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I always knew there were more worthwhile pursuits and that's why, in hindsight, I struggle to accept the time I spent playing. But I never felt like it was downtime.

I knew I was building skills that I would use again someday. It wasn't about trying to be the best at shooting a gun in a virtual world. It was about outthinking and outmaneuvering my opponent. Analyzing details and figuring out the best strategy.

It was never about my score, it was about how well my team did. CS taught me a lot about working with other people. Managing and recruiting talent, motivating people, and keeping everybody happy.

Besides, learning about the importance of commitment to excellence is something that can be learned in a lot of places, as you demonstrate. It's a lesson that's lost on most people. Don't struggle to accept the time spent on CS; embrace it, become one with it. Enough other people will denigrate you for it, so there's no need for you to do it as well.

And, when the zombie apocalypse comes, at least you know how to clear a room better than the next guy, I'll wager!

I believe the single most important thing I've learned from playing competitive online games is how to manage the morale of a group. When you have 30-minute experiments, mostly self-contained, it's amazing how easy it is to see how one denigrating comment can ruin a whole match because it ruins the teams cohesion and teamwork. A few well-placed bits of praise, a little humility, and a little leadership will trump raw skill most of the time.

It's a lesson I'm glad I've learned, and now I can use online games as a way to practice.

Getting involved in clan gaming certainly takes things to a whole new level. I remember trying to organize teams and enter various leagues as well as playing friendlies against other clans.

Not only that but you have to manage a geographically dispersed set of people over the Internet who have their own schedules and priorities. Some of the politics got very heated and of course you would always get somebody who was an incredible played but would always drop out of playing matches at the last minute or would find some minutiae to throw their toys out of the pram over.

Still an excellent lesson in management though, as well as having to plan tactics and be able to change these on the fly as the other team adapted to them and trying to close the gap when your team is losing and you cannot afford the weapon setup that you have based your strategy around. Very satisfying getting 3 frags in 1 clip with the USP and winning the round for your team :)

I do remember the public servers being utter every man for himself bedlam though, not to mention being accused of cheating when you are 30 kills to 1 death.

Would you say the same thing about chess, which is arguably just as useless? Just wondering if it is mostly public esteem that makes you think so (chess would presumably be held in higher esteem - being a grandmaster in chess would gather more respect in the general public than being a grandmaster in CSS).

I don't mean it in a bad way, just seriously wondering what are worthwhile things to pursue. Should we discard any and all recreational activities and concentrate every waking hour on researching cancer cures? Even music and art seem very questionable, at least it is not clear why they should be more worthy than playing games.

I don't think it's any more of a poor choice than spending time trying to be awesome at sports or music, or any other hobby. The real question is: does it make you happy?

Not everything in life needs to fulfill one of the questions you ask of a hobby - there are lots of things that people devote time and money to that won't make them money, get them laid, etc., and I don't think they're any more a waste of time than being a competitive gamer.

I'm not against playing games for short term happiness or pleasure. It just seems like a poor long term hobby , especially to focus so much on one game.

I don't think CS is the worst offender here though, It's worse when WOW gets patched and people complain about the patch making their character worse because they invested so much time in that character which can be so arbitrarily rendered worthless.

I think being good at sports or music is much more likely to get you laid and more likely to be a hobby that people will respect and you will be able to carry on throughout your life. There is also way more chance of making money and of course there are fitness benefits to sport.

I'm not ridiculing people who enjoy video games I just sort of look back and think "wow, why did I take that so seriously" and I know my other CS playing friends now think the same.

I don't find gaming a poor long term hobby, I see people who spend hours upon hours building model planes, only to crash it in a park.

If I never get published, my hobby of writing fiction is just as big a waste, if not more. At least playing CS or WoW gives me the chance of meeting someone to be friends with. With writing I'm generally disconnected and isolated, rather than connected and isolated.

