Not playing video games is immature

People who don't video game are losers, they're also wicked immature. It's immature not to. Many want to be seen as an adult. If your primary concern is seeming like an adult, it means you aren't one, and lack the maturity to be what you are without shame. Video games are fun for all ages. Who never had fun as they watched a child chase an invaluable Pokemon in Pokemon Go! that you unleashed in the center of a six-lane highway? And there you stood gleefully with your binoculars on a nearby grassy knoll as you made someone else play Frogger and caused a seven-car pile up.

People negate the great indoors at their own peril. If shut-ins are bad, shut-outs may be worse. Realistically globalization is leading to the homogenization of culture and learning. And yes, experience is important, traveling, seeing the world, but the bigger picture, cosmic way to examine the world has always been led by the atomic study of things. Extroverts prefer the bigger scale, the day-to-day, and experience. The small scale is the inverted look at things preferred by introverts, such as the study of philosophy, and literature and arts. But the formats are polluted. Only post-pandemic are people serious about online learning, for example. If we have popstar singers, writers, and performers, it stands to reason we would have popstar educators so exceptional their courses should be reaching and teaching millions. If education is expensive, hands-off learning of rehashed ideas and textbooks are arbitrarily updated to sell more copies, there can be alternatives to the form. Text is seen as the holy grail because it's words, meaning everyone on Twitter is rich and smart and everyone on Twitch is poor and stupid. It's the opposite. A video game can be text-based, but it can also contain videos, music, and also be hands-on instructional. Most learning is not this.

In the real world, work-life balance, yadda, "gyms are important," fraternize, socialize, and send your child to a summer camp ran by Jared Fogle, whatever gives them the lived experience to write a memoir. But there are only so many life experiences, this is why art and its fantasy are popular in the first place. Yes escapism is bad as is overindulgence in most anything. To hammer against it completely is a mistake. Anything that helps with imagination and ideas is generally a good thing. There's countless scientists and entrepreneurs now who speak of the influence of shows like Star Trek or The Twilight Zone. The real world for most people isn't a nomadic state of ever-changing experiences. Most people's lives are static. They are routine. Drive to work, drive home, eat out, visit family and friends, clean, fret over responsibilities, and do your zero-to-three hobbies. Doing extracurricular things requires time, planning, and money that often people don't just have, if it's possible to do those activities in real life at all. With a VR headset or a monitor you can experience becoming a spree killer or living as a viking.

There's also the history of gaming. Sports is gaming. When the Aztecs would play soccer with decapitated heads it was the original Rocket League. Tetris is based on a Russian sort of dominos. Casinos and cards, checkers and chess are all the same thing just often less sophisticated. Chess is a poor man's Valorant, only, the gatekeeping schizophrenics who play chess and live on a park bench and think the barista at Starbucks is in love with him because she put a heart on his cup get to sound sophisticated while knocking over a toy horse with a toy castle. Nerds. And if they were on Twitch I'd roast their banal comparisons of every societal problem to the fall of the Roman Empire and they'd get even more catatonic and seek more council from the second voice in their head. No mercy for the older, either. The same people who thought video games created violence were playing BINGO. Bingo relies only on your ability to remember numbers, likely a damning condemnation of our public school system where remembering dates is the most anyone learned, people left trying to gamify the one skill they were programmed with. If you updated to Candy Crush perhaps you'd be fun enough your loved ones wouldn't put you in a home to begin with.

 Aside from the odd title, I never played video games in my twenties and before with any regularity. Typically they didn't have much story and the basis was combative and an attempt to defeat the enemy. Now the spontaneous creation, mixed in tandem with literal millions of potential online co-inhabitants surpasses anything I can think of in terms of group-learning complexity. I mean, you're creating essentially a second world, a cloned and artificial reality for which to experiment to any end.  The subsequent potential for education is limitless. No role-playing scenario in a school can compete. There's nothing that could be say, more telling in a simplified way than exploring a domesticated life in Stardew Valley. The idea that as a young person you could faux start a business and learn about the this gradual progression in a safe and fun way and how to profit using a min-max system is invaluable. Plus you can put a hat on your horse.

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Education is most effective with interest, and with this I see it becoming gamified. Think of what happens when online learning takes over, and the millions government takes from people for campuses and books is converted to fun learning programs. Naturally when given the choice between education and education that isn't boring people will choose the latter. With virtual reality headsets slowly reaching critical mass this reality is an inevitability. Even if none of this were true, you'd still be dumb for sleeping on a form of entertainment where a single game generated more revenue than any other media ever has, and ignoring for some reason a cultural heavyweight phenomenon and removing it from your vocabulary as a reference. For those engaged, they will have the ability to contextualize if not directly create the future. For the naysayers out there, please understand if you cannot find a video game you enjoy to spend time with it is because you are too dim-witted and unimaginative to glean any value from it, and you're worse for it.