It has become clear to me that for young men of my generation that this type of video-gaming is very much the equivalent of 'doomscrolling' as mentioned in other comments, and is generally pretty harmful. I have so many friends that have improved their lives by following the much-mocked advise 'turn off the game and do something else'. Are games the culture-killing brain-rotting rotten life harbinger that our parents made them out to be? Of course not. Are they the epitome of entertainment and growth that places like reddit make them out to be? No, not really.

Like always. The truth is in the nuance.

These "classical" hobbies are vastly over-valued in my opinion. I spent almost a decade learning to play violin, and while the appreciation for music has been valuable, the actual skill of being able to play the violin has been largely useless. I also quit when I was no longer forced to play for school, and probably can't even read the sheet music anymore. It's by no means a life long skill like riding a bike.

Phrased another way, I don't see much that validates being able to play a musical instrument as more valuable than being good at a particular genre of video games. Music has existed for far longer, so it has a certain level of prestige as a long-standing part of our culture. Music can be shared with others, although Twitch seems to imply there are a substantial number of people interested in watching other people play video games.

There are various studies about the tangential benefits of music, there are likewise for video games. I don't know that one comes out clearly ahead.

Video games are more likely to give you real world skills. As more and more of the world moves online, skills that you pick up trying to get games to work or trying to make them run faster can be valuable. Online etiquette is another thing you tend to learn (hopefully, instead of just being toxic).

Learning an instrument is also not without pain. When I played, probably 75% of the time I was playing I wasn't actually doing anything enjoyable, I was working on committing a piece to memory, or practicing a piece, or doing exercises to work on my finger strength or flexibility. I don't feel like learning an instrument is less "grindy".

The problem of quitting music once it's no longer compulsory is endemic and I think more rooted with pedagogy than music itself as a medium. I staved it off because I was largely self-taught for theory and the instruments I currently play (piano, guitar), whereas people who were forced into lessons or only did it to fill an elective slot in school quit once they were able to. I've gone months-long stints without dedicated practice, but to me it's closer to an unforgettable skill than riding a bike is (because I don't know how to ride a bike).

Music has been around since the dawn of mankind. Video games has been around 20-30 years?

I will not be surprised when 100 years from now, video games will be the acceptable hobby while playing instruments would be seem as quaint when one can just tweak some params in some AI models to generate good music.

If anything, this statement is a testament to music's endurance as an expressive medium. As mentioned by others on this discussion, video games are largely consumable media with products that don't extend beyond the screen.

The whole AI-replacing-creativity debate is a large can of worms. Yes, there are already generative music models that can create pleasant-sounding music, but for many practitioners, the process is more important than the product. There's a reason people still perform live in front of audiences when it would be more reasonable and convenient to play lossless recordings at home.

And the same has been said about the TV. That it would never be mainstream.

My point is that video games is in its infancy. It has potential to be an art form, especially if VR/AR takes off once we get powerful enough hardware.

> There's a reason people still perform live in front of audiences when it would be more reasonable and convenient to play lossless recordings at home.

And there is a reason why people still enjoy playing video games even if people stigmatize it as a time sink. It's not about efficiency or productivity.

I won't debate that video games don't have merit as artistic media; some of my favorites from my adolescence have had positive effects on my world view and self in the same way works in television and film have, and I cut my teeth on advanced piano arrangements from video game music (specifically Kyle Landry's). I think that the problem lies in video games being a demanding medium that often rewards mindless grinding and non-transferrable skills. In McLuhan's terms, it's a hot (demanding) medium that only has the benefits of a cool (passively consumed) medium [1].

To say that music will somehow cede to video games eventually, when music has been around for literal eons, is flippant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media#%22Hot%22_...

Some music is about performance, but that requires a level of dedication I don't have. Bluegrass is music designed for a bunch of people to get together and have fun. Some friends of mine picked up guitar, upright bass, mandolin, washboard... and suddenly we were meeting a couple times a week just to play and have fun. It was never a grind.

Child, startup, moving away from my bandmates, and covid got in the way so I'm out of practice, but I'm really looking forward to getting back to it when life returns to "normal".

I guess what I'm saying is - maybe you were playing the wrong music? There are lots of music genres that seem to focus more on fun than grind. Classical violin probably isn't one of them. Old-time fiddle on the other hand...