Hobby's are entered into in full knowledge that you're wasting time. I don't see the point in replaying games (I worked as a movie/game reviewer, so I got into a healthy habit of seeing it as disposable entertainment), save for a few special ones like Grim Fandango.

> I think being good at sports or music is much more likely to get you laid and more likely to be a hobby that people will respect and you will be able to carry on throughout your life.

I don't think being good at sports is going to get you laid, I think being in excellent physical condition will get you laid. I think being good at sports means you're likely to have less free time to get laid, especially when you start avoiding drinking alcohol to perform better for saturday and sunday morning games.

Similarly I think being able to play guitar well might get you laid, I don't think spending your Saturdays in someones garage is going to help.

Sorry but you can't claim one hobby is superior to another, when by a hobby is a non-productive activity.

I'm sure many professional athletes have said "wow, why did I take that so seriously" when they're burnt out at 30, or took a bad tackle or fall and can never get back to performance level. I mean fuck, watch a series of Intervention and you'll see like 5 Olympic or Olympic qualifying athletes.

I know a girl who broke up with her bf just because he was training hockey too much. 5-6 times training per week and 1 match = No time for gf.

And when not training they are talking about hockey, watching hockey-games on tv or playing nhl on xbox.

I've heard that tale a thousand of times.

Successful men usually have wifes who support them in their hobbies/jobs/whatever, and vice-versa.

This is for me the meaning of 'Behind every great man there's a great woman'.

Our personal choice for a significant other should take this into account.

I don't know about you, but I don't choose my hobbies based on how likely they are to get me laid. And if people don't respect my hobbies, that's their problem, not mine. It's also a good indication of what kind of person they are.

Although as an aside, you do forget one significant downside to playing sports - injuries. This is especially the case if you play at all competitively. Also, are sports really a valid "long-term hobby"? You can probably only play most sports for so long... (barring golf/tennis/etc).

No, although as a teenager if you had suggested a hobby which I hated but promised that it would result in ladies throwing themselves at me I probably would have considered it :)

My point was more that being masterful at a sport (e.g playing professional or semi-pro football) or being a successful musician playing large gigs to cheering fans will get you more social status than being a counterstrike champion (although maybe korea is a counter example here).

I'm not suggesting that you should choose your hobbies based on this though! I try to choose hobbies based on a deeper sense of fulfillment which may be creative , exhilarating or just make me physically fitter. Whilst I still enjoy playing video games I never got any of these feelings of "real" achievement from it in the same way I would from writing a good program or running a marathon for example, so they are now in the "fun" category for me now rather than a serious hobby.

Of course there is a social aspect to many hobbies too and this is probably one of the things I enjoyed most about gaming (especially since it is easy to play with people all over the world and learn about different cultures).

I just feel if I had the chance to go back again I might have been more fulfilled learning to really shred on a guitar since this is a skill which would be more likely to stay relevant over time. When I play modern video games I can really only call on a very limited amount of my counterstrike skillz.

It's like looking at the starcraft players in korea complaining about starcraft2 making their well honed skills less useful simply because of a software update. The same thing happens with programming a little but I can still apply most of my Visual Basic and PHP techniques now to writing python or something.

Can't argue with that one (choosing hobbies as a teenager), although I have to admit that I became much more satisfied with my hobbies once I stopped caring about them from the point of view of other people.

Personally, I think putting time into music and sports are about as useful/useless as putting time into video games. For the most part, adults aren't going to be able to sink much time into their hobbies (certainly not enough to become world class) - most of my friends who did sink time into learning to shred on a guitar (and the like) don't really use those skills now. I spend most of my personal time playing sports, but other than the side effect of being rather fit, I don't think they are intrinsically any more fulfilling than spending a similar amount of time becoming just as good at competitive gaming.

