Life Is A Video Game Quotes

‎"Was that your plan all along? Show me where to go, then convince me there's nothing I can do to save my sister?" "Actually, my plan all along was to become a rockstar, travel the world collecting fan girls, and then getting really fat and spending the rest of my life playing video games while the girls kept comin', thinking I look good as I did in my music videos." He shrugs as if to say, 'who knew the world would turn out so different?

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

To all the secret writers, late-night painters, would-be singers, lapsed and scared artists of every stripe, dig out your paintbrush, or your flute, or your dancing shoes. Pull out your camera or your computer or your pottery wheel. Today, tonight, after the kids are in bed or when your homework is done, or instead of one more video game or magazine, create something, anything. Pick up a needle and thread, and stitch together something particular and honest and beautiful, because we need it. I need it. Thank you, and keep going.

People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails splattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was suppossed to try everything. If there was a cave, you went in it. If there was a mysterious stranger, you talked to him. If there was a map, you followed it. But in games, you had a hundred million billion lives and Val only had this one.

Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the Atari video game system, once stated, ‘Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea, It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.

Every time I run into you for the rest of our lives, I'll ask you to make a game with me. There's some groove in my brain that insists it is a good idea." "Isn't that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result." "That's a game character's life, too," Sam said. "The world of infinite restarts. Start again at the beginning, this time you might win. And it's not as if all our results were bad. I love the things we made. We were a great team." Sam offered Sadie his hand, and she shook it. She pulled him into her, and she kissed Sam on the cheek. "I love you, Sadie," Sam said. "I know, Sam. I love you, too.

It's not a question of can or can't. There are some things in life you just do.

Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.

So here's how it went in God's heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story-how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn't die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master's degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life. AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!

Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.

I happen to have a certain fondness for existing--soda wouldn't have that lovely fizzy feeling if you were dead. Think of all the things you would miss: Cartoons, music, movies, video games, music, art, fingernail growth, sex...well, perhaps not sex, depending on how weird your mortician is.

......

Maybe I could use a little metal on the inside, I thought. If I'd kept my heart better armored, where would I be now? Easy—I’d be at home, medicating myself into a monotone. Drowning my sorrows in video games. Working shifts at Smart Aid. Dying inside, day by day, from regret.

Avoid trivial pursuits. You are a child of God, destined for glory, and called to do great things in His Name. Do not waste your life on hobbies, sports, and other recreational pursuits. Do not throw away the precious moments of your life on entertainment, movies, and video games. Though some of these things can properly have a 'small place' in the Christian’s life, we must be careful not to give undue attention to temporal and fruitless activities. Do not waste your life. Employ the time of your youth in developing the character and skills necessary to be a useful servant of God.

When I was a young man, I had liberty, but I did not see it. I had time, but I did not know it. And I had love, but I did not feel it. Many decades would pass before I understood the meaning of all three. And now, the twilight of my life, this understanding has passed into contentment. Love, liberty, and time: once so disposable, are the fuels that drive me forward. And love, most especially, mio caro. For you, our children, our brothers and sisters. And for the vast and wonderful world that gave us life, and keeps us guessing. Endless affection, mia Sofia. Forever yours, Ezio Auditore.

As for me... I'm fine. I have bad dreams, but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scares. I like the way that sounds. I carry a lot of scares.

Standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek. An agoraphobic shut-in, with no real friends, family, or genuine human contact. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified video game.

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

In real life, you don't get a reset, and you don't get extra lives, and I got the crap pounded out of me.

Sometimes life is like a video game. When things get harder, and the obstacles get tougher, it just means you leveled up.

But I feel like I've spent most of my life wishing for someone else's approval, or relying on their reassurance that I'm living my life the right way. And somewhere along the way, I forgot to care what I thought about myself. I feel trapped beneath all the things that make me think less of myself. If my life were a video game, I would have hit the reset button a long time ago.

– I understand the world can be cruel place and there are people out there counting on naive kids like you to take advantage of. Don't just think because it's video games people can't get hurt.

I was obsessed. I couldn't stop myself. It was not healthy, but I couldn't stop. I didn't feel like there was anything else in my life to stop for. We all have periods of our life when we're trapped doing something we hate and we develop habits that have nothing to do with our long-term goals to fill the downtime, right? I hope you identify with that idea. It's the only way I can explain becoming so emotionally invested in a video game that I would get in my car and drive around town sobbing if my internet went out.

