I highly recommend reading the book “Flow” if you’re looking for that thing that makes every day enjoyable.
In addition to exploring why people love games and other high skill activities, it discusses the idea that we can learn how to turn every day tasks into activities that evoke the same reward centers. It doesn’t just dive into “people like games”, or “people like achieving hard things”, but it delves into why, and tries to explain some of the mechanisms.
It made me start to see daily mundane/boring tasks differently. They’re things I have to do anyway, so I can choose to approach them with a mindset that actually evokes enjoyment. Might as well.
Video games used to be my primary outlet. These days, it’s photography and writing. Over time, cooking/baking have transformed from tasks I begrudgingly did to tasks I find deeply rewarding. I still play video games and my point isn’t to disparage them, but the more things in my life that I can move into the “things I enjoy” category, the better my life has become, on average. And part of that had more to do with changing how I engaged with tasks than the specific tasks I was doing.
"If you see yourself as God and then you come back from this state and somebody says, "Hey, Sam, empty the garbage!" it catches you back into the model of "I'm Sam who empties the garbage." You can't maintain these new kinds of structures. It takes a while to realize that God can empty garbage."
i go through the diamond sutra regularly, but still can't stop building sawmills and waterworks
currently thinking about how to build a system that plays klondike solitaire for me based on my previous games, so it only presents me with deals that i "woulnd't be able to beat" (based on previous games)
I believe this can be more generic, having something you're into makes every day enjoyable.
I had that realization a couple of years ago. Happiness for me is doing less things I don't enjoy and more of the things I do enjoy.
Gaming is nice because there is little effort to start. Just sit in front of a PC and play.
Something like surfing requires more effort, getting changed, getting to a beach with waves, etc. I hate the setup, but it's possible to minimize it by living somewhere warm (no wet suit needed) and on the beach so you don't need to drive.
That's how I live my life nowadays. Doing very few things I don't enjoy, minimizing the effort required to do the things I do enjoy and doing things I actually enjoy instead of things I'm indifferent about (like watching garbage Netflix shows).
I think any therapist will tell you that it's best to have something to look forward to; probably small, near-term things as well as large, long-term goals. When you don't have anything to do, the future looks pretty grim. I've long given up on anything like finding some sort of meaning to all this, but I do try and find little enjoyable stuff to do.
I think exercise is pretty key and applying the philosophy above of doing the type of exercise you like and making it easy to do is very helpful.
My 2015 PC started dying, requiring BIOS resets and other weirdness like suddenly not outputting basic VGA graphics.
So I finally upgraded to an AMD 7800X3D, nvidia 4070 12GB, 64GB DDR5-6400 RAM.
All to play Factorio! :D
Apart from a strange error where Linux will crash if I have 2 DIMMs in the motherboard, it's been a great upgrade. (I'm going to submit bug reports to Fedora, but I'm assuming some combo of the MSI B650 motherboard, CPU, and memory are contributing to the error. Memtest says the memory modules are OK)
Now I have a PC that can handle the modded-Factorio huge railway city block maps I like to play. Each block of space is surrounded by 4 lanes of railway, with interchanges. It's really nice to organize the refining and production into specific tasks, like "deliver lead ore, process it into lead oxide, combine that with carbon blocks to make lead ingots". Now the distribution method is via railway station so it's far more flexible than simple conveyor belt outputs. Loads of fun! And very complex too, but that's half the fun. Needing "blue science" which needs circuit boards, which need solder, which needs lead and tin ingots, etc etc. I can lose hours of time to this, moderated only by my back hurting and making me take breaks.
A nice bonus is that my new PC is capable of running smaller LLMs locally, so I can mess around with learning the new hotness technology. Plus new toys are always fun.
The Zen 4 memory controller only sometimes is binned high enough to be stable at 6400. It's likely that linux just loads the memory better out of the box. I had to dial back my 7800 X3D to 6000 after rare but consistent crashes.
