Serious question. Why is reading a better hobby than video games?

I'm not a psychologist, so i'll report whay they did to me:
>addiction
>short term irritability
>insomnia
>lack of socialization
>anxiety
>depression
Im sure they fuck with some reward system in the brain, making you feel like shit when you're not playing

Sry for englando i meant self awareness. Which isnt necessarily a good thing either but i think that it is

Except 99.99% of videogames are made with the sole purpose of entertaining, unlike other medias

>Homer wasn't trying to entertain
>Shakespeare wasn't trying to entertain
>Anything that isn't a horrible attempt at moralizing doesn't have entertainment as a priority
although delight would be a broader word that would stretch painting and sculpture in there more comfortably

>unlike other medias

Did you miss the >sole in his post?

Most media is to entertain. Save for the pretentious few, see Finnegans Wake

well that part was either hyperbole or ignorance regardless of the quality of video games.

99.99 are made with the sole purpose of entertaining and that's the extent of what they do, unlike real art

it's not man its just a hobby. it's Wether you like it or not. that's all that matters. I have just as much fun playing CS 1.6 as I do reading something stimulating like lookout cartridge. you will learn different things. who cares b.

Do you honestly believe that entertaining (again let's use words as delight or pleasure because they're broader term) isn't the primary goal of all (good) art and that its the not the sole purpose of most of it?

Do you think pulp fiction attempts more? Landscape paintings?

I think paintings and a lot of movies do more of that. I believe that maybe 2-3 videogames do that

name le games

Sry i'm too tired to even write correctly. More than that*. I will read replies tmrw

sounds like video games were a symptom, not a cause

>Im sure they fuck with some reward system in the brain, making you feel like shit when you're not playing
I don't think that's how the reward system works.

They mess up your dopamine, just like anything with a screen.

I guess ebooks really are shit then.

>Books are a dying art form and as with all dying art forms it is increasingly used as a social signalling mechanism while personal taste is increasingly discouraged. Worship of certain books is the main preoccupation of many people and is used to determine social hierarchies. Enjoyment is dismissed as immature.

When you spell it out it that way it sounds quite sad. I might have to stop shitting on YA or something.

Doesn't count. When you look at an ereader you are focused on the writing, not how many likes or texts you're receiving.

I think it's probably a better way to absorb large amounts of information quickly, so readers tend to be more well-educated than gamers. Plus, getting good at processing books gives you the ability to access the large tradition of literature discussing high concepts and Big Ideas. There are games that do this, but reading is a more abstracted medium and thus is more effective at conveying abstract concepts, as opposed to intelligent videogames like Portal, which make you think about spatial orientation and more low-level concepts.

tl;dr its a byproduct of the format of the media, with books building on abstract/developed concepts (what is most good? what is good?) and games playing with physical/low-level concepts (Portal-style "what would happen if we connected two points in space that shouldn't be connected?" questions).

Vidyagames bore me, books don't.
I played a lot as a kid, but ir's just annoying to press all these buttons to me. It also doesn't help that the storytelling quality in videogames is abysmal

Anyone got any recommendations for any good interactive fiction?

sorry this post wound up replying to 2 people at once

>do that
this issue here is whether or not they attempt it, not do it. I'll agree that VGames are finding their feet rather clumsily, but the are finding them. Look at Pathologic, (the new one coming out) its demo flies in the face of people like that would otherwise have really good points by meaningfully engaging with themes of death and its intersection with cultural reactions to it. But I am reluctant to agree that games, especially puzzle games only engage in low-level concepts in the first place. Although I think it ultimately fails, The Talos Principle almost touches on some powerful themes although it requires you engage intensively about spatial orientation.

The Beginner's Guide (play it at least twice, because it is designed to distract the player from its own depth)
LISA the painful (if you like turn-based rpgs)
AntiChamber (however the narrative is completely told through extremely abstracted gameplay)
Pathologic
Hylics (also turned based)
Space Funeral (turn based, plays with Plato's idea of forms)

>AntiChamber
>tfw to smart to not get stuck forever
who the hell had the idea to store the iq stat as a byte??

I'm not saying that videogames can't do high-level materials, I'm saying that as a medium books are better for conveying abstract, higher-level concepts.

