Some people have this idea that playing baccarat is a hobby and it puts me off. Playing baccarat is not a hobby it is a pastime. Hobbies are often communal activities that encourage socialization, not pseudo casino congregations. You can engage with your hobby in isolation and it can be your own activity for yourself, or you can share your hobby with others which I believe is the prime function of maintaining a hobby the goal being socialization. Just because you play baccarat with other people or groups of people does not then make playing baccarat a hobby, you are merely interacting with others inside of a baccarat game which is very dystopian.

This same phenomenon of pseudo relationships exists in the streaming world where people congregate behind their screens to watch a person do a thing or play baccarat, but together, it’s essentially gooning without the sexual pathology. (actual lol at this part)

The definition of hobby has been stretched to include baccarat. Baccarat is not a hobby, they facilitate the atomization of the self and promote further isolation of the human spirit. I can play a game of baccarat with other people without having met the other people, in essence they become the medium itself exempt from the human form. I do not know you nor have I met you, if we did meet would we even share a common interest outside of the pastime we bonded over?

The system that relies on atomizing its people to the point of creating virtual subjects with no corporeal being and promoting socialization through baccarat is entirely bizarre, the amalgamation of things that are present in my existence pushes me closer to reaching peak psychosis.

There needs to be a material value to a hobby, it can’t just be cards on a board highlighting one’s achievements. Without a tableau, without all that data stored, your hobby CEASES to exist.

Card games must be abolished, they are just another barrier preventing our escape from a doomed virtual world created for the sole purpose of pushing us further away from our physical bodies. Like the universe shifting, the same process is existing within society, they call it the red shift and we are Blue Eyes White Dragons shifting away from ourselves.

Ableist bullshit, you just want to degrade people who play videogames, regardless of if its a “hobby” or not

People used to play chess through mailed letters. Before the internet hobby communities could be restricted to people writing letters to enthusiast magazines or for the more privileged of them sometimes traveling to a convention, if they didn’t live in a big city and the hobby was niche enough. People still play tabletop games through daily forum posts or over IRC channels.

For much of the 20th century the main American hobby was sitting dead still for hours every day staring at a man in a glowing box deliberately try to give you deadly brainworms. Before that sitting dead still staring at some cheap paper containing some weird racist story about Jack Manly getting the girl as his special good boy prize for doing colonialism was the biggest hobby.

In short, there’s no reasonable dividing line of telepresence for hobbies nor is there innate quality to something being a hobby in the first place.

I completely agree but we must also consider reading literature as well. People consumed with buying books, sitting alone, completely enveloped in a fantasy world with no regard for what’s happening outside of their story. It’s not a coincidence that the printing press accompanied industrialization.

Pajitnov wrote Tetris for fun in a couple of weeks on a piece of hardware with 4kb of RAM. Pretty sure to abolish video games you’d have to either get rid of computers completely or have a dude with a gun standing over the shoulder of every programmer.

Also fuck that, video games are fun and make me happy and my life would be worse without them.

You say videog*mes need to be abolished, yet here is you partaking in a videog*me. Curious.

he says while being given a wedgie and shoved inside of a locker

Video games are a hobby, like watching TV, but generally not worth mentioning on a date. Oh, you like video games? Don’t tell me you like eating food beyond your required nutrients too, you quirky bean

in the streaming world where people congregate behind their screens to watch a person do a thing or play a game, but together, it’s essentially gooning without the sexual pathology

I agree that videogames aren’t a hobby though.

Unless you make videogames, then that can be a hobby.

Hobbies involve making a thing, and sometimes sharing that thing you made with other people who also make things. This can stretch to making a collection, which you share with others, such as tabletop card games.

Some specific videogames are however a hobby, by themselves. Minecraft can be a hobby. People make stuff, and share the things they made with each others.

This is kind of like saying “[insert band] isn’t real music” – actually, it is, but that doesn’t mean it can’t suck

Hobbies are often communal activities that encourage socialization, not pseudo online congregations

Wrong. A hobby is a small falcon in the genus falco

Sorry, can’t read all this, Tarkov just wiped

no i think that still counts as a hobby. the nature of hobbies is that most of them are uninteresting to people who do not share those hobbies. model trains is like the platonic “hobby” and it’s mostly solitary. i don’t know where you got the idea that the hobby is a natural, pre-social category that has been misrepresented under capitalism. if anything, it’s the capitalist separation of pleasure activities and work activities which gives us the concept in the first place.

additionally, i’m not sure what conception of “material value” you’re using, or why that would be necessary to hobbies. like, you have to be able to sell it on the open market for it to be a hobby? is going for walks a hobby? certainly not in common usage. what about hiking? is smashing mailboxes in the dead of night a hobby? is doing whip its a hobby? what about my personal vice, trading card games? that’s very social and very material, and my first hand observation is that it is ideologically aligned with the reification of intellectual property and empowerment of corporations.