You can try OCCT to check if your memory overclock (even with Expo and especially with XMP, those are overclocks) is stable.
You probably have Hynix memory (check your 4 main timings and XMP/EXPO advertised speed) - if you do, these are very save timings you can do that'd probably make up for going down to 6000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlYxmRcdLVw
When I saw the specs my thoughts immediately went to local LLMs, then I got to the last paragraph. I was messing around with Mistral 7b the other day when it was posted on here and have been considering upgrading my PC so I can run LLMs faster.
I've wanted to play games since Atari Pong came out. But I've never owned a console, and haven't owned a computer with a discrete GPU since 2005. Twenty years ago, I satisfied my urge to game by playing Unreal Tournament, Quake, etc. demos. More recently, I'd spend an hour a week watching other people play games on YouTube, to see if I was missing anything.
This year, the snake has entered my garden in the form of an RTX 3060 that I bought for AI and media production applications.
My wife has bought me a flight stick for Christmas, so I can play DCS myself, instead of watching other people's videos.
I worked so hard avoiding escapist leisure in favor of physical exercise and 'maker' hobbies that it's difficult to switch off the discipline, and go have some escapist fun.
I'm retired and have all the resources needed to indulge in pure fun. I'm gonna take advantage of the opportunity.
Dont forget VR might make it one day, and in the meantime you can always get a slight productivity satisfaction by making mods for your favorite games.
Thank you for the article. ~7 years ago, I realized I have a similar disposition - my best mental state is when I’m in a state of learning and being challenged. The struggle I’ve run into is when I look back and consider what “good” that thing I’ve been learning about has produced.
For instance, I too love video games and have found immense enjoyment in them for many, many years but if I add up all my play logs and realize I’ve spent something like 5-10% of my life playing video games, it begs the question if that time could have been better spent? Has that really helped anyone, myself included? Has it made the world a better place in any way?
Lately, I’ve uninstalled all games and am seeking hobbies that still challenge me but also can bring joy to others. To list a couple:
Cooking - An art really but also quite a bit of science involved. Chiefly though, food brings people together and there is nothing quite like feeding people with your very own creation and hard work.
DIY - DIY helps with my engineering itch, saves a lot of money for the family, and also can greatly benefit others who might otherwise not be able to afford something they really do need.
I have nothing against video games, I’ve played far more than most my age. I really just wonder when it comes to hobbies, is maximum satisfaction achieved when not only you satisfy your own needs but are also able to add to others’ lives? FWIW, this can be achieved in video games through friendships and community formed… I’m just not good at making that an important part of why I’d play a video game.
I find a lot of comfort in the idea of unintended consequences. I spent the majority of my youth playing games: CounterStrike, Magic: The Gathering, D&D. I paid a lot more attention to useless hobbies than to school.
In hindsight, I attribute my strongest mental skills to all that gaming. Abstract reasoning, strategic/tactical thinking, english fluency...things that separated me completely from my peers once I began my career.
Life's long and you never know. If you enjoy cooking, sure, it stacks with a lot of other benefits. I think that's a good framework to keep in mind. But there's no reason to believe nothing good can ever come from some hours spent on Call of Duty. Heck, if you enjoy them that's enough good gotten.
Totally agree, some of my best friends today were found through Halo/dota/RuneScape/Dark Age of Camelot/etc. These are not regrets I have - just more of a point forward perspective in what I do with my time now.
I have a family of my own now so that has played no small part in shifting my perspective.
“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. ... There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
That's Go for me and has been for the past 3-4 years (with varying intensity), recently got a Japanese floor goban, and it's just a pleasure to sit in front of it to study, understand the nuances, experience professional games bith new and old. What a beautiful game
I have phases too, right now going through a strong wave. I’m desperately resisting the urge to buy a really nice hyuga kaya table board. I decided to gift it to myself if I ever reach one dan, hopefully that would incentivize staying motivated.