This is begging the question more than a statement of real fact. What about magical combat against imaginary enemies, opening treasure chests, and completing collectibles is valuable in the real world? At least learning to play a musical instrument is actually doable in the real world.

One might argue that video games can teach someone to solve puzzles or to strategize towards an end when given a set of strengths and weaknesses, but if you really wanted usable critical thinking out of puzzles, you'd be better off grinding away at LeetCode and HackerRank. Strategizing towards any end requires the specificity of the context, too, and the world in video games is often very far from real.

And besides, if you really believe in video games--are you willing to raise a child to spend his youth and energy on video games instead of learning new skills?

You might be surprised. I went back to piano after 10 years, and got back up to close to my old skill level quite quickly

Who is to say? FPS games can teach you about your physical ability, practice and teamwork as much as playing football or playing in a band. The physical skills are different, sure, but the planning, teamwork and execution are all very similar (and similar to developing an app with a team). Any of these things could also, well, not teach you much of anything. But is that a function of the game or the player?

The article suggests maybe it's a function of genuinely liking what you're doing vs simply wanting to do it (maybe because of an addiction).

I.e. the real problem is the opportunity cost

The problem with viewing through the lens of the opportunity cost is that it requires some hindsight to be completely evaluated. I played competitive football for 8 years. I wanted to, but I never went pro. You can work hard, put in the effort and still have nothing good to show for it. Today, I feel like I could have better spent that time, because it ate up a lot of it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-surgery-games-idUSN2J3039...

It's anecdotal, of course, but I always notice vast diffference in spatial conceptualization between people who have played first-person videogames set in complex 3d environments and those who have not. Me and my gamer friends could easily draw you an aproximate map of a location after being there once, correctly oriented by cardinal directions.

Though of course, I wonder if I am more likely to have an accident because I glance at it without thinking.

Mind you, I may also have internalised the art of "knowing when to look at the minimap" IE when do I need to pay attention to what.

As usual, it's society that determines which one is a more "acceptable" hobby.

With videogames, the experience usually is very different. I'll blink, and suddenly it's time to go to bed and my whole free time for the day is gone. I don't want to go to bed because my mind is telling me that there's still more day left, no way it's all done already; so I usually go to bed really late.

Days feel far longer when I'm not playing, in a good way. Gaming is like presing the fast forward button on your life.

That isn’t to say that getting good at CS is inherently worse. But that as you age and your priorities shift I think piano is something you are more likely to value.

Consider the analogy with big game hunting. The image I imagine of a British club includes the heads of a bunch of formerly live animals hanging on various walls. Within that subculture, hunting adventures and stories were very much social currency.

As gamers age, gaming clubs could form as a third place to hang out, and gaming stories would also be of great social value. May not be to your particular taste, but it is just a matter of taste.

Additionally, as knowledge of sporting teams and their performance during current season break down conversational barriers between people living in different parts of the US, knowledge of gaming, and the ability to play with others at any age, could do the same.

There isn’t as strong a general piano culture among a random set of people. Maybe music, but depends on the group. It brought Boomers together, but that essential core value of current music as a glue for a demographic isn’t there as much.

What music does do is directly feed the soul, and computer games aren’t at that level. Yet. Whether they ever can be is an open question. They aren’t an art form. Yet.

Less flippantly, one of them requires consistent improvement or you'll quit - there's no zombie-state when learning piano where you'll be content with sitting at the same level for over a thousand hours. This zombie-like steady-state scenario is very easy with video games; relatively minor skill improvements over literally thousands of hours for the majority of people. No feedback to quit and try something else, unlike the piano where if you have no elegance after a few years you'll be very disillusioned. This disillusionment is a good thing, a necessary part of the learning process which indicates you either need to change your approach or find something else entirely. Video games, in my experience, break this feedback loop: they demand no fundamental progression.

as a guitar player, I'm very sorry to inform you that this is not the case. you get a small bump in attractiveness once you master the chords to wonderwall, but after that you don't really make any progress unless your band becomes popular.

as a cs player, I can't say I agree with the rest of your comment either. counterstrike is a very harsh and unforgiving game. plateauing at the same skill level feels very bad. you will get rekt by twelve year olds and they will mock you mercilessly. I would also contest that musical instruments create any inherent drive for improvement. plenty of people just learn the basic barre chords and a couple major/minor scale shapes and go on to happily jam with friends for thousands of hours.