When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the head with a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later, viciously push his younger sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced coffee table. His mother picked him up, immediately afterward (but not her frightened daughter), and told him in hushed tones not to do such things, while she patted him comfortingly in a manner clearly indicative of approval. She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. That’s the unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves advocates for full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to any command uttered by an adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if he demands it while immersed self-importantly in a video game. The future mates of such boys have every reason to hate their mothers-in-law. Respect for women? That’s for other boys, other men—not for their dear sons.

Ultimately, the main reasons why I will be chubby for life are (1) I have virtually no hobbies except dieting. I can’t speak any non-English languages, knit, ski, scrapbook, or cook. I have no pets. I don’t know how to do drugs. I lost my passport three years ago when I moved into my house and never got it renewed. Video games scare me because they all seem to simulate situations I’d hate to be in, like war or stealing cars. So if I ever lost weight I would also lose my only hobby; (2) I have no discipline; I’m like if Private Benjamin had never toughened up but, in fact, got worse; (3) Guys I’ve dated have been into me the way I am; and (4) I’m pretty happy with the way I look, so long as I don’t break a beach chair.

If life were like a video game, she would have used her power move to whip Jen in the air and knock her against the wall with two strikes of a lacrosse stick. Of course, if life really were like a video game, Val would probably have to do that in a bikini and with giant breasts, each one made of separately animated polygons.

I might play the hero in video games, but I’ll be the villain in life if it keeps her safe.

I play video games and watch TV, but there's more to life than that. Faxing and the Internet have created a global community. The kid next door has become the kid in Latin America or Asia.

In the long run, completing a marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends while struggling to make ends meet makes us happier than buying a new computer. These activities are stressful, arduous, and often unpleasant. They also require withstanding problem after problem. Yet they are some of the most meaningful moments and joyous things we’ll ever do. They involve pain, struggle, even anger and despair—yet once they’re accomplished, we look back and get all misty-eyed telling our grandkids about them.

Games were not just a diversion, I realized. Games could make you feel. If great literature could would its power through nothing but black squiggles on a page, how much more could be done with movement, sound, and color?

I happened to see Larry King interview Billy Graham shortly after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. I had read an article the previous month about violent video games and their effects on the minds of children, desensitizing them to the act of killing. Larry King asked Billy Graham what was wrong with the world, and how such a thing as Columbine could happen. I knew, because Billy Graham was an educated man, he had read the same article I had read, and I began calculating his answer for him, that violence begets violence, and that we live in a culture desensitized to the beauty of human life and the sanctity of creation. But Billy Graham did not blame video games. Billy Graham looked Larry King in the eye and said, 'Thousands of years ago, a young couple lived in a garden called Eden, and God placed a tree in the Garden and told them not to eat from the tree...' And I knew in my soul he was right.

It's not a question of can or can't. There are some things in life you just do.

life is a video game, only difference is that you don't always get three chances!

Thinking and talking about love leads to Love, which is the enemy. Do not consort with the enemy. Even if those hot-ass actors in the movies make it look cuddly and nice and tempting, don’t fall for it. It’s the biggest bad in the world, the worst villain ever created by hormone-pumped pubescent morons. It’s the Joker, Lex Luthor, that one overweight guy who’s always messing with the Scooby-Doo gang. It’s the final boss in the massive joke of a video game you call your life.

In addition, he came to a realization: he had a fanatic love of video games and the skills to make money creating them, but that was not the best way to spend his life. “I wanted to have more impact,” he says.

If only I could handle my problems like a video-game style battle against a boss. But there are no power-ups in real life. No FTW moment when I can declare total pwnage. I don’t even know who the bad guys are.

Or try this: Place yourself in the middle of the room. Turn on the stereo, the television, and a beeping video game, and then invite into the room several small children with ice cream cones. Crank up the volume on each piece of electrical equipment, then take away the children’s ice cream. Imagine these circumstances existing every day and night of your life. What would you do?

she had that rich-girl demeanor, treating life like a video game she’d already played through twice.

Modern culture anesthetizes the mind while mainlining the soul with emotional experiences that keep the worldling believing he is really living.

Video Games are a great analogy for life. You go through level, get thrown off by obstacles, and face several enemies.

From now on, every ghost who enters the world of the dead will have to come with a story, the story of his or her life, and tell it to the harpies. It doesn't have to be a big adventure; it can just be a description of a day playing with the children, like Lyra's, or whatever it might happen to be. In exchange for this true story, the harpies will lead that ghost outside to dissolve into the Universe and be one with everything else. Of course, I stole that, as I stole everything else! I stole that from the Oresteia -- the bargain Aeschylus's characters make with the Furies that are following them about. "You will be the guardians of this place, and we will worship you and we will give you honor," they say. Then the Furies are satisfied, and they leave off their pursuit of Orestes. There's nothing new in stories. It goes round again and again and again. But that was something that I thought was a good way out for Lyra, and it did reassert the value of story. States it fully and clearly, brings it out. And also the value of realistic story. It's got to be true. And there's a moral consequence; for those who have eyes to see, they can see it: you have to live. You have to experience things to have a story to tell, and if you spend all your life playing video games, that will not do.

