I have been meaning to blog about this for a while but *ahem* I have been busy playing Guildwars .

I started to consider the pros and cons of two hobbies of mine, gaming and programming. Not that I do a lot of the former, in fact it's rare for me to play for more than a few hours a month but that all depends on what game I have to play, some games I can get quite addicted too.

Gaming
Less of a mental challenge
Can be repetitive
Can be dull
Mostly fun if you like a challenge of hand eye coordination
Entirely unproductive
Nearly no useful skills obtained
Less rewarding
You can't play the same game forever

Programming
More of a mental challenge
Repetitiveness is
Can be dull
Mostly fun if you like a mentally stimulating challenge
Very productive
Builds on current skills, can lead to learning new ones
More rewarding
You can keep improving your program for as long as you like

I have spent a lot of hours on GW lately, what do I have to show for it? A lvl 20 Ranger/Monk which is a virtual character with no use outside the game. Had I spent that time coding I would have furthered a project I am working on. The end result of gaming is nothing, the end result of hacking on some code is a finished program which not only you find useful but often others too.

I realise not everyone can program and not everyone would want to or find it interesting, but for those who do or want to spend some time learning how two beacuse it's a lot more productive, rewarding and useful than gaming



2 Comments

Dugahole Location: Ballarat, Victoria, Australia Joined: 27/03/05

I hardly ever get to game anymore, and I agree with your points. Even if I had the time to game it doesnt mean the same to me as it once did, I would like to do other things like listen to music, go see friends...or shock horror, I have started reading lol. I have always wanted to learn some basic programming skills, its on my list of things I will teack myself, another on that list is play guitar...I need a guitar first.

Chris Location: West Midlands, UK Joined: 24/03/05

Generally if I'm gaming it has to be a really good game. The majority of games out there are nothing special and playing those type of games really is quite a waste of time, I simply don't have the motivation to do so when there's so many other things I could be doing. If you want to learn programming, I suggest starting off with PHP because you can start putting it to use very quickly and that's very rewarding, other wise if you want to go for a less web orinted language I would suggest Python. As for guitar playing, grab a cheap guitar and learn some chords. The net is full of guitar tabs. Just pick something simple to start off with (you'll know it's simple if you can play it ). The first song I learnt after messing about with chords was Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag. That was quite some time ago lol.

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