What I mean is that 2000 hours of my life can simply vanish into a video game black hole, absent any other life events. Why? It's possible to play Counterstrike (or whatever) for 14 hours in the day. For a week. Or two. or 52. I've never in my life met a person who can enter that kind of state for 14 hours when playing an instrument, where the ease by which it consumes your life is just so breathtaking. The only two activities I've found which have this addictive ease are generic web browsing (e.g. reddit) and assorted video games - and my life has definitely been degraded as a result.

That said, learning a musical instrument does not last a lifetime if you don't keep playing it. The point of learning skills early in life is not necessarily that the skill is useful, it's that you've learned how to learn skills. Which hopefully will be used throughout your life.

at least that's how I explain my own experience. I routinely go for years without playing most of the instruments I know. Give me a week and I'll be better at any one of them than I've ever been.

People also often get to know each other through gaming or it is their first interaction with technical things, setting up networking and firewalls for LAN parties, installing and creating mods etc.

Just to be clear - I've wasted much of my youth with single player gaming. It was pretty addictive, no question about it. I'll do my best to get my kids have better life than that - no active screen around their young age, being very active in sports, nature, mountain activities, travel around the world backpacking etc. If they will choose to get hooked on games, so be it, but at least I've shown them many other, for me better options.

On a side note I tend to think kids have a lot of self regulating abilities but that might not matter anymore since it seems that the brightest minds of this generation are focused on "increasing engagement" and fucking ads...

Dating someone who plays games is not issue. Most young people of both genders play games. Athletes play games too, there never was any dichotomy between sport and playing video games.

But, dating obsessed gamer is kind of like being alone, except you get yelled at more. If excessively competitive sport dude is asshole to his mates, you don't get to witness that every evening either.

Maybe it is something about the ultra-competitive streak - being "driven" - that makes it not nice to be around?

Personally, I gave up playing even the lowest grade of social hockey as people seemed to have forgotten the "game for fun" part and were "playing to win" - including hard shots at your legs, playing on no matter the breach of game rules unless the ref whistled etc.

I mean, people who do sport at amateur level drink a lot too. But, the high sport is not the same at all.

True. But following a sport and being able to hold forth on it competently will allow you to start conversations and engage in connections with a much broader social circle than demonstrating your knowledge of vidya memes.

Eh? I mean maybe for the vast majority too much of one thing is bad. For me, personally, almost all of my friendships came from bonding experience over playing video games together (or board games, or card games) and other semi-intellectual hobbies.

Did any of those games or pursuits give me deep marketable skills? Not really. But the friendships gained were invaluable as far as diversity of thought, advice and help given in times of need. I don't regret any of that time spent.

But those were games of a bygone era. Later games (like WoW/Fortine and whatever garbage kids play these days) probably would not have had the same effect.

> The truth is in the nuance

Yep. Gaming is a pretty neutral activity. When done right (challenging games played with the right people) can be extremely rewarding. When overdone, probably worse than watching tons of TV/politics.

I'm not sure I agree.

I have always enjoyed games where there is payoff for grinding. Usually, I enjoy the grind element as well. It isn't too far off of the sensation I get when working on a personal project or learning new tech. I used to "doom scroll," but have eliminated my FB and Twitter and harshly curated my Reddit due to the significant stress it was placing on my life. I never really enjoyed seeing what was going on with Twitter, I guess I felt obligated to keep up with things that ultimately didn't matter.

There's always a lot of hand-wringing about what kids and teenagers spend their time doing, and I wonder if it's not just a natural process of your brain figuring out a system, going "oh I see" and moving on to the next thing. Like, in other words, it might not be luck, it might just be the learning / exploration process working normally.

That being said, there's definitely an aspect where video games are a super-stimulus. It's true that video game designers are creating explicit reward loops in a way that, let's say the writers of Gilligan's island were not (to compare hand-wringing about games to hand-wringing about television)

By trying to get very good at a game, you learn how to solve problems, and, more importantly, how to learn how to solve problems. It's also often the case that by taking a game seriously, you engage with the community, making friends or at least getting to know people out of your circle.

I've put thousands of hours into several games, and I don't regret a second of that. I wouldn't say that behavior is unhealthy unless it brings you to downright ignore your job/school/responsibilities.