Bruce Lee was proof: not all Asian Men were doomed to a life of being Generic. If there was even one guy who had made it, it was at least theoretically possible for the rest. But easy cases make bad law, and Bruce Lee proved too much. He was a living, breathing video game boss-level, a human cheat code, an idealized avatar of Asian-ness and awesomeness permanently set on Expert difficulty. Not a man so much as a personification, not a mortal so much as a deity on loan to you and your kind for a fixed period of time. A flame that burned for all yellow to understand, however briefly, what perfection was like.

People don't talk about death. Not really. People fear it. Ignore it. Deny it. They're happy to blow one another's heads off in those infernal video games or devour horrific films where people are murdered in the most gruesome of ways, while refusing to face the reality of what death is or to have a grown-up discussion about what it means.

If you're reading this, you must be in dire need of a change. The same thing happened to me, long ago. I'd lost sight of what mattered most in life... real connections with other people and nature. So I dropped everything and moved to the place I truly belong.

six obvious ways to make an activity less convenient: •  Increase the amount of physical or mental energy required (leave the cell phone in another room, ban smoking inside or near a building). •  Hide any cues (put the video game controller on a high shelf). •  Delay it (read email only after 11:00 a.m.). •  Engage in an incompatible activity (to avoid snacking, do a puzzle). •  Raise the cost (one study showed that people at high risk for smoking were pleased by a rise in the cigarette tax; after London imposed a congestion charge to enter the center of the city, people’s driving habits changed, with fewer cars on the road and more use of public transportation). •  Block it altogether (give away the TV set).

...he didn’t know when he was going to get the chance to play WoW again. And it was damn important to do his bit to save all life on Azeroth while he could.

The rising sun will eventually set, A newborn's life will fade. From sun to moon, moon to sun, Give peaceful rest to the living dead.

People are fed up of movies and video games, now their real-time entertainment is to play with human emotions

10 ways to raise a wild child. Not everyone wants to raise wild, free thinking children. But for those of you who do, here's my tips: 1. Create safe space for them to be outside for a least an hour a day. Preferable barefoot & muddy. 2. Provide them with toys made of natural materials. Silks, wood, wool, etc...Toys that encourage them to use their imagination. If you're looking for ideas, Google: 'Waldorf Toys'. Avoid noisy plastic toys. Yea, maybe they'll learn their alphabet from the talking toys, but at the expense of their own unique thoughts. Plastic toys that talk and iPads in cribs should be illegal. Seriously! 3. Limit screen time. If you think you can manage video game time and your kids will be the rare ones that don't get addicted, then go for it. I'm not that good so we just avoid them completely. There's no cable in our house and no video games. The result is that my kids like being outside cause it's boring inside...hah! Best plan ever! No kid is going to remember that great day of video games or TV. Send them outside! 4. Feed them foods that support life. Fluoride free water, GMO free organic foods, snacks free of harsh preservatives and refined sugars. Good oils that support healthy brain development. Eat to live! 5. Don't helicopter parent. Stay connected and tuned into their needs and safety, but don't hover. Kids like adults need space to roam and explore without the constant voice of an adult telling them what to do. Give them freedom! 6. Read to them. Kids don't do what they are told, they do what they see. If you're on your phone all the time, they will likely be doing the same thing some day. If you're reading, writing and creating your art (painting, cooking...whatever your art is) they will likely want to join you. It's like Emilie Buchwald said, "Children become readers in the laps of their parents (or guardians)." - it's so true! 7. Let them speak their truth. Don't assume that because they are young that you know more than them. They were born into a different time than you. Give them room to respectfully speak their mind and not feel like you're going to attack them. You'll be surprised what you might learn. 8. Freedom to learn. I realize that not everyone can homeschool, but damn, if you can, do it! Our current schools system is far from the best ever. Our kids deserve better. We simply can't expect our children to all learn the same things in the same way. Not every kid is the same. The current system does not support the unique gifts of our children. How can they with so many kids in one classroom. It's no fault of the teachers, they are doing the best they can. Too many kids and not enough parent involvement. If you send your kids to school and expect they are getting all they need, you are sadly mistaken. Don't let the public school system raise your kids, it's not their job, it's yours! 9. Skip the fear based parenting tactics. It may work short term. But the long term results will be devastating to the child's ability to be open and truthful with you. Children need guidance, but scaring them into listening is just lazy. Find new ways to get through to your kids. Be creative! 10. There's no perfect way to be a parent, but there's a million ways to be a good one. Just because every other parent is doing it, doesn't mean it's right for you and your child. Don't let other people's opinions and judgments influence how you're going to treat your kid. Be brave enough to question everything until you find what works for you. Don't be lazy! Fight your urge to be passive about the things that matter. Don't give up on your kid. This is the most important work you'll ever do. Give it everything you have.

