Best Of

If the most common expression of the suffering of the human condition is that underlying feeling or belief that we are fundamentally separate from others, god or existence itself, wouldn't the feeling of "winning" amount to a feeling of some temporary assuagement of that condition?
From a perspective of practice, doesn't a feeling of winning, or losing, arise to the degree that we still foster an innate sense of separation between self & other?
Perhaps the influence of the feeling of "winning" or "losing" is little more than a teacher showing us what we are still attached to and suffering within.

Says a snooker enthusiast who runs a snooker hall for the over 50 crowd.

@how said:
While limiting my daily screen time…

Maybe an interesting view for you? From the video: An average American 18-year-old will spend 93% of his life’s free time behind screens. A significant amount of this is social media, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter/X. Social media carries a message by its very structure, and it is mostly about short contacts and scrolling. Social media’s profits are determined by how effective they are in keeping you scrolling through their stuff. And the value proposition in terms of how much you get out of it compared to the time you spend is really poor.

Worth watching, I thought. Of course, next to social media the other main drivers of screen time are television and games. So it’s not entirely inappropriate to the thread.

The simplest way to test out the effect that a game has on you is to just stop doing it and not substitute the time you would have spent doing it with anything else.
The dis-ease or discomfort that arises from the resulting lack of stimulation can indicate the degree to which that gameplay is actually suffering's cause..

Are we crabs in a cooking pot oblivious to the ever-increasing water temperature?

It is not necessarily the game that is the problem but how we relate to it.
I have long felt that the right "livelihood" of the 8FP's wheel while true, might have been a better support structure for all the other spokes on that wheel if it was re-labeled instead as appropriate "interactions" or relationships.

@Jeroen said:
It has everything to do with disenchantment — with realising that what games dangle in front of you as a reward is little more than sociological and mythological convention, a thin selection of noughts and ones making up a digital asset of something that has a much richer appearance in your mind. Ultimately you realise there isn’t anything of value in nearly-all games. I added the ‘nearly all’ as a nod to @person’s Dungeons and Dragons game nights.

Understanding what there is of value in games is therefore key. I think it can be broken down into five categories, as follows:

• Entertainment: games are an entertainment, it passes the time and keeps the mind busy
• Stories: games tell stories, with all the usual elements of myth and character
• Game mechanics: games teach you resource management, precision, trading pieces, etc.
• Confidence: games teach you confidence and competence, allowing you to practice for life
• Social interaction: games can teach you about social interaction, theater, play

Once these areas lose their hold on you, you may find yourself losing interest rapidly. There are other entertainments, other and better ways of telling stories. Confidence you may find you have enough of. Game mechanics is a very wide area and ultimately devolves into numerical puzzles, and social interaction through games can stay fresh for a long time.

So when I say there isn’t anything of value, I mean in an ultimate sense. You know what they say about the Dhamma — that it is good in the beginning, good in the middle and good at the end. For games there is a slightly different perspective, that games are good for a beginning player, stay fun for a long time, but ultimately you reach a point of being done with them (or you get totally wrapped up in addiction).

That point in the end, when you begin to see through the illusions to the little puzzles the game is made up of, that is where you become disenchanted. The puzzles ultimately have no value to you.