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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, conclusory and flip answers like this strongly make me suspect that there is some truth to it. It's worth discussing beyond "Let people do whatever they want."

There is very little harm in considering this question open-mindedly, and yet the defensiveness is so reflexively strong -- even as a bunch of the people who play them will very frequently themselves step back and joke about how much time some of these suck out of their lives.

So yes, we actually SHOULD encourage people to reexamine their patterns and consider if some (not all, some) of these hours could be put to a different or better use.

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You're so right. It's extremely strange how most replies here and on reddit take the "100% it's not a problem" stance. The real answer would require actually doing surveys of

1) the value, learning, and art generated by games 2) the cost, judged according to each individual player's own value system.

And then weighing the strength of each effect. Note that I am judging according to the individual's values, not my own. Example: the rate at which people say "I wish I could stop playing game X" or the rate they suffer regret after a play session, or a year after quitting playing. I personally am really glad I found factorio, but not very happy about my time playing diablo 2.

Surely there are hypothetical examples of games which could be created, or addictions conscious beings could be vulnerable to, which would force defenders of freedom to admit that it's at least conceivable that there are situations where "bad" things exist, which we'd be better off without. Not saying we are in that state now, or what we should do if it happened. Just pointing out that acting as if there are no costs at all isn't addressing the opponent's position, even though we know there are lots of people who claim otherwise.

It could be a huge problem and the correct response is still and always an immediate "let people do what they want".

If you want to educate people on alternatives, or offer treatment systems, or whatever, that's fine. But ultimately and finally you need to let people do what they want. Anything else is a consent violation.

A technically correct one, but perhaps not a useful one.

There is no inherent incompatibility between "very strongly challenging peoples' ideas and practices" and "violating consent."

In general, people get extremely defensive when it comes to entertainment, shown in its mildest forms with arguments about which movie is better, which band has the AOTY, to how well these things intertwine with politics (like adding fire to fire), and its more extreme forms on the debate about whether video games cause violence or porn causes sexist attitudes. Part of this is likely the fact that it feels really good to play video games and watch porn (and I say this as someone who does both) - perhaps more than food. People just don't want to hear criticism, because it sets their mind into cognitive dissonance mode.

A question worth asking is what a 'better use' is to that person and to what extent (and why) that differs from your idea of a 'better use'. For example, I personally don't think chess is much better than a game like Starcraft or Factorio. I don't think billiards is any better than chess. I don't think English literature is better than philosophy. I don't think science is as good as maths.

Not everyone wants to be an intellectual; many people (due to other factors in life) can barely find the time to care enough (with either depression or work sapping thir creative energies). "Reexamining patterns" is good. Saying that someone is a bad person (in a moral sense, as some have done) is not. It doesn't take into account individual situations. Philosophers have argued we 'should' reexamine all kinds of things, from our political conceptions to who we decide to date.

>and yet the defensiveness is so reflexively strong

It's hard not to get defensive because this reddit post is basically flamebait:

>use of words like sapping and deadend

>"there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity"

Like you said we can probably discuss this question without getting defensive but it's impossible thanks to the way it's worded.

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