Choices make us feel alive because in it we are exercising the capacity of life. [...] We feel alive when we encounter a choice and make a good one. We feel dead when we shirk from these choices, even if we're "comfortable" with our warm homes, cars, video games, pornography and serving-size packaged prefabricated foods.

Most people are afraid. Most people get comfortable in a life that seems tolerable enough. They don’t have the time, they complain, and may actually believe it (even as they spend hours watching TV, playing video games, surfing the Internet, at the mall).   The price is that moment near the end when you realize that your life never belonged to you. You never stepped up. You never owned it. You never showed us who you really are.

My story is about all I got to my name right now, and that's why I feel robbed. But a story's a whole lot more than most people got. All you people watching out there, you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot. Bought and paid for. That's what all you people want, and why you're sucking off me. You want my plot. I know how you feel too, since hey, I used to feel the same way. TV and video games and movies and computer screens... On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watchee. Ever since, I've known what my life is about. I give good story. It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it. You ate it up. Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll. Without people like me, the whole country would jump off a bridge, 'cause the only thing on TV is some housewife on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winning $64,000 for remembering the name of the president's dog.

He doesn’t always wish that real life were more like video games, but in certain situations it would be helpful. Go here. Talk to this person. Feel like you’re making progress even though you don’t know what it is you’re trying to do, exactly.

Stories also told me that if I ever stumbled, got hurt, or got scared, I could just numb, scroll, eat, lift, hunt and fish, video game, smoke, golf, drink, Netflix, flirt, gossip, or study myself away from reality. The story said: Just. Keep. Going. So I kept going. Faster and faster. But I never asked myself the magic question . . . What do I want for my one, short, precious life?

Don’t do it. Just do something normal with your life. Go work first, go to a studio that’s already there, that’s already nice and produced. Don’t make your own studio. My second suggestion would be that if you absolutely, totally feel like you’re going to be a bum, that you’re not going to pay your rent and you’re going to lose your apartment and you have to do something, and then your friends happen to want to make a video game – as it was in my case – if it feels like an existential must and you will die if you don’t make it… then definitely do it, because it’s very much possible, I think. You have to be really… it has to be scary how much you want to do it, because it’s very hard.

Ultimately, it was Super Mario Bros. that taught me what remains perhaps the most important lesson of my life. ... There is no turning back, only going forward — for Mario and Luigi, for me, and for you. Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown.

Our world is full of submissive activities. Shopping is submissive. You wander around buying the things the controllers have placed in front of you. Watching TV is submissive. You watch fictional lives rather than live your own life. Playing video games is submissive. You sit there shooting up the world (in virtual reality), while having no impact at all on actual reality. It’s easy to be a virtual hero, hard to be a real one. One involves no work, and the other is as hard as it gets. Video games are an avoidance of the real world. Voting is submissive too – you delegate your authority to one of the puppets of the controllers. Dominants are active, not passive. They DO. They ACT. They MOVE. They CHOOSE. They DECIDE. They are NOT CONTROLLED by the system. They are FREE. So, what are you?

We have each other. We lived apart from them; we understand now. Our failure to touch, to belong. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Everybody is gone, and we will join them. We are born apart, driftwood on the banks of an endless dark ocean. And we will be carried away by the swell soon enough. But in between, in a single day of living… that dancing in a strip of sunlight, we can find what we miss. The love that makes us whole. The imminence. Everybody found their other. This pattern is mine...

Growing up is terrifying. When you’re young, you have this feeling inside of you that you’ll eventually get the chance to do and try everything in life, because life looks so infinitely long from the perspective of a kid. Then suddenly, you realize that every choice you make unchooses all the other ones. This isn’t a video game. There’s no reset button and no infinite lives. Every single decision I make is permanent, and the more I make, the slimmer my path becomes in this shrinking, dark forest we call adulthood.

...You know how you have real-life time versus story time, how stories leave out the boring bits and condense so much? A long-form RPG has some substance to it, leaves time to wander the desert or have a conversation or hang out in a pub. It might not be the closest thing to real life but pacing-wise it's closer than a movie or a TV show or a novel.