A book disregards a ton of data/information conveyance like visuals and physics and explicit representations of concepts in favor of just using commonly understood symbols (words) to denote concepts. This means that the content of a book is inherently higher-level than that of a videogame, which dedicates large swathes of content space to backgrounds and game engines and physics etc etc which explicitly establish low-level concepts for the benefit of players.

Okay, i definitely agree with that, however there are some inherenty benefits and freedoms to come along with that burden. The two father artforms of videogames are Film and Sculpture and any tool availble to either of these are available in some (almost all) capacity to Games. Through that, Games can (but are derided as pretentious when they attempt) to convey complex and extremely specific aesthetics through those mechanics while allowing a player to interact with them in a meaningful way. I honestly think that looking more towards the sculptural aspects of game design would advance the narrative being made (at least in a direction i'd like to see) and then mechanics as metaphor have to engage with these aspects, because designing them the other way around creates engaging gameplay with a horrifying distance from the actual narrative. I started rambling so
tl;dr The aesthetic capabilities are very, very different and perhaps more inaccessible, but no less depthy

>depthy

got me

I generally have more fun & experience more excitement at a painting exhibit than I do playing video games. In fact, movies, television and videogames make me feel numb to boredom but don't really help it.

I read either to fulfill interest on a subject or for the experience of art, both of which "entertain" me, especially more than videogames. That includes everything from philosophy to Gogol.

Civ IV is a pretty cool game though. I sometimes play PS4 games at friends houses but they usually bore me to tears, and it's a horrible group interaction.

It isn't. reading requires no skill, it's a passive hobby. All it does if get people to rationalize nonsense because what's being written is retarded or they are interpreting it like a retard.

Reading turns you into a pseudo-intellectual faggot.

Tactics Ogre Let us cling together psp remake is the best story /writing/lore in video games.

The only skills you develop when you play are skills relevant to that specific game, they are non-transferable. When you play guitar, you develop a skill - and it doesn't matter if you switch guitars, music genre, etc... You are developing a skill. When you read you broaden knowledge, get better at reading, critical thinking, as well as writing. When you play video games everything you learn is confined to that specific game, and you carry nothing from it once you turn off the game.

>t. millennial douchebag that demonizes others for pursuing knowledge

when rockets launch from the earth carrying those who contribute the most logically to humanity's survival, dindus like you will be left to rot in an apocalyptic wasteland while the elite colonize mars

A first playthrough of a classic game is probably equivalent in value to a 100 page novella. The problem is that most people restrict themselves to 1-2 games which they can easily play all day every day (league of legends, hearthstone, world of warcraft, etc). Everything is just repetition of a few very basic skills, and they can switch their brains off and still get rewarded regularly, like a mouse in a skinner box.

So, you can imagine a person playing top lane in league of legends for 6 hours a day, for 5 years straight, amounting to a total of 10,950 hours. At the end of it, what have they really gained going forward? What would a person who instead used that time to read books have gained in comparison? When considering this comparison i think it is trivial as to why books are a 'better' hobby in the long run.

Books are far more demanding of your attention, and thus require much more focus and the ability to sustain and contemplate more complex strings of thought. Books generally present characters that are far more nuanced and subtle than any other medium can convey, affording you insight into others and yourself on a much deeper level. Engaging with distinguished literature is an engagement with the finest art that a culture has produced; to do so is to have a share in the cultural that is inseparable from the fabric of your human nature.

This isn't me

To continue the reply string:
>The two father artforms of videogames are Film and Sculpture and any tool availble to either of these are available in some (almost all) capacity to Games

This is a good point, but all the same I think given the same amount of time invested into the medium a book will convey more purely conceptual content than either film or sculpture. That isn't to say that videogames don't have great strengths in the lower level realms that those media are more effective in as well. I'm hoping to see videogames that take advantage of immersion to convey conceptual stuff by doing that, specifically by manipulating the surrounding world outright to reflect deeper/higher level concepts. Like utilizing landscape distortion or gravity shifts to highlight a characters feeling of powerlessness or something. Gravity turns up when heartbreak hits or whatever.

That would be unique and of value, but it will always require more videogame/higher-level concept than book/higher-level concept. So people who spend time reading instead of playing videogames will acquire higher-level knowledge faster.

That's one way in which you could argue for "books > videogames as a hobby" but it totally leaves out entertainment or enjoyment, which are totally subjective and can't be compared reasonably.