There is a common misconception that certain forms of entertainment, like video games, are 'mindless' or even worthless activities. It is this misconception that I addressed in a recent tweet, which seems to have confused some. I want to clear up that confusion here.
My position is that playing video games is not mindless; it requires active participation; in fact, all entertainment requires active engagement. Although you might feel like a passive recipient of information when watching a film, you are creating complex ideas about, e.g., the film's characters, their motives, and the progression of the story. In this sense, all activities that require creativity are what I call 'epistemologically equal' since all such activities require that you actively create knowledge. Games are a particular form of entertainment, special because they are complex and autonomous worlds, which is why being a competent gamer requires a fair amount of knowledge and why there exist highly competitive gaming-tournaments. Nowadays, it is even possible to become a professional gamer. A game, then, is just as engaging to a gamer as, for example, a violin is to a violinist. The supposition that playing the violin is inherently 'better' than playing games is arbitrary. I would not know what that statement means. (The economica value of both activities is not straightforward either because of Esports and YouTube.) Certain video games are not as beautiful as others, just like all musical pieces are not equal. Moreover, although musical compositions have an objective aesthetic quality, we do not usually compare music with, e.g., scientific theories and their scientific beauty. We don't say, 'Beethoven's 5th is better than Einstein's special relativity.' What would it mean to say that music is better than science? Similarly, what would it mean to say that playing musical instruments is better than playing video games? Are certain activities more 'important' because they are more difficult? No, that is the so-called labour theory of value. Consider digging, for no particular reason, a yawning hole in the earth. This might be an arduous task, yet one that is of very little use to anyone. Likewise, a drawing created quickly by a professional artist might be of considerable worth, despite it being a relatively simple job for the artists. So value is not dependent on the difficulty of a task. In the same way, video games are not invalidated by being less challenging than certain other pursuits. And all creative pursuits are, in a fundamental sense, equal to one another in terms of our engagement with them. In light of all of this, it is mere prejudice to think that games are mindless, worthless activities.
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