I grew up playing a lot of computer games (PC). A lot of them. It mostly stopped once I went to university - for the following decade I played only newer versions of games I was familiar with (e.g. newer Civilization, newer Command and Conquer, etc). And even that was the once-a-year binge - not continual. Then I stopped altogether.
There were multiple reasons I slowed down. I was interested in my academics. I looked back at all the time I had played pre-university and (rationally) lamented the time lost. The genre I liked had died (adventure games), and I really didn't like 1st person shooters. And I didn't want to deal with the headache of upgrading my PC every 2 years just to play a game. Also, I switched to Linux, which didn't help.
I bought a PS3 in 2010, but it was only for Blu-Ray and streaming. Then in around 2016, on a whim, I decided to check out a game from the library. I picked The Walking Dead (Telltale version).
I loved it. I started checking out other games. Someone bought me an Xbox One as a gift. But this all lasted a few months before I stopped playing again.
Finally, around 18 months ago, I felt guilty that I had spent $100 on games back in 2016 when I got the Xbox (some big sale, so quite a few games), but never played them. So I told myself I'll try a few.
The first one I played was Life is Strange. Loved it. Then Oxenfree. Loved it. It's been 18 months and I haven't stopped playing.
Before, I'd spend 30-60 minutes per day watching some TV show. I've merely substituted that time with gaming. And it is so, so much more rewarding than watching a TV show - even a great show. It's counterintuitive, but I find it both relaxes me and invigorates me at the same time in a way a good show on TV wouldn't (and I love good stories). With TV, you're just staring. With games, you're actively thinking. It's more dynamic. You make decisions. You're in control. And games can have great storytelling.
I remember times in my life where my work was really stressful. Looking back, I wish I had played games back then.
The funny thing is, while I had earlier lamented all the time in my youth spent playing games, when I look back now I have only positive feelings. I still have good memories of certain games - heck even certain achievements in games, from 30 years ago. That time wasn't wasted.
I always find it amusing when someone belittles gamers as losers, but then they go watch TV.
I always have some game to play. Usually it's some multiplayer FPS shooter and doesn't require long term commitment or investment (CsGo2, Apex Legends, 20min matches). I'm in my mid 30s, but I'm still quite good at those games, so I have some passion for them, but I mostly play them as a method to disconnect my mind from work. When I'm not coding much at work, doing some ops stuff or whatever etc, games get replaced by coding at home, because it's just like wanting to go to a bathroom, it has to come out at some point. I sometimes even combine the two, recently started RE'ing or modding my childhood games, which is quite awesome as I picked up new skills along the way.
My other half on the other hand, has no such interests, and thinks that I'm wasting my life away, while sitting on the couch watching netflix.
One of my favorite things to do on HN is to read much older article from the authors/posters to see their change over time. Major props to the author, as they appear to have significantly improved their English over the last 8 yrs: http://plumshell.com/2015/03/01/why-nintendo-doesnt-release-...
Writing in another language is always a challenge. I learned Hungarian a decade ago, and I still struggle to write “natively.” Major props!
I’m struggling in the worst way to get into any game at all. I have free time. I don’t feel guilt being “unproductive” with that time. But nothing feels motivating to continue with.
In my teens and 20s it felt amazing to finish homework and have a late night ahead of me to really sink my teeth into an RPG or something. But for the past decade that magic is just gone.
I don’t want to declare “I’ve grown and changed and maybe gaming just isn’t my thing” because I badly want it to be.
I’ve stopped playing multiplayer games with strangers. I play tabletop RPGs (online, on a virtual tabletop) on Tuesday nights for 3-4 hours with some friends, and it’s an absolute blast.
Even though the stories we tell are goofy and not worthy of a pulp fiction novel, it feels like actual play and engages a part of my mind that’s seldom used anymore. It’s not often a video game can capture a fraction of the fun we have paving our own crazy story. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the closest I’ve seen in awhile.
I'm in a similar situation. Most games just feel like work to me. Here's some complicated thing that I have to learn, watch long-winded cutscenes that are like a very bad movie. I have to figure out what I'm supposed to do, where to go, how to find things. The environment is too complicated, everything looks the same, how am I supposed to navigate this. Now I have to learn some combat mechanics. Get killed within seconds, reload over and over.
> I don’t want to declare “I’ve grown and changed and maybe gaming just isn’t my thing” because I badly want it to be.
Games are not your thing, whether be sure of being grown up or so etching else. And there is no intrinsic value of gaming unless you like it a lot. Forcing yourself into it makes zero sense.
Maybe, just maybe, it makes sense to try different things and chances are one of them will be it.
Slay the Spire is awesome, addictive, and can be played for 5 minutes or 5 hours - great recommendation!
With very limited gaming time available I’ve been searching for other games like that with limited success, apart from Hitman Go, FTL, and Into the Beach. But none of them scratch the itch quite as well.
For anyone currently looking for something that does this for you, may I suggest Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com/ This is the first year I've really made time and space to enjoy it, and enjoy it I have.
Also - this article ends on such a weird note given the message that the rest of it delivers. The author has finally realized how valuable it is to have something that gets them going, regardless of whether or not it ends up being "useful", but then immediately stumbles over the fear of it not lasting and failing to achieve greatness in it and sharply concludes with that sentiment.
Perseverance through intermediate-ness into greatness is irrelevant to enjoyment.
Sure, be great at your hobby if you're driven to be great, but if you're looking to maximize enjoyment, it's much better to focus on a) embracing intermediateness, and b) exposing yourself to new things so you can find the next hobby that will light you up.
- (a) be available at precisely midnight EST every day for an entire month. That would be 6am for me, not really feasible on working days for a full month.
- (b) be extremely good at a weird flavor of programming competition -- more often than not you don't win at AoC by writing better solutions, you just have to crank out a solution that you don't too long to type.
I like competitions, I really do, done them my entire life, but AoC is just not that interesting to me.
I'm just doing the problems every day ignoring the leaderboard, 48/50 stars, this year I'm on track to get 50/50 on Christmas day :)
It doesn’t require either of those things. I’ve been doing it this year and I’m on day 17 I think. I probably won’t finish it until the end of January.
I looked at the leaderboard one day there were a lot of people who finished the problem set in 3-4 minutes. I spent more time than that reading the problem description.
It’s still a lot of fun. Some days I’ll solve the problem more than once just to try different ideas.
Kidding, of course, but that's pretty much how I feel about it. I haven't done any real programming in >5 years so I'm using it to dust off the cobwebs, get up to speed on C# language features and push myself to think about the problems functionally/recursively where I can, for fun. The freewheeling open-endedness is the best part because you can get value/enjoyment/satisfaction out of it a million different ways: you could golf the problems; use them to learn new languages; pretend you're writing production code and make it super clean and organized; do them with a partner or group; etc. etc. There's so much value simply in interesting, well-defined puzzles with a good scope, and the presence of the leaderboard is actually a really good example of not letting the need for greatness (especially by arbitrary measures!) stand in the way of enjoyment.
I'm in the same boat as you, I started late and I'm on day 14 or so with a couple skips that I'll get back to, hope to finish in January, and then maybe go back and clean a few of them up, reflect on them, write a little bit about them, and then start looking at problems from previous years.
Yeah. I started like 13 days late and am just on day 5 part 2 (building it out a few times cause I’ve never worked on interval algos, so trying a few different things out).
You don’t need to compete or even do them on the day they release. It’s been fun solving them regardless.
> once they hit a certain wall, growth slows down drastically.
Deliberate practice addresses these plateaus. I think you need to constrict your focus, zoom in, change the scale so the slowing of progress doesn't feel slow. If you can accept that, it can be just as satisfying. A great coach/mentor can help here [but how can you evaluate them?] As the frontier of your knowledge expands, there's more of it.
funfact: Usain Bolt hit a plateau as a teenager, but got a new coach who addressed a congenital spine defect with specific strengthening exercises, and to train less (he was overtraining).
overtraining is such a trap! My college crew program had something like 11 workouts per week - one on the water, at 5am, and one in the gym at 4pm, every weekday, plus a "big one" on Saturdays. Very little tapering before big races.
