Hobbies are not meant to be jobs

One of my favorite hobbies is remote controlled cars. Competitively, these are driven around a track, and I've even set up rudimentary tracks on my property to drive them about in this manner. I am not racing against anyone else, nobody cares how many times I crash or have to walk over to the car to flip it back over, or even how well I painted and decorated the body shell.

Even if in a proverbial social vacuum, I love the hobby, from building a kit all the way through to driving on a track, or just in an empty baseball diamond.

It does not take much to motivate me to partake of that hobby in my free time.

With video games, another hobby I have enjoyed, it's not quite the same. Some of them I get bored of very quickly, because the input and reward mechanisms just don't work for me. The game may be well designed, but the process of hitting the button is unsatisfying and so I would have to rely on some big payoff, like an achievement or piece of loot, to keep me motivated during the parts of the game I didn't like.

What that really tells me is that I don't enjoy the game. If I am having to bank on a big dopamine hit sometime in the future to justify a boring monotony now, then more likely than not I should just quit playing altogether.

While I have that perception and modus operandi, it is not too difficult to identify when other people don't.

Video games are easy because folks will talk about "growing tired" of a game, or it not "being rewarding". What has happened is that they've burned out their pleasure centers from overexposure and now they can't feel anything doing what used to be enjoyable.

In R/C cars, that would be like not even wanting to charge the batteries, or weed the track, even once the weather is nice. Nothing has objectively changed about the hobby, but the perception of it on the part of the individual has, and so what needs to change is the individual, not the hobby.

Sometimes people get involved in a hobby due to social opportunism, something is useful because of the social opportunities that such a hobby affords. When that social leverage disappears, though, the interest in the hobby also disappears, except that now an individual is likely both monetarily and emotionally invested in the activity. The monetary connection is easy to understand, but the emotional one is not that much more complicated.

In short, when a person practices an activity, their body and mind adapt to perform that activity "better". Weight lifting is a good example of this, in that repeatedly lifting heavy weights will cause the body to adapt to a new "baseline" expectation, and then the lifter increases the weight to continue increasing the baseline expectation. Such adaptation costs the person to commit to, and so regardless of why they are committing, their actions have consequences.

In hobbies the adaptation is to the tasks that play a role in participating in that hobby. Building a model, reading a book, fly fishing, whatever the motivation for participating, there will be adaptation to that hobby, much like how to spend money on one thing, you have the opportunity cost of whatever else you could have purchased.

So when the motivations change, what happens to that adaptation? Well, nothing, because the motivation was only thematically related to the adaptation, and now you have a person who is good at doing something they don't find intrinsically rewarding. If there isn't an intrinsic reward, then they'll demand an extrinsic one so that the adaptations and investments they have made do not go to waste.

But that's not out of a love for the hobby or pastime at all, despite the superficial appearance of deep devotion and involvement, it's a way for someone to feel better about the time they had spent doing something by requiring the tasks they're doing to reward them beyond having the ability to do the task, and that's when a hobby becomes a job.

Jobs are frequently based around what is needed of us, not what we'd prefer to do, and there is an extrinsic reward that we are offered, through the paycheck, to help in motivating us to overlook misery and discontent because of the reward that comes afterwards.

We all need jobs to help pay bills, but we also need a break from what we're required to do to enjoy doing something we want to do. There needs to be a balance, and that balance isn't found by making the hobbies one participates in more rewarding, but in finding activities that one intrinsically enjoys, and spend some time on those, leaving the hobbies alone.

Not only will this help the individual grow in a healthy fashion and find better balance, but it will also ensure that hobbies are being shaped and guided by those who genuinely enjoy them, instead of being laden with responsibilities that the hobby was never meant to involve.

Why you are bored?

Because you are boring!

One of the complaints I have seen in increasing frequency relating to video games is that people are bored playing the game. What makes this distinctive isn't just that they're bored, but that they didn't used to be bored by the same game. They'll point to changes in how the game plays, the activities it offers, the balance and function of items and abilities, the lists are exhaustive on why what was once enjoyed is enjoyed no longer.

