Are video games important?
If playing video games isn't meaningful, then is developing video games meaningful? What about packaging, shipping, and selling those video games?
There's a whole lot of people able to eat & have shelter, in part, because people play video games.
Playing doesn't produce food & shelter for myself. And it's really only buying a game that puts food on other peoples' tables.
So is it valuable to buy video games, but perhaps not to play them?
It's a silly question anyway, are video games important? If you care about them, then yeah. If you don't, then no.
Now apply this same logic to like 90% of stuff at the supermarket & like 60% of the stuff at the grocery store.
I'm wondering how many video games exist purely because developing & selling them was a way to access food & shelter. (And other amenities of modern society)
And I wonder what the gaming landscape would be like if all those developers, artists, business people, marketers, actors, and others just had food and shelter and were free to do as they please.
It would actually be so neat to test this idea. Just literally let half of the gaming industry have their current salaries whether they work or not. The other half will still have to work for their pay, and will probably get more sales since half the producers are not required to work.
I wonder how many studios would keep developing anyway, how many indie games would be produced, how previously competing studios might start working together, or people might shuffle around to games they want to work on, or people might do other stuff entirely.
I guess it's nice, in a way, that we compete for food and shelter by working (or accessing welfare or committing crimes or begging) instead of murdering, for the most part.
P.S. Israel is competing for land by bombing Palestinians with U.S. weapons, funded by tax payers, making private military contractors richer.