system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
A book isn't any more productive. There's quite a bit of text in the games I play and I do like to read as much as I can while still playing video games. Also, reaction time. Thinking about how you're moving your character in relation to everything else. Managing resources, deductive reasoning (you can figure things out on your own in video games!), a little logic in games like DayZ where you can trick people into drinking gasoline out of a canteen, you can wear rags on your feet instead of shoes to silence your footsteps, mixing normal rags with disinfectant to make them better rags, you don't have any recipes to follow in that game it's all done like in real life. With your bare hands without seeing what it is you'll make. Maybe it's not the way you play video games, but I absolutely approach them from a mindset of improving what I can in my brain, and it works! Dark Souls gave me a love for challenge and I don't really get stressed at large tasks, it helped me learn that even if it's frustrating losing a lot, you can absolutely find a way around it and solve your problem. As opposed to reading which is just the text part I mentioned. Also, it's much easier to distract yourself from mental health problems when you care more about not dying in a video game.
gpt
The skills you learn in video games are generally useful… in video games. Reaction time is useful in video games. Resource management is useful… in video games (I’ve heard people say this transfers into budgeting… I refuse to believe those people have ever actually made a budget).  Videogame-isms (gas cylinders = shoot for explosion, crouch to sneak so enemies can’t hear you, attacks from behind are critical, etc.) are useful, in video games. You had a love for challenge before you played Dark Souls, Dark Souls was just a challenge (Took me 120 hours to get through that game, definitely not easy).

You can point to the 1-5% of all of this that carries over into the real world, and call it productive. But just because you get *something* out of it doesn’t mean it becomes *productive.* Seriously, try just laying around for an hour, doing nothing. You will have a few interesting thoughts, and will come away from that experience with more than you went into it with. I still wouldn’t call it “productive.”

When I reflect on the best video games I’ve played, I remember them fondly, and they’ve given me some insight into the ways I go about solving problems. Now, do I think those lessons were worth the thousands of thousands of hours I poured into them? Not remotely, and I think if you’re being honest with yourself, you’d agree that when viewed through the lens of long-term self improvement, you probably wouldn’t recommend someone play video games.

When I reflect on the best books I’ve read, they’ve fundamentally changed the way I view my life.

None of this even matters—it’s fine to waste time. But I hate this framing that playing video games isn’t *actually* wasting time because it they have text, and involve some degree of problem-solving. Own up to the fact that you don’t really feel a need to do self-improvement, rather than reframing video games as self-improvement just because you get *something* out of them.