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Comment by coldtea

4 days ago

>It means lots of people will give up the hobby.

Oh, we can only hope!

>This has the potential to harm a lot of businesses from hardware to software companies, and change the lives of millions of people.

Including millions of gamers, but for the better.

You hate gamers? Why?

Why can’t you let people enjoy their hobby?

  • For the same reason I don't like alcoholism or meth use or gambling or porn addiction, even when the person "enjoys them".

    • That's one hell of a long shot. Are your views applicable to the rest of the entertainment industry? There's plenty of people wasting away in front on Netflix, after all. Or why just entertainment, any "useless" hobbies that are repeatedly done for fun but have no real productive output. Is any comparable "pleasurable" activity that also hooks a minority of people in an unhealthy way bad, or just gaming?

      But what's most insane is trying to draw any parallels between gaming and these other things - something that was literally engineered to ruin human lives, biologically (hard drugs) or psychologically (gambling). The harm and evil caused by these two industries is incomprehensible (especially the legal parts of them, like alcohol and casino gambling/sports betting/online gambling), and trying to fit gaming in among them both downplays the amount of suffering inflicted by gambling and hard drugs, as well as villainizes normal people - like the hundreds of millions of people who play games in a sane, non-problematic way or indie game devs who make games because they want to express themselves artistically.

      Anyways, I gotta log off HN for a while. I can feel my gaming withdrawal kicking in. I've bankrupted myself four times by only spending my money on gaming, and I've been in and out of rehab centres and ERs as I've been slowly destroying my body with gaming in a spiral of deadly addiction. I think I'll have to panhandle and threaten strangers on the street to buy some Steam cards.

      5 replies →

    • I don't like football. Can we add football fans into the mix of people we're punching down on, alongside the gamers and the meth heads?

      Thank you for your consideration.