Video games

[Israel Chai]

WI calling himself a gamer here encouraged me to delete all my games again. It's really the most depressing thing on earth to call yourself, I sit on a chair and play a game on a screen that does nothing good for me or anyone, but I do it a lot and I've been doing it awhile unlike those noobs.

If you take a little car, move it back and forth and say "broom broom" you're getting more exercise, working your imagination more, and not damaging yourself behind a screen, or wearing your will down as you get addicted. If you spent your whole life, and then CNN recogized you as the best gamer in every single game, what then? You're not getting any more girls because of it, you won't even get one at all if you start talking about it. It's embarrassing to play computer games, and you only want to talk about it with others that do it, because people that don't will just look at you like "you're wasting your life" and "that sounds pretty useless". It's cooler to say at a family dinner you made a stupid birdhouse than you beat every single game that was with the most efficient method, and it's cooler to say you just tried a game than that too, the better you do and the more you invest into computer games, the more pathetic it is.

Some people eventually think there's nothing else they can do, and are stuck in a cycle of addiction and wasting their lives forever. There should be a group to rescue people from this crap.

[The Noachide]

[Rubystars]

I'll commend South Park for pointing out that "Freemeium isn't free", even though as usual the moral lesson is quite twisted.

I did see that episode. They made good points in it. The fact I found a game that so far isn't trying to screw its players is pretty nice. It just takes a lot of patience. So far I've gotten four of the fealty buildings and I'm working on saving up in-game for one of the premium items I want. Some guides recommend spending money once to speed things up but it's not necessary to access all areas of the game.

That could change in the future but for now it hasn't which is nice.

I also have an old neopets account I still play on but the company that bought them out is really screwing that game up big time. They don't have any good events and large areas of the site are broken (like the beloved game Key Quest, which was supposed to be down for a week when they transitioned but ended up being gone for over a year now). They used to have fun stuff to do in October like puzzle games, etc. where you could earn trophies for participating but they did practically nothing this year and Jump Start hasn't really added any new original content after they took over from Viacom. They also have a lot of bugs all around the site they seem to have little to no intention of fixing, which leads me to think they may be letting it die. This is a shame because long-term players like me which have accounts over 10 years old (Mine is 14 1/2) have invested a lot of time into the game over the years and would like to see the site continue to get better and attract users.

The difference between the neopets unresponsive current staff and the Game of Thrones: Ascent staff is night and day.

[Yehudayaakov]

I play Star Wars it'free hehe

[Israel Chai]

I did see that episode. They made good points in it. The fact I found a game that so far isn't trying to screw its players is pretty nice. It just takes a lot of patience. So far I've gotten four of the fealty buildings and I'm working on saving up in-game for one of the premium items I want. Some guides recommend spending money once to speed things up but it's not necessary to access all areas of the game.

That could change in the future but for now it hasn't which is nice.

I also have an old neopets account I still play on but the company that bought them out is really screwing that game up big time. They don't have any good events and large areas of the site are broken (like the beloved game Key Quest, which was supposed to be down for a week when they transitioned but ended up being gone for over a year now). They used to have fun stuff to do in October like puzzle games, etc. where you could earn trophies for participating but they did practically nothing this year and Jump Start hasn't really added any new original content after they took over from Viacom. They also have a lot of bugs all around the site they seem to have little to no intention of fixing, which leads me to think they may be letting it die. This is a shame because long-term players like me which have accounts over 10 years old (Mine is 14 1/2) have invested a lot of time into the game over the years and would like to see the site continue to get better and attract users.

The difference between the neopets unresponsive current staff and the Game of Thrones: Ascent staff is night and day.

LOL I played neopets like 15 years ago. That takes me back.

[Rubystars]

LOL I played neopets like 15 years ago. That takes me back.

It's still there, still pretty much the same in a lot of respects. My account as I said is 14 1/2 years old. I try to make sure I log in so I don't miss it if they ever do get around to making another big event. Lots of trophies over the years, etc. It used to be a lot more fun but sadly it hasn't been much fun at all since Jump Start bought them. I thought it was going to be a great new start for them at first, because everyone complained about Viacom and some of the changes they had put in after Adam and Donna left, but Jump Start is worse than Viacom.

[Israel Chai]

If all the video game time i wasted was spent learning things, I'd be a lot more useful.

[The Noachide]

If all the video game time i wasted was spent learning things, I'd be a lot more useful.

You'd be surprised as well as non-gamers out there to know the benefits to this hobby. This is coming from someone who has been gaming since the Atari days when my old man used to operate arcade machines in the shop. We were never religious either.
 
I often heard common stereotypes about video games saying it is childish, for kids, a waste of time.
Let's start with the genres of video games to disprove all this nonsense.

Horror: find clues, investigate your mission, defeat enemies. These are usually atmospheric with scare pop ups. Titles include Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Condemned, F.E.A.R, Fatal Frame, there are also movie based horrors like Friday the 13th that came out in the 80s.
I played the sequel to Fatal Frame, that gave me goosebumps from Japan...

Puzzle: solve puzzles and often look for clues.
I recommend a puzzle game called Antichamber. It is a unique atmosphere with a thought out presentation.


Role play games: known as RPG, it is a genre for story buffs and take the role of a character. Titles are Dreamfall, Skies of Arcadia, Kingdom Hearts, Zelda, Final Fantasy.
I recommend this genre to women. There are plenty female characters to get to know their stories with families and relatives to share their motives.
This genre also requires a sufficient amount of time for each play time though because you are familiarizing with new people in the game.

Fitness exercise games: This genre has come a long way. You need a motion sensor (Wii or ps3 or kinect) for this to control your body movement and do basic exercises with an instructor guiding you on the screen and accomplish the obstacles.
Senior homes have used this device on old people to get in shape


Now there's the hardcore gaming side relying on intense high accuracy and twitch hand to eye coordination which I will just list the genres First Person Shooters and Fighting games
 
All this might seem I'm defending this hobby, my point is there is something for everyone in this diverse hobby even for Orthodox Jews in this site and for all ages with benefiting results. Religious gaming, now that's a colliding genre.

[Israel Chai]

I am ashamed to say I've played all those types to an extreme point, and could name many others. For all the supposed benefits of them, all it did was waste my time.

Exercise games and Orthodox friendly games might have some value. If you could attach of series of resistance cords and use that technology to make a virtual reality system, you could have a pretty epic "taking over Israel" or "Modern Israeli defense" game where people actually get exercise and learn actual battle tactics. The American army has an epic one that no one's allowed to talk about.