That's simply too much, especially for 18 year olds...
This article speaks to me a lot. I played FF7 Remake when it released on PS+ in ‘21 thinking I didn’t enjoy JRPG’s.
From there i played the entire collection - the ps1 version, crisis core, advent children, and then remake again.
Those months were fantastic - either playing, listening to the soundtrack, thinking about materia combinations. And it’s likely to consume another 3 months of my life when Rebirth releases.
My favorite thing about picking up a retro emulation handheld is using it to play through these old games. It's more like an ebook reader in my mind than a game console when I load it up just with story-dense RPG/strategy/adventure games instead of arcade and action games.
The thing that unlocked it for me was taking a save state at pretty much every "scene" or big story beat. A lot of these games lack a good way of tracking where you are in the story, and picking up/putting down a deep game in short increments can be hard to get reoriented, so I got in a habit of loading one or two saves back when I restart playing after a break. Replaying a minute or so is usually more than enough to remember what's going on and what I need to do next.
This is me with Dota 2 currently. I play against bots every few days, and don’t obsess over studying the nuances, which I know are myriad. Feels like there are 2-3 separate games being played simultaneously within the single game that interact in different ways.
Accepting that I’m a filthy casual has been lots of fun. I should probably use that time to practice guitar, but I like the change of pace.
For that game specifically recently i feel more fun in Turbo Mode instead of normal. Even if you lose you only "waste" half of the time and you can win twice as much in the same amount of time. I know a friend who prefer Valorant over Overwatch solely because games there lasts half as much time too.
Great article! I had deep, long-lasting obsessions with games growing up until I discovered programming. For me, it's not so much about the challenge anymore; it's about building stuff. Once I discovered programming, games felt like very small and limiting sandboxes. If I played a game for 10 hours a day, I would not be able to convince myself that it's okay for me and those around me. However, since programming is lucrative and comes with a pat in the back, I struggle to find a good work-life balance still to this day.
For me it became incredibly hard to find a game to get hooked on. Most recently Path of Exile was it, one of the very few games (flight sims, Gwent and Slay the Spire) that I have more than 100 hours of game play. And indeed, when I find such a game, looking forward to it was a great motivation throughout the day. Currently my only hope is with PoE2, crossing fingers for it.
Games (especially video games) can be extremely distracting from doing the things you need to do. I'm in school and so I have to work hard to avoid these things because I will not do the work I need to do if I start playing a video game.
Maybe I just need more self-control, but I prefer non-games as hobbies. Programming, listening to music and podcasts, etc.
Everyone is different. I’m really happy you can look at yourself critically like that and realize your own limitations, then work around them. To be honest your comment is the real takeaway here for me (the article was basically “good things are good” and felt quite empty/meaningless).
I tend to associate mahjong with gambling and smoke filled illegal parlors. The Asian counterpart of poker as it is played in western stories.
Probably a stereotype. Just as poker usually isn't played in saloons with revolvers on the table nowadays, but I wonder what kind of reputation it has, and if the money aspect is as prevalent as it is in poker.
The illegal parlors exist, just like illegal private poker games exist in the US.
I’m not sure about numbers, but I know many people in Japan who play mahjong with community friends just like I know many people in the US who have poker home games.
I have played both games in the casual community games, and they are generally very friendly even though money is involved. Typically, the amount wagered is “in the budget”, skill sets are usually in the same neighborhood, and ringers either self-moderate their winnings (this is me in poker and a friend of mine in mahjong) or get uninvited.