I have a much lower bar because I don't think all video game playing is equal.

My first Pokémon game was one of the more recent ones for the switch. I didn't quite understand how the breeding worked and I was trying to breed a particular Pokémon with high stats. I spent many hours figuring out how it works and writing scripts to figure out what I should breed to get what I want, then more hours actually doing the breeding. I was fully engaged and I would consider this video game playing healthy.

I've also spent many hours just vegging out. A little of that is fine; it's one way I do some thinking. But too much of it and the day is gone and when I stop I feel bad, like I've just come out of a stupor. This, to me, is not healthy, even if I otherwise took care of all my responsibilities.

What if you could have done something more productive or rewarding with your life instead, like developed new friendships or deepened existing ones, learned new skills, or read something that opened your eyes or changed your life?

I've probably gamed as much as anyone here, and I deeply regret wasting so much time on it. Though it wasn't a complete waste of time, as it did help me to learn to manage complex systems (I like complex games) and to anticipate and prepare (I like RPG's and chess), and it also helped me to destress, there was also a compulsive quality to my gaming where the ultimate payoff wasn't all that great compared to the many thousands of hours I put in to it.

That's a bit unfair, though. The same reasoning applies to everything in your life that isn't strictly work. Gaming did change my life, requiring everything to be the most efficient use of your time is simply unreasonable.

There are activities that produce long term satisfaction, while other produce long term regret. I don't regret having gone on a canoe trip but I do regret many hours of playing RTS games.

Maybe it's just me and my brain is prone to addiction to games, but it's a loop that's hard to escape. At first it's pleasurable, then I find myself playing through the night, just one more game again and again, I start to gain weight, sleep in, resent the whole thing but crave the fake-accomplishment and dream with the game. I might be an outlier. It hasn't ruined my life though because I always snapped out of it due to some external event that forced me to stop and then I normalize after some days or a week or two of not playing. But when living alone and nobody stopping me, I have definitely wasted months of my life on such things and have holes in my CV due to it.

Nowadays I just refuse to play games altogether. I miss out on some cultural references, but so be it. Same with TV series and binge watching. I miss out on them and become a more boring person but I just cannot do a little bit of these. If I start I'm useless for days or weeks.

It's easier to have willpower to just not start.

So the couple years I spent playing WoW back in university did these some of these things for me.

The friends that I played with are some of my best friends 15+ years later with the time we spent playing being a formative part of building those relationships and us still occasionally referencing stories from that time-period. Mind you real-world friends that I later did things like play D&D and other TTRPGs with so I'm not making the argument video games would have been enough on their own.

Getting bored of the time-sink in Wow lead to me investigating game hacking, lead to me learning memory modification and reverse engineering skills, and was my first try at process exploitation techniques all contributing to my eventual career in computer security. That said, I was already interested in the field and if I hadn't been I probably wouldn't have tried those things.

I don't play games very often nowadays but last year, while I was going through a divorce and dealing with depression and some amount of substance abuse in response, playing Disco Elysium was very relevant and contributed a ton to working through the thoughts and emotions around what I was going through. It helped me pull myself out of destructive patterns and I consider it one of the more important pieces of fiction I've experienced personally. That said, it is more or less a really complex illustrated choose your own adventure book so its not quite what most people think of when they think about "video games".

If my qualifications don't make it clear I don't think my anecdotes count as data nor am I discounting your personal experience, but I do feel the time I spent playing video games have been a net positive for my life.

There were some fond memories from it, and there were certainly many enjoyable moments. But it was certainly not done in moderation. I'm also glad I pulled out of it, and didn't get into a similar situation with a different game.

Regarding game vs. IRL skills, I enjoy Guitar Hero quite a bit, but Rocksmith actually improves your ability to play a real guitar.

Rock Band drums are pretty close to electronic drums though, and vocals are actual vocals.

And as I've mentioned, Ring Fit Adventure (which I'm still playing) kind of levels you up. I found similar effects with Wii Fit, where years after stopping playing (and switching to non-balance based exercises) my sense of balance was surprisingly better than it had been before I started playing the game. I expect other physical games like Dance Dance Revolution are good for physical coordination, and I expect twitch games such as FPSs are good for eye-hand coordination and reaction time.

1) chasing the next thing. Next item, next perfect build, next stat.