Life's a video game stuck on hardest, no way to save, and no extra lives. Worst part? No manual either. - Marlon Samson

Chapter 22 If life is a game, then I've done a poor job of playing it. My time on Earth has been boring and uneventful. I've wasted my youth, sitting around doing nothing when I was full of life and energy. Playing video games, working at simple jobs, trading my time for just enough money to pay the bills and survive; not really learning anything or traveling anywhere.

GamerGate wasn’t really about video games at all so much as it was a flash point for radicalized online hatred that had a long list of targets before, and after, my name was added to it. The movement helped solidify the growing connections between online white supremacist movements, misogynist nerds, conspiracy theorists, and dispassionate hoaxers who derive a sense of power from disseminating disinformation. This patchwork of Thanksgiving-ruining racist uncles might look and sound like a bad joke, but they became a real force behind giving Donald Trump the keys to the White House.

There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The world is only about work: work work work get get get...racing ahead...getting sacked from work...going online...knowing computer languages...winning contracts. I mean, it's just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Hollywood and similar “popular culture” sources of disinformation have assigned largely negative images to programmers. For example, we have all seen the solitary, fat, ugly nerd with no social skills who is obsessed with video games and breaking into other people’s computers. He (almost always a male) is as likely to want to destroy the world as he is to want to save it. Obviously, milder versions of such caricatures exist in real life, but in our experience they are no more frequent among software developers than they are among lawyers, police officers, car salesmen, journalists, artists, or politicians.

But I couldn’t block out the sound of his voice. “Hayden wasn’t the son I expected to have,” he said. “I’d imagined playing catch in the yard, watching football on the weekends, going fishing. The things I’d done with my dad; the things I do with Ryan. It was the only kind of relationship I knew how to have with a son.” His voice cracked. “But my second son didn’t enjoy any of those things. He loved music and video games and computers. I didn’t know how to talk to him. And now I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing I’d learned how.” He lowered his head, as if he were trying to hide the fact that he was crying.

I'm in my room, consuming, cyber, and confused. I don't remember the last time I made something Besides blunts, cum, minimum wage, bad grades, a noose. Sometimes I know I'm just twiddling my thumbs in front of a screen, That the songs about the money make me fake feel rich too. That the porn gets weirder, life gets shorter, and I eat shit stew. That these unrealistic characters I play make me feel strong. That I'm screaming at plastic that did nothing wrong. That I'm hurting and escaping and yearning and breaking. That underneath this hole, I may actually have some flair. Sometimes I'd like to leave my room and go see what's out there. Would you like to go with me?

Rashid did not give in. "Look how his hands move on the contols," he told her. "In those worlds left-handedness does not impede him. Amazingly, he is almost ambidextrous." Soraya snorted with annoyance. "Have you seen his handwriting?" she said. "Will his hedgehogs and plumbers help with that? Will his 'pisps' and 'wees' get him through school? Such names! They sound like going to the bathroom or what." Rashid began to smile placatingly. "The term is consoles," he began but Soraya turned on her heel and walked away, waving one hand high above her head. "Do not speak to me of such things," she said over her shoulder, speaking in her grandest voice. "I am in-console-able.

In the long run, completing a marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends while struggling to make ends meet makes us happier than buying a new computer. These activities are stressful, arduous, and often unpleasant. They also require withstanding problem after problem. Yet they are some of the most meaningful moments and joyous things we’ll ever do

By choosing reading you’ve chosen one of the best ways to reduce stress. It was found to be 68 per cent better at reducing stress levels than listening to music, 300 per cent better than going for a walk and 700 per cent more than playing video games22

Mass media is the food for our eyes, ears, and minds. When we watch television, read a magazine, watch a film, or play a video game, we are consuming sensory impressions. Many of the images we are exposed to through the media water unwholesome seeds of craving, fear, anger, and violence in our consciousness. The images, sounds, and ideas that are toxic can rob our body and consciousness of their well-being. If you feel anxious, fearful, or depressed, it may be because you have taken in too many toxins through your senses without even knowing it. Be mindful of what you watch, read, and listen to, and protect yourself from the fear, despair, anger, craving, anxiety, or violence they promote. The material goods they promise are only quick, temporary fixes.

Lands that stretch on forever. Skies one could drown in. The heartbeat of nature, silent yet strong. And amidst it all, a people. Beacons of light and life. Laughter that warmed my heart like naught else before. They are my meaning and my purpose. My love. In spite of...or perhaps because of this, I choose to believe. In mankind's potential. In his ability to find a way forward. So let there be no way back. From that temptation I sunder us. No more shall man have wings to bear him to paradise. Henceforth, he shall walk.

