Video games are one of the few places where failure motivates us to get back up. It's a temporary setback that allows you to keep going, teaching us resilience and the power of a second chance.

Video games are (usually) designed in such a way that there is a guaranteed path to victory. You just need to find it. So failing means you found one more path that doesn't lead to victory. That mindset helps motivate me to keep trying until I find the path that the designers made for me to find.

Life is not that way, unfortunately. There are plenty of no-win scenarios. Running into those makes me want to curl up in a ball under a blanket and run away from my problems.

I'm currently experiencing this, which is why I'm on lemmy instead of working. I'm currently in database hell and I can't find the way out.

I'd say in video games you can always find a way to win a battle. In real life more often you need to find a way out from the battle.
There are plenty of no-win scenarios.

This was something great about the Witcher 3. More than one quest, you end up with choices between one shitty outcome or another with no happy ending. For a fantasy game in a magical world, it wasn't afraid to be realistic.
In life there's no isolated consequences neither a guaranteed path to success
- This is a critical piece of the puzzle and I love that you pointed it out. Bare necessities aside (shelter, food, etc), we start out with a set of win conditions (from parents, friends, etc), but ultimately we can determine them ourselves. In most democracies, nobody can tell you how to live your life.
Right here with you bud. Currently on the low end of the vicious cycle in which I get a new job, be the absolute best at it for awhile, then get burn out and quit. I’m pretty fucking close to quitting. And I don’t know what I’m gonna do next. Thanks ADHD

You term it in a very positive way but I term it as nothing but "hopium".

The hope of may be you will do better in the next game or in the next next game or the one after - gamer developers use this to keep us hooked is what I believe.

You will definitely get better aa you keep playing the game and this improvement will give you even more of that hopium drug. It is a cycle which cannot be broken unless you get genuinely bored of the game.

Okay, and what's the negative part?
- Life doesn't work that way. You have only one life.

Glad that impossible NES games taught me i’m a failure early on

Ryukahr has been doing a series on the difficult nes games:
Youtube playlist
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Joke's on you... I've never finished a video game!

"Don't go hollow, now."

There is so much focus on the lore of Miyazaki's games, but not enough about how it also has hella meta commentary on games and players, too. One of the main ones is how death doesn't matter, and no matter how hard things get you, the player, can overcome all these obstacles and beat the game if you persist. There are examples of those who do survive until the end, and many examples of those who give up at various stages of the game, much like how real players would if they find themselves unable to beat a particular boss necessary to complete the game. The NPC's stories often mirror that of a player who faces the same objectives.

Miyazaki? As in Hayao Miyazaki, the Studio Ghibli director? What video games has he done?
- No, there’s a Hidetaka Miyazaki now, the head of FromSoftware who is unrelated to Hayao Miyazaki as far as I know. It took me a while to figure that out.

And reality you fail the capatilism fucks you up because failures is never a option is this capatilistic hellscape

"Comrade, come! Ve have no time for play videogames, da?"

Up to a point. I played Cuphead and it was too hard and gave in.

Permanently Deleted

Idk man my life fell apart and I failed out of college. Hard. Picked myself back up and learned a trade and I've had a very successful career that I love and a beautiful old home I'm remodeling and a partner who loves me and we're gonna get married soon.

Video games are just something to pass the time.

All of life involves doing things to pass the time. What makes video games (and all hobbies) different is that you do it voluntarily because you enjoy it.

I too have a job that I like very much (love is a strong word for a place of employment because if I didn’t have bills I wouldn’t be working let’s be real). I also have a home that I am happy in, a loving partner and a young son.

I achieved most of these things thanks to video games. They got me interested in computers which led to a lucrative career in technology. They helped me unwind after countless long days of work which kept me from losing my mind. They led to life long friendships due to the shared common interest. I was able to pick up my wife thanks to what I learned from Leisure Suit Larry, etc.

I guess what I’m saying is a healthy relationship with any hobby can be good, or bad when taken to an extreme.
Yes.

I think with something like this you have to do a literature search. Even then it’s kind of tough because I’m sure it’s very hard to do objective tests of these traits.

You might say that any activity has similar aspects. Learning a difficult passage in music, learning to speak languages, learning to throw a basketball through a hoop, etc.

I’m not sure there is a huge amount of evidence that video games teach resilience any more than any other similar activity. Moreover, it’s easily the kind of thing that our biases set us up to believe things that aren’t there. For every person who learned resilience from video games, there might be three other people who learned poor lessons, like “I should be lazy and play video games and not study for my exams.”

With academic or professional resilience, I can’t say I’ve seen any positive correlation with video games.

I could easily argue that excessive video game play makes you less resilient to doing non-video-game challenges.

The group of Intellect Devourers, when you're lv 1 in the beginning of Baldur's Gate 3, proved this shower thought about 5 times for me.

Same with competitive sports. As a tennis player, if I lose a match I'm usually doubly motivated to get back out there for another one.

This is what I love about the Souls genre. It's a great feeling to chase.

Jokes on you, I save scum

Jane McGonigal has a TED Talk about exactly this: https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world

I found that I really, really enjoy extremely hard video games, ever since I did some koan training.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/muXfZr5EYCfZqLmsb/memetic-hazards-in-videogames similar ideas to what you're talking about

My therapist told me this exact thing last week.