2) the multi player aspect. Be it pvp or a coop game with some online “friends”

Both of these are good ways to keep people engaged / addicted I guess.

I definitely think there's value in the second thing, though. Basically, I used to tell people that I play video games "socially" -- until a few months ago (when I decided to actually skill up on Starcraft 2), I almost never played video games unless it was with a group of other people.

I haven't had a grindy experience in most single-player games, but MMOs have perfected the grind system to keep players in the game and spending money (particularly in a subscription MMO.)

Oddly enough, I tend to enjoy the repetitive activities of MMOs such as gathering, crafting, and simple quests; they put you in a sort of relaxed flow state and you get to see the game turn from day to night as other players and monsters wander by. You also end up exploring more of the game world in detail and noticing interesting details that you might miss otherwise. Daily quests are repetitive but they have a bit of variety because you have a different set of players every time.

I wonder whether MMO players might be good at real-life grinds that seem tedious but are actually worthwhile, such as exercise.

As a data point, I'm still grinding away at Ring Fit Adventure, which is fun and seems to be beneficial to fitness in terms of increased strength, balance, and energy after several months.

I haven't managed to enjoy grinding housecleaning yet but I might if I can figure out how to gamify it....

Really, it was Destiny 1 and Halo MCC that broke me hard of this habit. Between the games being broken or lacking, and me not enjoying the PvP aspect of Destiny 1, I just stepped away from it all.

Now I am content to game for the sake of burning time. I don't like PUBG, but I have it to play with friends while we drink beers and shoot the bot infested unranked, the final moments are tense and fun and if we fail at least we had the fun of getting there.

I got XBOX game pass and just pop in games to try them out now, no worries or hassle of returning since it is Netflix style gaming.

Even on my phone I have loaded up old games where I turn on cheats for mad fun. I am currently playing Pokemon Sun and whenever the baddies start a match with "I am stealing your Pokemon" they face my 100% started with 100% critical chance and I just lob a Master Ball and steal their Pokemon. I enjoy walking through walls and just being ridiculous in it while still enjoying the story and atmosphere of the game. (all the fun, none of slowness inherent in those games).

But I do agree. I don't know how many times I would work my 9-5, try and game some, get upset at the losses, and just wallow out the rest of the night, skipping other stuff I wanted/needed to do. The highs certainly weren't worth the lows.

Part of why when folks say video games aren't addicting, I ask why CoD put in the prestige system. It keeps hitting you with that dopamine of 'yea, just unlocked something' which constantly throws you back into combat where something else gets unlocked.

It's also part of the competition. It's called "Prestige" because having a lot of those levels is meant to be prestigious. For me, it was closer to an MMR Ranking or KD Ratio. It's less about collecting the icons, and more about getting some form of external validation that you were a better player than other players. Of course, Prestige is a bad indicator that you are a better player than other players, but it allows people who aren't good but have a lot of time to compete on some level.

If this were really about "yea, just unlocked something" I would expect better rewards. I haven't played the new CoDs a lot, but from what I remember, the rewards for prestiging were largely meh, and you get most of them from low levels of prestige. If you hit prestige 99, you've done a lot of prestiges without any unlocks (other than the bars next to your username, which no one ever looks at).

There is a psychology behind "obtaining bigger numbers" being a never ending goal. (Aside: I mean, why does Bezos even work anymore?)

And then you have Universal paperclips... a game largely designed around increasing a number - and that's it. No 3D graphics, some bits of text every now and again.

Full game on website:https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

...and yes. I played it through to the end on a car trip once.

The really harmful thing might be the artificial meaning this creates, which might be at the end more addictive than the fun.

I never really was addicted to games. The funny thing is, I could only play games that were really fun for me, because of the game mechanics or if they had some interesting new aspects. But this kind of fascination never hold that long and after that the game play just got repetitive and tedious, at which point I just stopped playing.

Therefore also most games that contain a lot of repetition feel just pointless to me.

I think there's something interesting here with how different people respond to 'fake achievement'. For me FPS games were fun because it was a little competition between players (also I was often interrupted growing up and short rounds are better for this).

After trying WoW and having to walk 30min to pick up a feather and bring it back then do the same for an acorn I lost total interest in ever playing again. That might be all the time I had to play that day.

I suspect some people get more of a positive feedback response from seeing numbers go up than others. I think MMOGs can also have a social component that keeps people coming back to do shared events which is probably stickier than the fake achievement bits.

