When Video Games Become Too Realistic

10 Jun, 2008 by John Hawkins

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Back in the day, I used to love to play Dungeons and Dragons. Then, over time, I got more into video games (although they can’t hold my attention like they used to) and the whole idea of massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) fascinated me.

However, there were two things that kept me from ever getting into MMORPG.

#1) So much of it is time intensive. Put another way, the deciding factor in how well you do is how much time you’re willing to spend playing. When you’re a college student or have nothing better to do after work than just play video games for 5-6 hours at a stretch, that may sound pretty appealing, but if you’re a busy person, who has the time to play that much?

#2) These games reminded me too much of this…

Now, I used to work for an ISP and unsurprisingly, there were a lot of hard core gaming junkies working there.

Once — and I kid you not — I had one of them tell me that he was spending hours in a game working on his fishing skill. In other words, he sat in front of a computer, logged into a game, where his character was fishing. Another person told me they were running a shop online in one of these MMORPGs.

I was flabbergasted.

What’s the point of playing a game where you spend hours fishing, something that you could actually do in real life or worse yet, working at a business — isn’t that the sort of mundane thing you play games to get away from?

Hat tip Hot Air for the video.