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Do RPGs have value outside of fun?

King Crispy

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Do RPGs have value outside of fun?

Yes, they do. One of the primary rewards of having a satisfying RPG waiting for you at the end of the day (for those of you who actually still know what "working for a living" is) is knowing that you can escape your everyday, mundane life's troubles for some time and de-stress. Some may equate this to having fun, but I think the psychological benefits of having an RPG that you like ready to boot up once you get home far outweigh the simple definition of fun.

Don't forget also that the roleplaying games industry provides income for millions of people and contributes to the stimulation of many countries' economies. That means if you pirate RPGs you're a fucking monster and probably deserve to be unhappy.
 

Thunar

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Outside of fun, languages, and challenging yourself, all fiction is proven to increase your empathy and our ability to put ourselves in others' shoes. RPGs (and games in general) can give us as much as any fiction book can, which is quite a lot.

Yeah, the Codex is really a place bursting with empathy and acceptance.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
Do RPGs have value outside of fun?

Yes, they do. One of the primary rewards of having a satisfying RPG waiting for you at the end of the day (for those of you who actually still know what "working for a living" is) is knowing that you can escape your everyday, mundane life's troubles for some time and de-stress. Some may equate this to having fun, but I think the psychological benefits of having an RPG that you like ready to boot up once you get home far outweigh the simple definition of fun.

Don't forget also that the roleplaying games industry provides income for millions of people and contributes to the stimulation of many countries' economies. That means if you pirate RPGs you're a fucking monster and probably deserve to be unhappy.
have you considered doing methamphetamine?
 

Generic-Giant-Spider

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does any such parallel exist in playing RPGs? If so, what value do they provide?

iG5gcfx.jpg
 

Ysaye

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Stopping the spread of COVID-19 to nerds by keeping them quarantined in their rooms?...oh sorry they were inside their rooms to begin with!
 

cretin

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Games are entertainment, nothing more and nothing less. They are exactly as valuable as film and pulp literature. Pretending they have use outside of this usually involves all sorts of sophistry that even the person spouting it doesnt really believe. For example, one of the frequent retard offerings you will get is that video games improve hand eye coordination..... and they do, in tests where the gamers are tested using a program where they line up one kind of pixel with another kind of pixel using a mouse as an index, iow: the same thing theyve already spent thousands of hours practicing, and as such if you take the conclusion to be: gamers have good hand eye coordination (general) you're a fucking moron and should probably work in a field full of other morons who produce shit pop-sci research like that for the birds. No one seriously entertains the notion that a competitive gamer could laterally move into say, volleyball, with a high level of success because skills are highly specific and the hand eye coordination you develop playing volleyball is different to the hand eye coordination you develop playing fucking counter strike.

Other arguments revolving around "intrinsic use value" (e.g games contain reading and therefore playing games is valuable for improving reading) are absolutely moron level sophistry because the only way that is valuable rests on the presumption that your level of sophistication/ability is so poorly developed that the grade school level reading you do in videogames would produce some kind of progressive challenge and adaptation. But since you're already (presumably) an english speaking nigger who reads at at least a 9th grade level, eehhhhhhhh unlikely. If you read harry potter easily at age 10, there is nothing in videogames that would provide a challenge for you and thus no actual learning going on, just stop.
 
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RPGs have dramatically improved my ability to perform statistics, probability, algebra, and understand fractions. As a child, many of the morally nuanced games of the late 1990s and early 2000s presented me with an early layman's philosophy.
 

cretin

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RPGs have dramatically improved my ability to perform statistics, probability, algebra, and understand fractions. As a child, many of the morally nuanced games of the late 1990s and early 2000s presented me with an early layman's philosophy.

Lets be honest: they did none of this. You'd like to think so, but they didn't, because they didn't for anyone else either, and everyone knows it.
 

Glop_dweller

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The original Fallout had players replaying it to clear their own conscience, after they realized the consequences of their in-game actions.
 

DalekFlay

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You old fucks keep realizing you've got more time behind you than in front and now we get all these "man, maybe I've wasted my life playing video games" threads. 80% of your life would have been wasted either way, you just chose video games over other pointless shit.
 

Funposter

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if a book contains value outside of entertainment then an RPG obviously does, since most of the RPGs that codex loves are just bad books.
 

octavius

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You old fucks keep realizing you've got more time behind you than in front and now we get all these "man, maybe I've wasted my life playing video games" threads. 80% of your life would have been wasted either way, you just chose video games over other pointless shit.

Yeah, I could have been sitting in front of the TV watching while "we" play against the other foreign football team.
 

Norfleet

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RPGs have dramatically improved my ability to perform statistics, probability, algebra, and understand fractions.
This is actually totally true. Vidya games basically teach my kids everything from reading, to math, to economics, to physics, to history. I have never sent my kids to school, entirely replacing their education with vidya games and murdering things in the woods. The difference when compared to other peoples' kids, or hell, even other people, is absolutely striking. In this one game, for instance, there is this mini-puzzle that other people seem to really struggle with, whereas my kids seem to consider it a non-issue and when assigned to go grind that mission, never even brought it to my attention as something that was worth mentioning. From this and numerous other examples, I conclude that most people are dumber than a 6 year old.

Of course, as a result, they also have no friends, being unable to relate to other kids, who play games like filthy casuals instead of understanding the principles of min-maxing and DPSes, reasoning silly things like "I'm going to equip this weapon because it looks cool and is new and has a big number for its damage" rather than the way my kids see it, which is "I'm going to keep this one because it has higher DPS".

Also, games aren't supposed to be fun. If you're still having fun, you're playing it wrong: The purpose of a game is to optimize the fun out of it. Remember, Dwarf Fortress teaches us: "Losing is fun". The corollary to this is that FUN IS FOR LOSERS, so STOP HAVING FUN.
 

bloodlover

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I think that, similar to books, this genre has a lot of value outside fun. Maybe it's not as evident but it I'd say that a good RPG can at least improve reading skills and comprehension. More often than not we think about value as something that you can directly quantify so it's rather strange to associate an RPG with value but to be honest, it's not like reading Dickens lands you a job in IT or makes you a better parent.

Related to the topic: In my country an entire generation grew up with morning cartoons in English. Wacky Races, Space Ghost, The Jetstons, Scooby Doo, stuff like that and many many kids learned English from those cartoons. And I mean actual English and not I can haz chessburgers English. Nobody assumed that Space Ghost would be anything more than fun but over the years, those cartoons were a foundation for something good. Of course you don't go from Scooby Doo to Canterbury Tales over night but those childish cartoons were the first steps in many people's English language.

At the end of the day, I think that RPGs have value outside of fun, even if it does not show immediately and if assuming you don't go full Madame Bouvary or Don Quixote on the world.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
You old fucks keep realizing you've got more time behind you than in front and now we get all these "man, maybe I've wasted my life playing video games" threads. 80% of your life would have been wasted either way, you just chose video games over other pointless shit.
This post is a lie, I don't plan on dying.
 

Grauken

Gourd vibes only
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You old fucks keep realizing you've got more time behind you than in front and now we get all these "man, maybe I've wasted my life playing video games" threads. 80% of your life would have been wasted either way, you just chose video games over other pointless shit.
This post is a lie, I don't plan on dying.

Some of us have other plans (for you)
 

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