I don't see how the early anthropologists would be so bored with this tribe. They sound so different than anything else and fascinating.
This shows how important play is to develop imaginary things like gods, rituals, etc. however, I do wish American adults played a little less. Whenever I'm in the u.s. or when American friends visit me they're constantly futzing around on their phone playing games. I mean constantly and nearly everyone.
Imagine how much you could accomplish if you used that time to for example learn a new language. And before you say that people need to take a break every now and then the people playing these games don't seem to be taking it easy - they're working really hard it!
So there probably is some value in shaming play, at least in adults.
Those "casual" (not really) games are addictive without really being "fun" per se. People aren't playing at them, any more than they're playing a slot machine. They're just hooked on them, with social reinforcement by the same mechanisms as prime-time television (the water-cooler "did you get to see/do X last night" sort of conversation.) They're like viruses spreading through the population.
There are probably a few reasons why America has the problem especially badly—maybe an higher-than-average prevalence of ADHD makes this sort of addiction easier to fall into; maybe being the origin of these games and their first launch-market means we get saturated in them (and especially in their coordinated "viral PR" launch campaigns) in a way few other countries do. Really, I think it's just that the social pressure factor is stronger—we really like having shared private experiences to talk about at water-coolers. See also: soap operas.
As a person with ADHD I actually think that it makes this type of addiction less likely, almost impossible. People with ADHD crave novelty and these free to play games are anything but novel. For example I spent several consecutive hours playing 2048 when it first came out. But after a beat it twice I never played it again it was boring. However I know one person who I know dosent have ADHD who still players it all the time on his phone. The very idea of doing that seams so dull to me even though I know he enjoys it.
I do actually have ADHD myself as well (clinically diagnosed and everything), and you are indeed right—ADHD makes it harder to get entrapped by such addictions. I was using the idea as a shorthand (which I guess by the downvotes is a Very Bad Thing I should never do?) America doesn't have an ADHD problem—it has a dopaminergic imbalance problem, but in the other direction which people don't talk about nearly ever. America has a hypomania problem.
The "Protestant work ethic" is what you get when social mores are mostly decided by people who are unable to get bored. Given that America was founded by such people, the gene pool experienced a heavy selection effect toward hypomanic tendencies and hasn't recovered since. (America's immigration policies only accepting what amount to extremely hard workers continue this trend.)
It's more like the games are playing the adults. It's "Core Wars" on a cloud based scale. The goal is to write a program that can virally consume timeshare amongst the 'cores' (people) that comprise our world wide mainframe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next...
I've never played phone-games much, but enough that I wondered if I could find a better use for the time. I found one:
Chess
Chess works pretty well as a phone-game. You can blitz against the computer and work through endlessly non-repeating permutations of mid and late game play that you'd rarely see against human opponents. Playing against your cell phone does not adequately prepare you for human opponents on its own, but it does help you improve your game.
While being good at chess if of questionable utility, at least it's somewhat respected and can be used in social settings. It's viewed as a skill, unlike being good at flappy bird.
It's interesting to consider why it is that some games are respected and viewed as a skill.
I think what sets games like chess, and to a greater extent go, apart from trivial addictive games, is that they teach concentration, executive function, pattern recognition, and in some cases jumping up and down abstraction hierarchies, in a way that probably extends beyond the game's domain into life.
I don't know what to do about the morass of addictive games that are taking over human mindshare. There have always been some; even crossword puzzles are arguably the pre-computer version. They strengthen recall and concept association but how useful is that, since most of what's required is trivia? Scrabble at least is social (with the benefits that entails) in addition to strengthening recall of uncommon words.
Some time ago there was an article here about Croatia(I think?) making chess playing mandatory for all school children. The comments section was full of people saying that it's stupid because there is no correlation between playing chess and any skill useful in life. There are no studies that prove that playing chess improves anything, apart from....being good at chess. I don't know if that is true personally, but that was the vibe HN was giving.
My grandfather used crossword puzzles to help himself learn English, so while I'm personally frustrated by the Trivial Pursuit-like nature of modern puzzles, I wouldn't regard them with the same disdain I give the average Zygna or EA title.
I should note that you're taking this a step further than I was: it's not all "phone games" that are bad (is there anything that "phone games" as a genre have in common?)—it's just what are commonly referred to as "free-to-play casual social games" that are insidious.
You can have great game experiences on a phone! You can build good, fun games, either in-depth or casual, for mobile, just like you can build them for consoles. In fact, just because a game is "casual" doesn't make it bad! Some of my favorite games have been casual few-minutes-at-a-time pick-up-and-put-down things; non-time-based puzzle games (e.g. KAMI[1]) work especially well for this—they're functionally equivalent to doing a crossword puzzle—but even action games like Tiny Wings[2] can work if they're self-contained.
Then, of course, you can also have things like RPGs and action-adventure games, of just the same quality you'd see from a console.
The most important difference, I think, is that people don't tend to play the good games in the middle of a conversation. The good games are actually engrossing, and therefore can only be played as an exclusive action—you might see someone playing them on the bus, but never just fiddling with them while hanging out with friends. It's only the games with no fun-value at all that are capable of the "empty addiction" you see on people stuck pulling a slot-machine arm all day.
Imagine how much you could accomplish if you used that time to for example learn a new language.
I disagree. The best way to learn a language is by playing. Reading compelling stories, making puns and jokes, flirting with the natives, having some fun!
And I hold the same opinion with mathematics. You can learn to attack some classes of solved problems without having fun, but to be a mathematician you have to follow your sense of aesthetics. Now this is highly sophisticated fun, the kind that takes years to develop. But once you achieve it, it is bottomless, requires nothing but a little free time and it is so useful that our entire civilization runs on it!
> I don't see how the early anthropologists would be so bored with this tribe.
The stereotypical anthropologist studies foreign tribes by interviewing their members and observing their rituals. Rituals are particularly important because they yield a lot of data about a tribe's traditions and belief systems.
But if the subjects refuse to chat and don't seem to hold any rituals over the course of a year, I can imagine why the anthropologist might get bored. He's not bored because his subjects are uninteresting. He's bored (or rather, frustrated) because he's unable to do the work that he came here to do.
> I don't see how the early anthropologists would be so bored with this tribe.
Once you document day-to-day living, which is probably not too unlike most of their neighbors. The only thing left is to document differences. In this case "doesn't do anything interesting" pretty much closes the book on them and it's time to move on.
Other groups will have interesting myths, or variations of myths, games, dances, music, etc. These guys basically just do nothing, and there's not a whole terrible lot that you can write about that.
I'm guessing they are boring because every day is the same as the day before. They have no religion, no beliefs, no customs. None of the things antropologists get excited about.
Playing game on your smartphone and learning a (new) language are not necessarily incompatible: I'm addicted to memrise, which is very much like a game in its mechanics, but is teaching me an awful lot of useful Japanese words...
This shows how important play is to develop imaginary things like gods, rituals, etc. however, I do wish American adults played a little less. Whenever I'm in the u.s. or when American friends visit me they're constantly futzing around on their phone playing games. I mean constantly and nearly everyone.
Imagine how much you could accomplish if you used that time to for example learn a new language. And before you say that people need to take a break every now and then the people playing these games don't seem to be taking it easy - they're working really hard it!
So there probably is some value in shaming play, at least in adults.