I think there is good reason to be skeptical of hardcore gamers who are above a certain age. These games all use the same basic tricks to trigger to pleasure mechanisms of the brain. As such, anyone who is sufficiently intelligent should be able to figure out that they're all basically the same, and thus to be avoided after a certain point if one wants to keep growing as a person.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy playing genuinely novel games when they come out like Katamari Damacy or Braid, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that gaming can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits.
But at it's root most serious games today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain.
That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy playing genuinely novel games when they come out like Katamari Damacy or Braid, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that gaming can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits.
But at it's root most serious games today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain.
That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation.