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A comment on How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018). Parent comment

Re:How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (... by UweSchmidt on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @06:45AM (#20103038)
The vast majority of people "lost in the gaming world" is not going into programming or learning anything useful. Socially, it's a lot of "GG" and insults to each others mothers. Connections in "clans" or "squads" are mostly incredibly shallow and abstract, compared to hiking or playing sports in a team or otherwise engaging in groups irl. Kids are physically underdeveloped [1], programming MMORPGs is mostly treated as cheating and not encouraged. Sure, in a billion life-years spent in games good things can happen, but compared to the time invested? Not much imo.

It's absolutely understandable why kids gravitate to these online worlds but I regret the time lost in games and if I could go back I'd really limit my gaming to brief, enjoyable sessions, and invest my energy to more challenging and ultimately rewarding things. Building skills, building real relationships.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429

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Re:How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (... by debaserab2 on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @11:37AM (#20105490)
> Socially, it's a lot of "GG" and insults to each others mothers. Connections in "clans" or "squads" are mostly incredibly shallow and abstract, compared to hiking or playing sports in a team or otherwise engaging in groups irl.

The best man at my wedding was a friend I played video games with that I met online (in "clans"). In fact, I'm sitting in a Discord server right now with about ten people that I've sat in a chat server of some sort since I was 14 years old (I'm 34 now). We meet up several times a year at different locations for vacations. Some of us now live close together and regularly hang out with each other's wives and kids. We still game together on a near nightly basis.

Maybe the relationships are only superficial and shallow if that's the level of effort you put into them.

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Re:How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (... by vanterdon on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @09:13AM (#20103985)
I mean that's the case for you, but not for everyone. I've made connections in games (friends, guildmates, clanmates), that have lasted for over a decade. I don't regret a moment of the thousands of hours I poured into online games.
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Re:How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (... by brianpgordon on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @01:21PM (#20106768)
> programming MMORPGs is mostly treated as cheating

WoW, by far the most successful and influential MMORPG ever made, has a large API surface for displaying in-game information and automating certain actions, and it has a large mod scene that takes advantage of it.

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