PLeasure-Negative Society

If there’s one thing that the ‘media circus’ surrounding video games has shown me is just how backwards our culture is about what it acceptable.

It appears that while shooting, vehicular homicide, drug use and drug dealing isn’t worth working up a sweat about, consensual sex between two consenting adults is enough to get congress involved. While it’s ok to simulate things that are horrific crimes, it’s somehow much worse for people a year over the age of consent to see something that’s a thousand times more tame than a lingerie commercial.

These are arguments that have been put forward a million times, so I won’t go over them again. However, what I do want to talk about is how we’ve become a ‘pleasure negative’ society. While hard work and self sacrifice are the corner stones of any well adjusted culture, we’re unusual in that any pure leisure activity, one that has no benefits other than being fun, are looked down on, and in many cases vilified.

It’s Not Good For You.

Any gamer out there has heard the arguments and accusations. Gaming is a ‘complete waste of time’, ‘unproductive’ and ‘lazy’.

To be completely honest, I can almost agree with all the above statements, but the point is that we’re talking about a leisure activity. The point of a leisure activity is to have fun and relax. Gaming is ‘unproductive’ because it’s meant to be. The objective is to have fun, not to ‘achieve’ anything.

The biggest problem for gamers is that nearly every other pastime has some sort of ‘loophole’. Playing sports is exercise, reading is ‘educational’. But if we actually consider these points, we see that they’re flawed.

First and foremost, plenty of people enjoy playing sports. However, if playing a sport offered no physical benefit whatsoever, how many people are going to quit? I’d say none, because people play sports for the fun of it, the exercise is just a positive side-effect.

It’s the same with reading. It only counts as educational if you’re reading something educational. Are you any more intelligent after reading a work of fiction? Are you any more equipped to deal with the world in general after reading Harry Potter?

The other big point I want to make is that these same ‘loopholes’ also apply to gaming, it’s just people refuse to see them.

Stuck In the 80’s

One of gaming’s biggest problems is that non-gamers assume that games are stuck in the 1980’s. A game of Space Invaders or Mario hardly encourages thinking deep thinking, but even games like these can be said to have benefits. Something like a side-scrolling platformer or shoot ‘em up is going to develop hand-eye coordination, maybe only a little, but then again, just how educational is reading a trashy romance novel?

Sure, the trashy romance novel may be at the bottom of the literary food-chain, but judging games by their most basic and simple incarnations is exactly the same as assuming Shakespeare is going to be crap because you read a Harlequin romance novel once and decided that ‘books where crap’.

You can’t judge all literature on the strength of one book, and you can’t judge all games based on “Space Invaders”.

Many games reward lateral thinking, problem solving and require a lot more brain power than just when to press the ‘shoot button’.

Take a roleplaying game for example. Each player class has different strengths and weaknesses; you have to think about the trade-off between developing this skill or that skill. Should you spend money on a particular potion, or run the risk of going into hostile territory to find the ingredients and make it yourself. You have to accomplish a particular task, so do you run in guns blazing, or try and hack that security console and slip in and out undetected?

Sure, there are ‘mindless’ games out there, but many games reward thinking and punish lack of planning. A good real-time strategy can be compared to chess. I dare anyone to play ‘Civilization’ and say you don’t have to think to succeed.

Rationalization

So games can be just as educational or as mentally taxing as a good book or a game of chess, but is a game that requires little thought necessarily a bad thing?

The only time gaming is a bad thing is when people allow their lives to suffer because of it. Taking the day off work because they where up all night playing the latest ‘Zelda’, allowing their relationships to suffer because they’re playing games all the time instead of paying attention to your partner or kids.

While this is obviously a downside, this can also be applied to everything else. Instead of staying up all night with a control pad in their hands, people stay up all night because they just can’t put that novel down. Missing a birthday party to play golf; Missing work to go see a movie.

Basically, what’s true of gaming is true of everything else. In moderation it’s fine.

Guilt.

Unfortunately, as a society we have this pre-occupation with ‘being productive’. Unless there’s a tangible achievement at the end, we feel guilty.

However, we don’t play sports or read a lot because they’re beneficial. We do these things because we enjoy them. The difference between these activities and gaming is that we’ve managed to rationalize spending a lot of time reading or playing football because they have those benefits as side-products.

Long story short, we’re doing these things for the fun of them, but we’ve learned we can get rid of the guilt by telling ourselves we’re only doing them for their beneficial side-effects.

We’ve become a totally pleasure-negative society. Anything we do just for the fun of it is considered a bad thing and a waste of time. Unless we can feel we’re being productive in some way, we guilt the crap out of ourselves. My question is: Why?

If you’ve spent all day working, come home, spent some time with the kids and got them off to bed, don’t you deserve to do something just for the sheer fun of it? Haven’t you earned a break?

We all want to have fun. The problem is that we’ve conditioned ourselves to feel guilty by doing just that. As human beings we’re excellent at lying to ourselves. We’re not ‘wasting time’ by playing football because we’re getting good exercise. We’re not being ‘unproductive’ by spending a few hours with a good book, because reading is educational and good for us.

We feel so guilty for wasting time just having fun, that we find ways around it by convincing ourselves that the incidental side-effect of our leisure activity of choice is actually the main reason we’re doing it.

I think a good way to illustrate this is something I read online about MMORPG’s.

Someone made the point that someone could spend literally hundreds of gameplay hours getting their character to level 60, getting that rare epic armor and all other kinds of rare in-game items. The point was, they’ve gone through all that work and in the end, have absolutely nothing to show for it.

I disagree. What that person has to show for it is those hundreds of hours of fun and enjoyment. The point of a game isn’t really to ‘achieve’ anything, it’s to relax, have fun and spend your down-time in a way you enjoy.

We’re preconditioned to believe that any activity should have a goal at the end, the ‘achievement’ we’re heading towards. Because of this many people have a hard time with the idea that the activity itself is its own reward.

We work to earn money. We work-out to get fitter. We read to become better educated. It’s this ‘task leads to goal’ thinking that makes us feel guilty for taking part in a pure leisure activity. Playing a video game has nothing to show for it at the end other than the pleasure of completing a game and the hours of enjoyment you got from playing it.

It’s this this we have a problem with.

Wasting Time?

By looking at my save-games, I can tell you that I spent over 60 gameplay hours playing through “The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion”. That’s two and a half days total playing that game, spread over a couple of months.

The common reaction would be “What a waste of time!” That’s two and a half days of my life gone with ‘nothing to show for it’. I could have read a book and got more intelligent, I could have made something, I could have been outside getting more in shape.

As I stated above, I don’t agree with that idea. It’s two and a half days I spent having a lot of fun and getting involved in an excellent story.

The bigger question would be “What would I have done with that time if I wasn’t playing Oblivion?”

The answer is nothing, because I play games in my leisure time. If I hadn’t been playing a game, I’d have been reading, watching movies or surfing the web. If that was two and a half days spent when I should have been at work, or fixing the plumbing or working on a project, I’d agree. However, actually having fun in my leisure time is something I refuse to apologize or feel guilty about.

I understand the importance of being productive. However, being productive is work and for me is not a leisure activity…and as long as you don’t let your work life suffer, what’s wrong with a few hours of pure fun?