We have nothing against playing video games; they have many good features and benefits. Our concern is that when they are played to excess, especially in social isolation, they can hinder a young man's ability and interest in developing his face-to-face social skills. Multiple problems, including obesity, violence, anxiety, lower school performance, social phobia and shyness, greater impulsivity and depression, have all been associated with excessive gaming. The variety and intensity of video game action makes other parts of life, like school, seem comparatively boring, and that creates a problem with their academic performance, which in turn might require medication to deal with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which then leads to other problems down the road in a disastrous negative cycle...

There aren’t many crimes in my book. Not many sins either. But top on both of those lists is killing time. Have fun with it, make something cool, play video games, work hard if you feel like it, but do something. Killed time is an abortion, life that never gets lived, gone, just gone.

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")

Results showed that areas of the brain linked with emotion and empathy (the cingulate cortex and the amygdala) were less active during violent video gaming . . . These areas must be suppressed during violent video gaming, just as they would be in real life, in order to act violently without hesitation.

And you love things, wholly and unashamedly. Video games or comics, and you think it’s trivial, that it’s silly. But you’re wrong. The topics don’t matter. What matters is the passion and the joy. You can’t see it, but I can, and it burns so brightly. Like the fires of—like the sun. It’s life. It’s beauty.

They were impressed and wanted him to work full-time, but he needed to graduate in order to get a U.S. work visa. In addition, he came to a realization: he had a fanatic love of video games and the skills to make money creating them, but that was not the best way to spend his life. “I wanted to have more impact,” he says.

I watched the All-Blacks score three tries against England, and formulated the Marco Chance versus Fate Videoed Sports Match Analogy. It goes like this: when the played are out there the game is a sealed arena of interbombarding chance. But when the game is on video then every tiniest action already exists. The past, present, and future exist at the same time: all the tape is there, in your hand. There can be no chance, for every human decision and random fall of the ball is already fated. therefore, does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you're in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you're reading, it's fate all the way.

Suicide has become fashionable nowadays. A Low EQ generation. Never think about anyone else and choose the easiest option for ending life. Don’t have the guts to face a situation like a true man. For God’s sake, life is not a video game where you get numerous chances. You have only one chance to live. Learn to value your life. Don’t throw it away like an idiot.

continued. “The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. “‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ teaches us the value of a good reputation and the power of honesty. ‘Cinderella’ shows us the rewards of having a good heart. ‘The Ugly Duckling’ teaches us the meaning of inner beauty.” Alex’s eyes were wide, and she nodded in agreement. She was a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and short strawberry-blonde hair that was always kept neatly out of her face with a headband. The way the other students stared at their teacher, as if the lesson being taught were in another language, was something Mrs. Peters had never grown accustomed to. So, Mrs. Peters would often direct entire lessons to the front row, where Alex sat. Mrs. Peters was a tall, thin woman who always wore dresses that resembled old, patterned sofas. Her hair was dark and curly and sat perfectly on the top of her head like a hat (and her students often thought it was). Through a pair of thick glasses, her eyes were permanently squinted from all the judgmental looks she had given her classes over the years. “Sadly, these timeless tales are no longer relevant in our society,” Mrs. Peters said. “We have traded their brilliant teachings for small-minded entertainment like television and video games. Parents now let obnoxious cartoons and violent movies influence their children. “The only exposure to the tales some children acquire are versions bastardized by film companies. Fairy

He finds himself wishing the proper people to talk to would light up or have hovering indicator arrows over their heads or dialogue options to choose from. He doesn't always wish that real life were more like video games, but in certain situations it would be helpful. Go here. Talk to this person. Feel like you're making progress even though you don't know what it is you're trying to do, exactly.

One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You’re doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You’re doing great, intellectuals! You’re doing great. Much

So here’s how it went in God’s heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story—how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master’s degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.

What does the negative libertarian escape to? Normally, it’s pure self-indulgence, hedonism, the pursuit of instant gratification. His life outside work is about dumbed-down entertainment, video games, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, alcohol, fantasy, escapism, relaxation, laziness, food and drink, chillaxing and “downtime”. But none of these things are enduringly satisfying. They are not sacred causes. They are not the meaning of life. That’s why all negative libertarians are sad, depressed, anxious, tormented individuals, crushingly alone and fearful. They are desperate to distract themselves from their lives because their lives are so miserable. Self-indulgence – the cult of yourself and your own pleasure and self-obsession – is never satisfying. You always need something higher than yourself, bigger than yourself, something for which you will sacrifice yourself, something that will curb your insatiable Id.

