Some people have this idea that playing games is a hobby and it puts me off. Playing games is not a hobby it is a pastime. Hobbies are often communal activities that encourage socialization, not pseudo online congregations. You can engage with your hobby in isolation and it can be your own activity for yourself, or you can share your hobby with others which I believe is the prime function of maintaining a hobby the goal being socialization. Just because you play a game with other people or groups of people does not then make playing a game a hobby, you are merely interacting with others inside of a video game which is very dystopian.

This same phenomenon of pseudo relationships exists in the streaming world where people congregate behind their screens to watch a person do a thing or play a game, but together, it’s essentially gooning without the sexual pathology.

The definition of hobby has been stretched to include video games. Video games are not a hobby, they facilitate the atomization of the self and promote further isolation of the human spirit. I can play a game with other people without having met the other people, in essence they become the medium itself exempt from the human form. I do not know you nor have I met you, if we did meet would we even share a common interest outside of the pastime we bonded over?

The system that relies on atomizing its people to the point of creating virtual subjects with no corporeal being and promoting socialization through video games is entirely bizarre, the amalgamation of things that are present in my existence pushes me closer to reaching peak psychosis.

There needs to be a material value to a hobby, it can’t just be data on a computer highlighting one’s achievements. Without computers, without all that data stored, your hobby seizes to exist.

Video games must be abolished, they are just another barrier preventing our escape from a doomed virtual world created for the sole purpose of pushing us further away from our physical bodies. Like the universe shifting, the same process is existing within society, they call it the red shift and we are Red Dead shifting away from ourselves.

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    4 months ago

    no i think that still counts as a hobby. the nature of hobbies is that most of them are uninteresting to people who do not share those hobbies. model trains is like the platonic “hobby” and it’s mostly solitary. i don’t know where you got the idea that the hobby is a natural, pre-social category that has been misrepresented under capitalism. if anything, it’s the capitalist separation of pleasure activities and work activities which gives us the concept in the first place.

    additionally, i’m not sure what conception of “material value” you’re using, or why that would be necessary to hobbies. like, you have to be able to sell it on the open market for it to be a hobby? is going for walks a hobby? certainly not in common usage. what about hiking? is smashing mailboxes in the dead of night a hobby? is doing whip its a hobby? what about my personal vice, trading card games? that’s very social and very material, and my first hand observation is that it is ideologically aligned with the reification of intellectual property and empowerment of corporations.