I'd be curious if people really vulnerable to fake achievement would also be successful if they could create a fast feedback environment for themselves with something other than the game as the goal (since they're clearly amenable to that kind of motivation).

For me, the difficulty is on the other side. Even outside of games it can be hard to find something that feels like it matters and is important (even if you can make money and be otherwise better off in your life by doing it). Curiosity can also pull you in a thousand different directions.

Figuring out what you want is hard, figuring out how to move in that direction is hard, then actually getting yourself to focus and do the work is hard.

When the search space of what's possible is so big, it can be difficult to coordinate. I think games reduce that to something extremely narrow. For some that's effective, for me the illusion is obvious and unfulfilling.

Today I tend to like one-off indie games driven by story (like Firewatch). I feel like I get more out of it.

Yes, pretty similar for me. Therefore I quite envy people that can get that much out of just games, and I'm even struggling to find something in the real world.

I think the modern kind of work can feel quite pointless, because being just a part of a complex machinery can make it hard to see what you're really provoking. And if you're a bit of a misfit for the modern culture, can't get meaning out of money, status and career, then also these game-like achievements aren't an option.

But life in general is just quite strange if you think long and deep enough about it. So it's pretty nice if you can loose yourself in such a simple thing as a game. I really think that being able to look at life as a kind of game makes it a lot easier, because taking it really seriously is just too painful.

Well, seems to be one of my more melancholic days. ;)

I suspect it’s a built in sense of purpose from millions of years of selective pressure.

Other things like novelty seeking, learning, getting better at crafts help - but looking at people that feel generally content, investing in a good partner and having kids seems like the surest way to fill that purpose.

Lots of ways that can go poorly (I think mostly people choosing their partner poorly or for stupid reasons), but if it goes well I think that’s probably a critical piece.

That's certainly true, and without my partner life would be a lot more bleak.

I've a bit of a hard time with communities, because I would really like to be part of more, but have often issues with their narrow mindedness, which seems to be the needed bound of communities. Well, also being a bit of loner doesn't help connecting to a community. But nevertheless I've a strong emotional desire to be part of one.

It might be one of these mismatches, when your desire and the reality just aren't compatible.

I like HN (most of the time), Scott Alexander's blog, and LessWrong.

It's hard to find the same kind of thing in-person though, plus have to overcome the social anxiety/social skills bit of actually finding and going to a place with new people which is an entirely separate (though worthwhile) skill.

I haven't succeeded with this either (though I like the people I work with).

creep, shoot, save, creep, solve puzzle, save, creep, die, restore, ...

And then there came along games that were more forgiving and you could just play and if you died, respawn.

but then other games replaced things with: fight, get loot, sort and rearrange inventory, possible weapon swap, go back to town and sell inventory, etc..

I guess it's better that the current crop of phone games with grind (shortcut available for purchase!) , grind (you really should buy this convenient feature), grind, ...

I did enjoy factorio. You have to periodically re-invent yourself. But then what do you do after launching a rocket?

People who are good at grinding would probably ace the so-called Marshmallow Test:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

One of the posts there contained a striking observation: The most tragic aspect of the game is that it hits the hardest workers the hardest.

Videogames are not all bad, and of course there are many healthy and successful people who enjoy them and appreciate them as works of art. But for me personally, I regret that I spent so much time doing busywork for an unpaid job that I didn't even enjoy.

Yes, if you live in Stanford or in a country that has an institution like Stanford then most probably "passing" the marshmallow test means waiting for a longer period in order to get twice the reward, but I dare say not a lot of countries/societies afforded that luxury until not that long ago (many of them still don't), in their case waiting for longer in order to get twice the reward might mean that you'll be dead by then, or evicted, or you had to escape the communists/the criminal right-wingers/the islamist beheaders/what have you.

I loved planning the most efficient/comprehensive path to achieve a goal in World of Warcraft or Knights of the Old Republic and then executing on the plan. I could think about what I wanted to do when I didn't have access to the game. Playing the game was really only an afterthought to test out the plan I'd come up with.

I think when most people talk about "grind" in games, they mean activities that are genuinely only time-wasters. You don't gain any skill (other than patience) from killing your hundredth goblin or clicking "harvest" on your hundredth field.

Perhaps Pokemon was training for that.