Why Game?

A Life Well Wasted

Robert Ashley

Video Games, Leisure

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2009

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Robert Ashley wonders why he spends his free time playing videogames, asks random people on the street about it, talks to a researcher whose work attempts to harness the brain power wasted on gaming, gets to know an eccentric, forward-thinking game designer who lives sustainably with his family of four on $14,000 a year, and gets a first-hand account of what it's like to work on terrible games (and what it's like to get terrible reviews) from an anonymous game developer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My voice is really, really bad. Oh, I don't mind. I like a bad voice. Okay.
0:07.0	So much partying. Yeah, understandable. I'm here at the game developers conference in San Francisco, a yearly meet-up for much of the gaming industry.
0:16.0	It's a pretty boring event if you're not into sitting through talks about advanced techniques and artificial intelligence and staring at PowerPoint presentations all day.
0:25.0	But it's a rare opportunity for man on the street interviews about gaming.
0:29.0	Practically anyone I run into here is a knowledgeable insider, an expert in the field, and I have a single simple question.
0:37.0	This is like an easy but surprisingly tough to answer question, and the question is, why do you play video games?
0:44.0	Yeah, because it's fun?
0:48.0	Anything else?
0:51.0	Anything else?
0:52.0	Because it's addictive.
0:54.0	Because I've done it all my life and I think it's more fun than watching TV.
0:59.0	Why do I play video games?
1:02.0	Because it's fun. Because it's fun.
1:04.0	It's stimulation.
1:05.0	It's really fun and it's all about
1:07.0	making a time when you would be sitting and doing nothing exciting.
1:10.0	Because they're fun and something to do in your spare time yeah got a lot of spare time. I'm 30 years old going on 90, married and juggling
1:31.0	odd jobs to make ends meet.
1:33.4	I've been playing games regularly since I was six or seven.
1:37.0	I spent months, probably years of my life, twiddling my thumbs in front of a screen.
1:42.3	Games are my default past time, the thing I do when I've got time to kill,
1:46.3	which is rare these days. The thing is, I'm not really sure would I get out of all that time
	...

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