Re: SC -> SC2 - not really a great analogy, considering how well professional SC players have adapted to SC2. They might complain about it, but there's actually a pretty high correlation between being good at SC and transferring that skill to SC2. (Not to mention that the few SC players that have switched to SC2 so far haven't been top-tier. I can't imagine how well the top-tier SC players would do at SC2 in comparison.) I don't think it's much different from pro athletes dealing with rules changes; NFL players might vociferously complain about it, but in the end, they're the best at what they do for a reason.

The choice is hardly one after 10,000 hours. Video games are addictive and satisfy short-term pleasure. My guess is that becoming awesome is sometimes just a matter of "addictiveness".

There's probably some correlation/causation in there - I imagine that you would tend to become "addicted" to things that you're naturally good at.

I think the case is that when you start playing a video game you don't start with the intention of playing it for 10000 hours, you just keep playing an realize you have invested so much time that you may as well keep playing and become the best.

Most people who trot out that "10,000 hours" figure don't remember the second part - it's 10,000 hours of _meaningful practice_. Being the best at something, including video games, isn't something that you just stumble into.

Would you say that about someone who enjoys sports as a hobby? You say "may as well keep playing and become the best" as if video games somehow involve less skill or practice to become the best at than other hobbies.

I think it is mostly that video games are generally designed around quick gratification compared to most other activities, they are not usually designed to be your primary hobby (at least 1 game on it's own is not). Throw a relative newbie into a first person shooter game and they will probably score their first kill in a matter of minutes, it just doesn't ask any long term commitment from you. I imagine very few people started out thinking they would become CS champions, more likely they found it addictive and played allot then at some point took it to the next level and joined a clan etc.

Contrast this with learning the guitar for example, first you have to buy $100+ of stuff that is only useful for that hobby. Then you will try and play some songs but most likely your going to have 10+ hours of practice under your belt doing boring stuff like learning chords and getting callouses on your fingers before you can reliably play even very basic rock songs at full speed. The learning curve then becomes very steep, especially if you want to learn complicated solos and techniques but once you have mastered it then it is a skill that is kept for life. It is very unlikely that a new instrument will come out which renders your guitar obsolete.

All of the people that I used to play counterstrike with no longer play it at all or only play very occasionally. Contrast this with the people I know who started playing guitar instead (investing a similar number of hours) at a similar age. Almost all of them are still playing and are now very proficient. They are playing gigs and writing/releasing their own music. A few have even made careers from it.

Single-player games may be built around that, but multiplayer games generally aren't. Have you ever seen a newbie get thrown into a multiplayer FPS game? Unless everyone else is at a similar skill level, the newbie often just gets destroyed. Heck, the difference between my friends and I at Halo isn't even that great, and I usually only wind up with a handful of kills at best! (It's arguable that I might just really suck at Halo, but it's not like my friends are that great either.)

That being said, I still fail to see how this is any different from playing sports, or any other hobby. You try something new, discover you like it, do it some more, get decent at it, and then decide to take it to the next level. I've never been that addicted to video games, but one could easily argue that my current hobbies have (obviously) been more addictive for me, since I've stuck with them to such an extent.

It is true that video games do age quickly, but it's not the case that your skills suddenly become obsolete. When the electric guitar came out, did that suddenly render classic guitar skills useless? It's the same with video games - many of the skills transfer over within the same game archetype. It's why you see the same people winning at different 2D fighting games over the years. Despite playing a completely new game, the bulk of your skills are still intact. Sure, the specialization is gone, but that's part of the appeal.

Yes, but how many of those CS players actually invested time into _meaningful practice_ at CS? No offense, but just being in a clan is kind of like being a club sports player. Pretty damn good compared to the average player, but not the same at all as putting in the work to become world class.

> which can be radically changed or even destroyed at any time

This was the nail in the gaming coffin for me. Imagining all those hours spent to be completely worthless once the servers are shut down- and then imagining that all that time had been spent playing guitar and writing code. I still like to play games occasionally for fun, but not with the drive to be the best.

Spot on. But oh, the feeling of a well-placed deagle headshot through the wall corner...