It'll burn some people out. I can't just read/learn or create things and see it as some kind of stress relief.

You'll feel accomplish and all great things but that's ain't relaxing at all for me.

Playing magic the gathering, just turn off my brain and watching a good tv show either comedy or scifi is my way to blow off steam. Video games can make me angry sometime or frustrated. Mtg can be challenging in term of stress and require thinking skill but I've learned to not over think it and play with my gut. My buddy who I play against over thinks and stress out often in mtg, it's enjoyable for the guy but after several rounds at his cube his brain is mentally exhausted, this rarely happens to me. He often chastize me for not reading the card carefully... though, I just kinda remember them if I play often with the cube a lot. Hell I thought one card had flying cause the creature seems to be hovering in the art once. Bad play mistake. While our style are different I we're pretty much tie in term of deck building skill set and winning rate.

Games can be enjoyed in their own right as well. If we play for pure enjoyment and can otherwise balance our lives then they are certainly a means to unwind.

Sorry, that's just not true. There are lots of interesting, rewarding hobbies that do feel like work, in the sense that they require a fresh mind capable of bearing a high cognitive load to engage in them. When my mind is fresh you're right, those hobbies are very satisfying to spend time on, but my "fresh" timeslots are mostly devoted to my actual job (phd) these days, which doesn't feel like work either much of the time.

Be careful, your attitude is a road straight to burnout.

What makes you believe that what reedlaw described is not to be considered mental downtime? I have made quite the opposite experience: when consciously reflecting and deciding about my mental downtime in advance, it turns out to be the most recreative. It's worth noting that I made bad experiences with: tomorrow from 7-730 I will be reading/running/cooking/medidate/watching an educational video for recreational purposes. The way to go for me is to predefine a set of activities which I support based on a principle. When in the situation for donwtime, I then choose from this set.

Edit: typo

Many mentally challenging activities I'll start spontaneously, but it's typically small ones with direct, achievable goals, like write a little scraper in a new language or reverse engineer a single mechanism of an application.

I only have a few times a week when I have downtime that I feel like I can pick something off a list. The rest of my downtime I want something to do - and that's where games come in - and I'm quite glad for them, because without them I'd spend much more time watching TV, reading junk political threads on reddit, etc.

Those principles ought to be chosen as to align with my convictions and expectations from life. So you could say that I know that this list is the intersection of things I consider worthy doing (and immediately have a well-formed reason for their worthiness at the back of my mind) and recreation.

When a moment for recreation has come, there is nothing that makes me question whether I should do something from the list or not because I am reassured that I have thought of this sufficiently in advance to determine the best for me.

The vast majority of video games are either built around the principles of addiction, or require a tremendous amount of time in muscle memory training.

What you're describing seems like describing how enjoyable it can be to smoke one cigarette a month. (assuming that actually felt good). Could be true- but the odds are certainly stacked against people attempting that behavior.

My friends and I play Overwatch. It's a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling, and if we wanted to compete professionally, sure, we'd have to spend a ton of time in focused training.

But we don't. We just hop on voice chat, play in Gold/Platinum against people of similar skill level, and we have a good time with it. Sometimes we'll pick up new strategies, we learn different characters, our aim and game-sense probably improve, but that's all secondary to hanging out and enjoying the game.

None of us are ever going to be competing in Master / GM / Top 500 tiers, and the amount of time it'd take to train and get better is immaterial to us because none of us want to.

Not only is it quite pleasant after I've had a beer or three, but they're the ultimate social hack for introverted nerds. Are you at a crowded bar/party where it's impossible to have a proper talk with someone? Step outside for a smoke, and you can instantly have a nice, low key conversation with the other smokers. Lulls in the conversation aren't awkward cause you can just go back to taking drags; and once you're done, you can keep talking if you like the person- or have the perfect excuse to head back in if you don't.

Highly recommended.

So you use smoking cigarettes as a crutch when making real conversations with the non-smokers inside gets hard? Then you fill in gaps in conversation with more smoking? Most people cope with those naturally occurring conversation gaps without breathing in smoke.

Serious question - Are you, as you stand out there with the party going on behind you, slightly repulsed by the fact that you connected with someone because you're both doing the same disgusting habit?

The whole scenario seems so absurdly sad, and certainly not something I'd "highly recommend" to anyone.

I wouldn't "highly recommend" trying it, because very few people can keep it at that level. I couldn't, and my way of quitting was to remember all the other ones I smoked. To this day, on the rare occasions where I crave smoking, I'll just remind myself of the nausea, the bad throat, the smell, the dizziness and whatever else the other ones, the ones I would smoke after the good one, would do to me.

I don't see a correlation with cigarettes, which offer you nothing beneficial, are physically addictive on the level of heroin, and are one of the leading causes of human death.

Nicotine can have some benefits; see for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6457772

> are physically addictive on the level of heroin

False. They're a bit above alcohol; heroin is much higher. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_as...

> and are one of the leading causes of human death.

Correct.

I realize this is anecdotal, but I feel the need to point out that my father, a veteran ER doctor of over thirty years, has said more than once that based on his experience of patients, he thinks it is easier to quit heroin than nicotine.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f961/639e2a998d275f3e8f8f4c...

Nicotine is quite often used as a form of self-medication - it's helpful for people with all kinds of issues, from depression to adhd, to weight control.

Even among doctors, there is very little knowledge on the subject of why people take up smoking, and usually it's assumed it's just a matter of bad habits.

So, if someone uses nicotine as an unwitting way of self-medication, it will indeed be extremely difficult to quit without fixing the core problem.

To some extent it's like calling SSRIs "hard to quit", because people who begin taking them often never quit, even when side affects are worse than those of nicotine.

Kind of like how in WWII the British improved the survivability of their bombers by increasing the armor in the places returning aircraft weren't damaged, theorizing correctly that those were the places the planes that didn't return were hit.

If a person with an addictive personality gets on heroin, they're probably visiting the ER very few if any times before they hit the morgue.

Edit: By the way, for an appreciation of "A bit above alcohol", check out an inpatient alcohol detox clinic sometime... it is no joke at all.

People who appreciate computer games as a serious hobby will tend to enjoy games on the complex end of this spectrum. These games are no more built around the principles of addiction than a good book, or a physical activity like skiing.

Well, define "vast majority of video games." Certainly that's true if we mean F2P phone games. For a lot of others I am not so sure.

When free to play becomes pay to win, writing your own cheats is the more fun and rewarding option.

Classic.