Online gaming has become so much a part of modern life that our hardy sociologists are starting to talk, amongst themselves mostly, about the things we are doing less often or even no longer because of the time we are spending playing games. Given that games will never be replaced by laundry or the like, let’s take a humorous look at all those formerly wonderful experiences that we may have ceded to the non-gaming cohort amongst us.
Casino
We might make a trip to a land based casino but, even if we do, we might still spend more time with our favorite mobile games than with the casino’s games. Online casino games have many advantages over land based casino games such as a much larger selection, no waiting, and the massive advantage of mobile. We can play anytime, anywhere – even in our pajamas. No travel necessary.
We always prefer online casino games when we need a diversion from the other games we play.
Cooking
Who has time for cooking when we can just go out to eat, get takeaway, or buy prepared foods. There are so many different types of restaurants and so much variety within each category that we can sample food from many different parts of the world without so much as buying a whisk, much less using it.
Shopping
This is a lot more than shopping for food. We actually do shop for food as long as we can eat it right away or at least as soon as we get it home or it is delivered. The shopping we are referring to here is for clothes, shoes, appliances, flowers, and so on. Why go to the mall when the “mall” can come to us? Thank God for the internet!
Reading
We usually read the instructions about how to play a new game. We read street signs when we’re driving. We read menus, messages, the time of day on our time-of-day delivery devices, and bills. Anything more is just time away from games.
Carry an Address Book
We don’t need one most of the time. But woe is us if our phone falls and breaks, or accidentally gets dropped in some water, or gets lost. We can live without our contacts list but our games! So we should back up our phone but a phone book? No way!
Laundry
The only thing we want to hang out to dry is a mean character on the game we happen to be playing. Evolution is such a wonderful thing. We’ve gone from doing laundry by hand down by the riverside, to doing it at home in a machine, to exporting it to someone else to do!
Daydreaming
How are you going to get over the hump to the next level if you’re daydreaming while the game is going on. There is a big difference between daydreaming and thinking about our favorite game when we’re not playing it. That we do all the time!
God Bless All Sociologists
As astute observers of the human zoo, sociologists have concluded that games can both separate us and bring us together; can delay our growing up spurt or make us more likely to accept responsibility; can dull our cognitive response to real life stimuli or can sharpen our cognitive response to real life stimuli; can increase our level of tension especially when we get oh so close to that elusive next level only to fall back again or can be a powerful psychological sedative of sorts, calming us from the slings and arrows of daily life.
It can make us shy or can make us more open to meeting new people; can focus us so strongly on one task that we filter out everything else that’s going on around us like climate change or can teach us to selectively filter out our surroundings so we pay little or no attention to the unimportant stuff and pay as much attention or more to the really important stuff like climate change; can make us demonstrate our frustrations by throwing things (but not the tablet) or can make us more accepting of the need to start over.
We can be made incapable of going with the flow except as the flow relates to games or can make us more capable of going with the flow in many non-gaming aspects of daily life; can make us unhealthy as we eschew proper diet, exercise, or sleep or can make us healthier by getting us to the point where we feel we must get some exercise or some food or a good night’s sleep.
Perspective
In short, games can be a great benefit to us in every aspect of life as long as we keep them in proper perspective, maintain a sound sense of humor, and treat life as a game itself. This last bit of insight reminds us about a famous writer we had to read in high school who said that all life is a stage. In modern parlance, we can say that all life is like a really interesting and exciting game.
