(2023-01-20) Hoel When Video Game Addiction Strikes

Erik Hoel: When video game addiction strikes. In college I played World of Warcraft too—my first semester I spent way too much time on it, and I too would dream of it, occasionally. We were both inside the supersensorium. And by “supersensorium” I mean the entertainment analog to a “supermarket” with all its conveniences and stocked shelves.

just as obesity rates took off after supermarkets became the dominant way everyone in America got food, so have rates of entertainment addiction followed the rise of the supersensorium

a lot of very successful people still play video games, and most manage it totally fine, just like plenty of people have a glass of wine with dinner and don’t become raging alcoholics.

In a now-infamous scene, SBF was playing League while on a billion-dollar fundraising call.

video games are, for many of my generation (of which SBF is one) a self-soothing activity, and this behavior was more like a toddler fondling a binkie.

the challenge of living in this age is that we must do the boring and unexciting thing of learning how to deal with the superstimuli around us. Survive is pretty much assured. There are no tigers to devour us. There are no predators left at all. But your own appetites will eat you if you let them

I, along with pretty much every guy I know from my generation, like video games.

I think many games are worthwhile to spend time on, and offer experiences equivalently unique to anything that can be found in TV shows or books or films. That is, they can be art.

Games are artistically powerful because they are the replacement of one reality with another.

You become instantiated inside the game, embodied as a virtual avatar.

As philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues in his book Games: Agency as Art: Just as novels let us experience lives we have not lived, games let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own.

it’s also possible to move beyond valuing games as an artistic medium but as something more like a replacement for lived life

Some even think there is, at an intellectual level, essentially no difference between reality and games—reality is just the biggest and most expansive game. David Chalmers, one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers, has an interesting book called Reality + in which he argues exactly this

to him reality is nothing more than just the most-detailed simulation, the one that contains all the other ones

I agree with Chalmers that we should be clear about these philosophical questions for practical purposes, but my conclusion is the exact opposite. Why? The view of simulations as being equivalent to real reality is, I think, ontologically confused, and relies on an impoverished notion of “real”.

When you design a Turing machine (such as one that contains a simulation), you can sketch out all of its working on paper, but the thing does not run

Reality itself, the base layer, is always required, and is always the one doing the heavy lifting of actually existing. And it is this heavy lifting which is absent from any schema of purely formal relations like a simulation, and there is therefore a sharp distinction between virtual realities and real ones.

And this is the ultimate, the most abstract reason why the tendency toward video game addiction is so sad, evokes so much pathos—you become addicted to video games because you want to replace your reality with a different one, but the different one is ersatz, and somewhere deep the pointlessness of it all is felt, pixel by pixel. So what to do?

Get older

the best way to stop video game addiction is to improve your actual reality. Mostly, this happens over time (agency)

Most people actually report being less happy in their 30s, but they are more likely to find life very meaningful, mostly thanks to family and careers.

In fact, at this point I go months to years without playing a game, and I don’t miss it much

Become a game snob

*As I wrote in “Exit the supersensorium:”

In a world of infinite experience, it is the aesthete who is safest, not the ascetic.*

This approach is like how a film snob might loathe reality TV, and therefore cannot become addicted to watching reality TV. Forget if any of this snobbery is deserved or not, the point is that this approach works

Avoid installing games on your laptop / work computer

Play finite games... you play through them and you win. There is an end. This is an incredibly important distinction, and what makes MMOs, strategy games (like Starcraft), and first-person shooters (like Apex Legends), so dangerous. They are all infinite games.

one should get off the screen and go breathe fire into the equations.

*As Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time, when discussing the same issue but in the context of the laws of physics:

Even if there is only one possible unified theory [of physics], it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?*