive life and have all these aspirations and do these good things that what I say back to them is not no no the quantity must be zero I challenge them to imagine what that quantity really would be we all have different responsibilities wives I have fewer responsibilities than most I could play a game like gem fighter just use this example it's a game that somewhat interests me partly because it's a parody of other games I could play that game for three hours today I don't have a job unless you count YouTube I don't have a lot of other responsibilities oh and by the way this particular game is so simple or so crude it's not gonna have any emotional effect on me I'm not gonna dream about this game it's not gonna you know it's not gonna make me feel excited and it's not gonna make me feel sad and it's not gonna make me feel angry if I lose I'm just not gonna care about this game on any level if I play it for three hours but you know if I did that I would be thinking about a whole lot of little things I really should have done with that time even just things I should have google-searched trig that time there's some there's some google searching I have to do for my lawyer some things I have to look into for my ongoing legal case there's some things I have to Google search about education I'm looking at other universities I could enroll in and career path there are some things just on a brainstorming level I could have done with those three productive hours in my life let alone you know alternatives like studying Chinese there's a lot of productive things that could have dumped those hours I would really regret spending those three hours this way even if there were no other considerations and so I challenge people say if you think the number of hours that's acceptable per week for playing video games is greater than zero what is that number because I think the truth is if we can just be honest with ourselves it's you're gonna maybe say one hour you're gonna maybe say two hours like over the whole week but that is about it the math doesn't go much higher than that without this being a real source of regret and remorse you know finally I just want to say I consider myself a moderate when there were people who talk to me who are more extreme in their opposition to video games they have arguments I can't refute like I think the people who are more extreme than I am I think they're correct and I can't argue anything in favor of my moderate position so I've mentioned that I felt it was appropriate and good to provide my daughter with video games during a train journey when she was stuck sitting in this seat for several hours all she can do is sit there look at the window you can't really play you can't do much and we also provided her with pencil crayons and markers and drawing and coloring we actually did a lot of stuff with her during that train journey I'm not gonna list it all so we weren't we weren't completely passive parents my girlfriend Melissa and I we actually we will really engage with her and even when she was playing the game we were talking with her and we were really involved so I just said we were very much present in our life and we were enjoying her company while she was playing the game and we had lots of other activity however there are people who got in touched me and said to me note that I'm wrong that really the right thing to as a parent would be to refuse to provide the kid with video games even if you're stuck on a train that really good parenting would be for the kid to have the experience of being bored on a train of staring at the window would be to having the experience for the kid of the kid trying to amuse herself and trying to amuse us and pass the time and do these other activities which we did have that actually gets bad and wrong and it's lazy or bad parenting I mean even to provide a video game for those few hours when she's stuck on a train for a long train journey I think that's a strong argument but I can't say that I'm right and they're wrong I can just say that I'm being moderate that I'm making a compromise that it seems reasonable to me even though you know what the UH the other side it seems to me they're they're right I think the other side who insists that it absolutely has to be zero zero hours per week not one hour two hours I think in some ways they have a powerful argument when I was a kid I played a video game with no graphics at all give you a screen shot here it's called nethack it's part of the roguelike series of games so if you google for this roguelike it's probably what you want to one of Google I had dreams about this video game I had dreams in this video game were like when I was dreaming I saw the world as if Ellison said this game not many times a couple of times I had that experience so if you think it's only super immersive you know video games with wonderful graphics and wonderful sound effects and this social element of massively multiplayer online if you think it's only those games that can really dig into your brain that can really affect you or that it's only games that you play for like 10 hours at a stretch you can guess this isn't a game you play for that many hours if you think those are the only games that can really get you can really change your life in this way you're wrong the the simple and crude games that I played as a kid they screwed me up they damaged me they to be blunt they've ruined my childhood in a lot of ways and I know even if the games with more immersive graphics and storylines and the social element of online play and the gambling element to the element of you know loot boxes and paying money and getting they're all these ways in which video games today are worse but I have to admit from my own experience the simplest and crudest video games already they are bad and I can't make an argument that just two hours a week is ok because I know it's possible for it to be 2 hours a week especially when you're a kid and still in your mind like your life is revolving around that illusory of their world that's still maybe those 2 hours a week may be emotionally for you that's the highlight of your life which is really sad and tragic but for a lot of people it's not that the game is something so great it's that they have nothing else positively going on we all have to be aware of the trap of being moderate just for the sake of being moderate of compromising just because we think compromise itself is some kind of wonderful moral cause when you talk to Frenchmen when you talk to the French they all believe they're living a moderate balanced lifestyle they think they're practicing moderation in everything when they wake up in the morning and start eating pork for breakfast hey beef for lunch they lamb for dinner and they'll tell you they'll tell you they barely eat any meat at all that they have a moderate lifestyle of balanced nature they will tell you with no irony that they barely drink at all right and you if you get to know some French people there they're drinking serious amounts of alcohol like five days a week and they think that's moderate they think that's balance and if you say to them hey I think you should quit eating meat I think you should quit drinking alcohol they'll say back to you dead serious that they believe in moderation and everything so how can you have to quit moderation is not an end in itself compromise is not in itself in this sense being reasonable is not in itself because when you say being reasonable all you're talking about is accommodating something that's bad and evil and wrong when you come to the conclusion that playing video games is bad as simple as the phrasing maybe that doesn't mean and that doesn't require that you know something better than video games that you could do the u.s. you have something better in your life to replace it with if you come to the conclusion that eating pork eating meat is bad and evil and wrong you may not have all the answers you may not have a better diet in mind you may not have a better philosophy in mind or what have you there may not be something positive replaced with but just recognizing that this is bad that this is something you want to eliminate for your life that's going to be the beginning of asking a set of questions really uncomfortable questions that'll lead you to a more meaningful life and it won't be the same as my idea of what a meaningful life is or must be right you're gonna ask those questions and with time you're gonna come to your own set of answers