The problem common to all these different players, though, is that they're boring people, and the video game no longer distracts them sufficiently from that fact.

Take World of Warcraft as an example. It's still the same basic game it was on release. Oh sure, it looks different and the details on how each class' function works has changed, but the fundamentals haven't changed one bit. You hit buttons in the proper sequence to kill monsters faster than they kill you.

Every class in the game is a variation on this basic concept. Every mechanic of the monsters you fight is built on that foundation. Perform a pattern correctly and you'll be rewarded.

This is why derision and scorn are so rightfully heaped upon people who so openly boast of their accomplishments in video games, because such feats do not display any real achievement in the "real world". Should power go out, all the digital accomplishments mean nothing. Further, while being able to perform a pattern of activities may appear impressive to someone who has not mastered the patterns, even people who are not very intelligent can be trained.

So with games like World of Warcraft, what really changed?

According to some, the game "got easier". The patterns required of players were simplified, and so where people felt a sense of accomplishment before due to the complexity of the patterns they could master, as shallow and vapid as that is, even that feeling is now gone, and they're stuck with playing a game that they don't fundamentally see as a good way to spend their time without any feeling of achievement to distract them from such truths.

Video games aren't inherently bad for what they are - entertainment. I am always baffled at how people do not realize that when they brag about an achievement, it's akin to declaring one's favorite flavor of ice cream. It doesn't mean anything more than what that person attaches to it, and if they attach that much meaning and value to how they are entertained, it often speaks to their complete failure to prioritize anything else that is tangibly more important.

As another anecdote, I knew someone who flunked out of college because they couldn't demonstrate the discipline to learn skills that college was trying to teach them. They were good at WoW, but they weren't smart or trained to be any more valuable than that.

Such people are boring, and they represent a growing number of people who are desperate to avoid coming to that realization by blaming the activities.

Another explanation was that where the "old WoW" forced players to cooperate, the new game doesn't, and so people feel detached and disconnected, and then act as if such a revelation is meaningful.

What these players don't seem to realize is that they lack the basic social skills required to become part of a group in the first place. When the game forced everyone to play together, even the socially awkward could find others required to interact with them in order to achieve some common goal. When that requirement is removed, the true social capacity of an individual is put to the test, and a lot of gamers don't have the skills to make and sustain friendships with new people.

What this means is that WoW social dynamics reflect more of reality, and if these folks were trying to escape the dynamics of reality through playing a game, such a change which reveals their own deficiencies will promptly be blamed on the game for exposing them, rather than take ownership for their own failings which exist whether the game is there to highlight them or not.

So if you are ever tempted to declare yourself bored, or to explain how some activity you used to enjoy no longer holds the same value, be aware that others will pick up on the projection, even if they can't quite explain it with words. Other people see bored and socially challenged people for what they really are, and gamers are simply less and less able to convincingly distract themselves from that harsh reality.

The Division 2 Closed Alpha

I didn't pay attention to my emails and missed out, and there's an NDA on it anyway, but I will try to do a better job of paying attention when either the next alpha round comes or the beta stuff starts.

Ubisoft has been making some rather peculiar choices regarding settings, themes, and story, and the developer for this game is based out of Sweden, which to put mildly isn't doing as well as say, Poland or Hungary.

I enjoyed the first game, it make an indelible mark on me and it is a game that still gives me chills.

The trailer for the second one is already promising to be at least as disturbing, because what they're basically doing is looking into the future of the USA after SHTF. The first game was looking at the immediate aftermath, and I think this one is about 6 months after that one.

Of course, the specific apocalypse in the first game was inherently apolitical, and both the good and bad guy factions played to the "colorblind" Civic Nationalist script without fail, so it will be interesting to see if they keep that up. First game had "Diversity & Inclusion" as well, but it was rather subtle and easy to miss.

Check the trailer if you want to see what I mean about all of that.