Gaming as secular activity

[droqen]

> You don't consider gaming a hobby?

> I see it as a secular activity that has little application elsewhere. The skills or connections you build end when you turn off the console. I'm looking for something more concrete.

> I disagree. If you played starcraft, you would learn coordination, resource management, time management, multitasking. If you played RPGs, it would teach you new words that you wouldn't otherwise see. But yeah judge them all you want. "Secular."

This is an interesting exchange. I feel lately like I can tell the difference between a thing I'm consuming for pleasure and a thing that helps me to grow. Why do I engage in an activity, or with a work? I'm really enjoying reading The Dispossessed right now, but certainly some of my interaction with it is 'unnecessary' in the way that grinding in an RPG is secular, is a thing that ends when you turn off the console.

I wonder how responsible decades of processing/analyzing gameplay is for making me a system nihilist.