Don't be afraid to start over. This time, you're not starting from scratch; you're starting from experience. It's like a video game—you’ve already unlocked some levels & collected the cheat codes. You’ve got the wisdom, the know-how, and the battle scars to guide you. Embrace the fresh start with a grin, knowing you’re smarter and stronger than before. Starting over isn’t a setback—it’s a chance to play the game with insider knowledge. So go ahead, hit reset and show life who's boss!

Do not love your life or the pleasures of this world. Do not love the entertainment of this world, but be caught up in the things of Christ. Your life should not be about the things that happen around you that give you joy but about the One who dwells within you. Do not be wrapped up in constant TV, movies, video games, or other idle things. Remember that when we gave our lives to Christ, we gave Him twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, not twenty minutes a day during a morning devotion.

Isaac basically knew just one thing for sure: Many are born, few flourish, all die. If you didn’t die as a sacrifice for God today, you would die of an incomprehensible plague tomorrow, or of undeserved starvation the day after, or of good old-fashioned senseless human slaughter before the next harvest. Life was short in those days and people were grateful for whatever they could get. They didn’t expect wireless video game consoles, fast German cars, dental insurance, anti-depressants, and a pension.

Too many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing—too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person’s capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart is unfulfilled. Where is the security, the guidance, the wisdom, and the power? At the low end of the continuum, in the pleasure of a fleeting moment.

Since their invention about half a century ago, video games have come to play a vital role in modern human civilization. I think this is because we modern humans were never designed to live like we do now—sitting in traffic, working in offices, shopping in stores. We are, by design, hunter-gatherers. Millions of years of evolution have wired our brains with an inherent need to hunt, gather, explore, solve puzzles, form teams, and conquer challenge after challenge in order to survive as we claw our way to the top of the food chain. For most people, day-to-day life no longer requires many of those experiences or challenges, and so those primal, instinctive needs inside us have no natural outlet. To keep our minds and bodies healthy, we have to simulate those old ways in the midst of our modern, technological lives, where everything on the planet has already been hunted and gathered. Thankfully, the technology that created this problem also gave rise to its solution—a way for us modern city dwellers to exorcise our inner evolutionary demons: video games.

Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of “fun,” constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger “high.” A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now. Too many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing—too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person’s capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart is unfulfilled. Where is the security, the guidance, the wisdom, and the power? At the low end of the continuum, in the pleasure of a fleeting moment.

great. This is a good description of Rovio, which was around for six years and underwent layoffs before the “instant” success of the Angry Birds video game franchise. In the case of the Five Guys restaurant chain, the founders spent fifteen years tweaking their original handful of restaurants in Virginia, finding the right bun bakery, the right number of times to shake the french fries before serving, how best to assemble a burger, and where to source their potatoes before expanding nationwide. Most businesses require a complex network of relationships to function, and these relationships take time to build. In many instances you have to be around for a few years to receive consistent recognition. It takes time to develop connections with investors, suppliers, and vendors. And it takes time for staff and founders to gain effectiveness in their roles and become a strong team.* So, yes, the bar is high when you want to start a company. You’ll have the chance to work on something you own and care about from day to day. You’ll be 100 percent engaged and motivated, and doing something you believe in. You can lead an integrated life, as opposed to a compartmentalized one in which you play a role in an office and then try to forget about it when you get home. You can define an organization, not the other way around. But even if you quit your job, hunker down for years, work hard for uncertain reward, and ask everyone you know for help, there’s still a great chance that your new business will not succeed. Over 50 percent of companies fail within their first three years.2 There’s a quote I like from an unknown source: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.

We live in a world that suffers from “status quo bias”. This means that change is resisted just because it’s change. People want to be safe and secure in familiar surroundings, with familiar people and familiar routines. Average people simply don’t like change. They don’t want it. Boredom is supposed to spur people on to change things, to change their life. However, nowadays, we have endless diversion tactics, endless ways of staving off boredom with the TV, movies, music, video games, online gambling and porn, and so on. All this means that it’s harder than ever to bring about real change.

