Gaming for life...

Chris Newsome graduated from high school in 2016. A student in two of my classes, he was quiet but responsible and conscientious. I never got the impression that the books we were reading in class stirred him up, but he read them dutifully, earned good grades, and went off to college the way most everyone does.

What I remember about Chris was how he came alive on the days he showed videos he had made. It was a curious thing for all of us to watch this quiet young man who sat in the back and kept to himself suddenly blow the roof off with his excitement and passion as he explained what he had created. In his capstone project, for instance, he made a video that compared books we had read with his favorite games. Chris’s gaming video went on for 30 minutes and I remember everyone in the class being stunned at how slick and professional the whole thing looked.

But gaming is gaming and school is school, right? A lot of people my age see playing video games as the ultimate waste of time. My kids have gone through phases where they have used a lot of their time playing games they loved. Gabe would stalk the streets of San Andreas looking for new cars to rip off and gas stations to set on fire in GTA. Billy would wander the bucolic settings of the new world hinterland, indiscriminately killing bumbling British soldiers with mauls and lances and crossbows in Assassin’s Creed. (While they played, I often watched the fringes of the screen to see if the game creators got the native birds right in their depictions.) It always seemed fairly harmless to me, but at the same time not the most productive use of time.

Chris’s post takes up this “waste of time” question. Not in the typical way in which gaming is said to improve cognitive functioning (multi-tasking, spatial attention, etc.), but as a call to follow your passion. True romantics might have trouble applying a seize-the-day mentality to virtual reality, but I would point out there is a successful video game version of the Henry David Thoreau classic Walden. Apparently, you have to “live deep and suck all the marrow out of life” to win.

After graduating from high school, Chris attended UCSD, but it is currently taking some time off to investigate the possibility of pursuing online entertainment as a full-time gig.

Chris’s post plays off of the follow-your-bliss advice given by Theresa Sgobba a few weeks ago. -- even if others think your bliss is a grand waste of time. “It's about how I've fought against the paths people recommend to instead pursue what I love, even though it's terrifying, difficult, and looked down upon.”


- C.H.

I’ll be honest - I’ve never really liked school.

Am I allowed to say that here?

For pretty much all of my life, education was something I knew was required, but outside of that obligation, I was never too excited for most of my classes. Looking back on my time in high school, I definitely don’t think it was a waste of time and energy, but if you asked my tired self at 6 a.m. every day if I was ready for another riveting day in Biology class, I’d probably groan and go back to sleep.

Outside of being “that one kid who sometimes made videos for school projects,” I was a very quiet student. I had a couple of good friends, but speaking up in class for me was rare and I didn’t concern myself much with school events, clubs or sports. I tended to just coast through classes to get through the day, because after that, I could go home and play video games.

At this point, some people may be thinking, “Oh, he just sat inside and played video games instead of doing anything worthwhile with his time? His parents must be so proud.” And trust me, I hear ya! Imagine how I filled out my college applications. How the fuck do you tell college admissions people that you played video games every day of high school instead of leading sports teams or starting charities?

I know I spent plenty of time trying to figure that one out.

But the whole reason I’m writing this is to prove to people that video games aren’t a waste of time. There are so many immersive and engaging demonstrations of storytelling, emotion, and music throughout video games. I think they deserve so much more than what news headlines reduce them to.

“Are video games making our children violent?”

Hell, for my senior year Capstone project, I compared the themes of Japanese role-playing games to the themes found in the literature I’ve studied. Take that, multi-billion dollar news corporations!

As I ventured through the college application process, my applications looked very thin. I had to dig deep for every extracurricular I could come up with and make it sound as professional and accomplished as possible. (I’m pretty sure I wrote about the club I started to play board games at lunch.) It was difficult to choose a major or write about my supposed passion for traditional academic subjects, when I really just wanted to play games and make videos talking about how much they meant to me. So, without a lot of thought, I decided to sell myself as a budding Computer Science major and sent away my applications.

Fast-forward two years to the current day. Even though I decided that Computer Science wasn’t for me after the first class I took in my freshman year of college, I am finally managing to do what I was always told was impossible: play video games for a living. Between classes and over the summers, I have begun to chart a path in the video entertainment industry and I can actually see a future in it.

Coming to the realization that I don’t find much interest in traditional education or a conventional college major has me absolutely terrified, as college being the “next step in life” has practically been ingrained into my head since childhood. Despite my fears, I’ve decided to take some time away from college to pursue online entertainment full-time, and the fact that I have the opportunity to turn my favorite hobby into a career has me incredibly excited for the future.

Alright, so you’ve made it to the end, and you’ve deduced that I’m a dude who plays video games too much. What are my incredibly original words of wisdom?

If you have a hobby or interest that you love, even if it’s niche, or difficult to make a career out of, or not something related to education or a traditional major in college, don’t give it up. In my humble opinion, you should always allocate times to the things you love, even if they are things that others consider a waste of time. If you’re passionate enough, you’ll find a way to make it sound interesting on a college application instead of doing that one other thing you don’t really care about but your counselors recommended. You don’t need to know exactly what your future should look like in your late teens and early 20s, so why not pursue what you love while you have the chance?