All work and no play.. I personally enjoy Warno a lot, I have over 1000 ranked game. Eugen games are very engaging I think it actually keeps me sane while only using max 40 minutes for a session.
consider how the same sentiment sounds stated in the inverse. even the most generous formulations, something like: "not every day is enjoyable when I don't have a game to be into," could pass for the opening sentence of a dystopian novel.
I'm reminded mostly of schopenhauer's remark that reading is simply the replaying of another's thoughts, and video games, especially scripted RPGs, extend this notion of "replaying" to its dismal conclusion.
> reading is simply the replaying of another's thoughts
And as it turns out, replaying someone else’s thoughts can be highly rewarding. It transmits ideas and satiates the brain’s need for new information. It helps ideas spread, and can fundamentally alter the direction of one’s life.
Another way to look at this is that the words are a form of program that configures your brain. The act of reading changes the reader. What you choose to read will modulate this change. Characterizing reading as simply replaying thoughts really misses what’s happening, which is a fascinating transmission of information between biological animals who invented a word game complex enough for us to enable us to dismiss it as “replaying thoughts”. And for sake of argument, let’s say it’s just replaying thoughts. That’s pretty interesting/incredible on its own.
Video games usually scratch a different kind of itch. They provide challenging tasks in a structured environment with a clear feedback loop that indicates progress. The ones that include dialogue options layer on an additional level of interactivity/feedback.
What it unclear is why this notion has or must have a dismal conclusion.
I think the point is more that it’s very easy to go through life only thinking (reading) the thoughts of others, and never truly thinking for yourself. In our hyper-information age, I think this is an especially common practice. Why start from scratch when there are already so many starting points others have thought of? Why build an original LEGO design when there are so many premade ones? Etc.
> I'm reminded mostly of schopenhauer's remark that reading is simply the replaying of another's thoughts, and video games, especially scripted RPGs, extend this notion of "replaying" to its dismal conclusion.
Is the implication here that reading books is also bad?
The inverse isn't really implied in the statement. In other words, a world where every day is enjoyable without a having a game doesn't violate the sentiment.
I agree it’s somewhat dystopian when referring to video games, however I feel some types of games can offer genuine fulfillment. I used to play tennis and volleyball regularly, and although these are sports they could basically be considered physical forms of games. The routine of training and competing against others definitely added enjoyment to my life and was a welcome distraction from anything else that may have been bothering me at the time.
Mindless video games where you chase dopamine hits and programmed stimulus and have no interaction with others isn’t the same.
Reading is more interactive than that Schopenhauer quote gives it credit for being. When I’m reading something challenging or interesting, it’s almost like I’m having a conversation with the author.
> The most enjoyable time is when you feel yourself growing, but the real test is whether you can persevere when you hit that wall or if you’ll lose interest and give up.
Why does it matter if you persevere or not as long as you had fun?
Pleasure vs. satisfaction. Pleasure is enjoying the moment, and satisfaction is enjoying remembering the moment. Satisfaction (almost definitionally) lasts longer, and importantly doesn’t even require in-the-moment pleasure!
Yes, a good book makes all the difference to me. Particularly around bedtime - I'm very much a night owl and usually struggle to get to bed on time but the prospect of reading a bit of a good book before going to sleep is good motivation.
In addition to exploring why people love games and other high skill activities, it discusses the idea that we can learn how to turn every day tasks into activities that evoke the same reward centers. It doesn’t just dive into “people like games”, or “people like achieving hard things”, but it delves into why, and tries to explain some of the mechanisms.
It made me start to see daily mundane/boring tasks differently. They’re things I have to do anyway, so I can choose to approach them with a mindset that actually evokes enjoyment. Might as well.
Video games used to be my primary outlet. These days, it’s photography and writing. Over time, cooking/baking have transformed from tasks I begrudgingly did to tasks I find deeply rewarding. I still play video games and my point isn’t to disparage them, but the more things in my life that I can move into the “things I enjoy” category, the better my life has become, on average. And part of that had more to do with changing how I engaged with tasks than the specific tasks I was doing.