Games such as Mass Effect allow the gamer a freedom of decision that can be evilly enlivening or nobly self-congratulating, but these games become uniquely compelling when they force you to the edge of some drawn, real-life line of intellectual or moral obligation that, to your mild astonishment, you find you cannot step across even in what is, essentially, a digital dollhouse for adults. Other mediums may depict the necessary (or foolhardy) breaches of such lines, or their foolhardy (or necessary) protection, but only games actually push you to the line's edge and make you live with the fictional consequences of your choice.

by have a home in the first place? Good question! When I have a tea party for my grandchildren, I'm passing on to them the things my mama passed on to me-the value of manners and the joy of spending quiet time together. When Bob reads a Bible story to those little ones, he's passing along his deep faith. When we watch videos together, play games, work on projects-we're building a chain of memories for the future. These aren't lessons that can be taught in lecture form. They're taught through the way we live. What we teach our children-or any child who shares our lives-they will teach to their children. What we share with our children, they will share with generations to come. friend of mine loves the water, the out doors, and the California sunshine. She says they're a constant reminder of God's incredible creativity. Do you may have a patio or a deck or a small balcony? Bob and I have never regretted the time and expense of creating outdoor areas to spend time in. And when we sit outside, we enhance our experience with a cool salad of homegrown tomatoes and lettuce, a tall glass of lemonade, and beautiful flowers in a basket. Use this wonderful time to contemplate all God is doing in your life. ecome an answer to prayer! • Call and encourage someone today.

The psychologist Geoffrey Miller, when pondering why we haven’t come across any alien species as yet, decided that they were probably all addicted to video games and are thus brought to an extreme state of apathy—the exploratory opposite of the heroes in Star Trek who spend all their time seeking out “new life and new civilizations.” The aliens “forget to send radio signals or colonize space,” he wrote in Seed magazine, because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissim. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. . . . They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels . . . ever so good.

A door to a long-awaited game-world has opened for those who found its key. This includes Dan Harvester, a guy who lives in a run-down apartment with his cat and runs a gaming channel. He's almost through playing and testing VR games, but is this his one last chance to - really - level-up? What can it promise to him, and its first 'Beta-pioneers'? 'Fountellion' is a nature-world full of artificial life that mimics the laws of 'the Source', our own nature with its force of evolution. It promises to be more than a 'survival experience', for there are six 'Insights' scattered and every player can find their own path to them. How much will Dan be changed? There is only one way to find out: experience and tune in to his 'avalogs'. For only by completing them together with fragments from its development, can you too discover the vision and legacy of 'Fountellion'.

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons. Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.

Fourth and finally, I must point out that any philosophical view is unlikely to gain wide acceptance among either philosophers or the wider public. This is especially true of a view like cognitivist misanthropy. Human beings excel at ignoring or denying unpleasant ideas, regardless of strong evidence in their favor—climate change, racism, evolution, heliocentrism, and so on. The idea that one’s own species is bad is especially unpleasant, so it is untenable to think that human beings would adopt the misanthropist view at any appreciable scale. To take an analogy, we might consider the epistemic standards of the home crowd at any sporting event. When judging the quality of the officiating, the crowd relies on the standard of whether or not the officials’ calls favor the home team. The crowd approves of calls that are to the benefit of its favored team while disapproving vehemently of calls that are to that team’s detriment. It matters not to the crowd whether the officials’ calls are, in fact, correct. Even if video replay clearly shows that the home team violated one of the rules of the game, the crowd will repudiate the officials’ “unfair” treatment of its team. I suspect that the public’s estimation of cognitivist misanthropy would be similar, in the unlikely event that anyone outside academia learns of it. The view would be rejected because it is unpleasant or perhaps because it does not fit with preconceptions. In that case, there is virtually no chance for cognitivist misanthropy to cause harm, because there is virtually no chance that it will be accepted by more than a few people. One might object that my analogy is unfair. The behavior of a crowd at a sporting event should not be taken too seriously. It is merely in good fun that the crowd abandons reasonable epistemic standards for a few hours, and surely the individuals who comprise such crowds return to reason when it comes to serious matters. I wish that were true, but the analogy seems apt to me, at least in many arenas of human life. Politics is an obvious example. It is very difficult to look at elections, for example, as involving much in the way of epistemic reasonableness. Support or opposition to some candidate or policy seems to depend on cultural commitments to a far greater extent than considerations of facts, coherence, plausibility, the content of a candidate’s platform, and so on. For instance, when asked by pollsters, a high proportion of supporters of Donald Trump claim to believe many obvious falsehoods. This is puzzling if we assume that the respondents are behaving as genuine epistemic agents who seek to understand reality. How could persons capable of running their own lives believe in absurd conspiracy theories, for example? If we instead assume that the respondents are behaving as supporters of their favored “team,” their behavior makes much more sense. When it comes to politics and social issues, many people simply do not care very much about the truth. Instead, they are invested in promoting the “right” candidate, value, idea, or institution. This is not limited to false views.