Daily Dose of English 48
Video Games
Daily Dose of English 48
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about video games. That's sort of a fun topic. I think nowadays we're at the point where everybody has at least played a video game at some point, even if for just a few seconds or on their phone or something like that. Because video games have been around for quite a while at this point, right? They kind of came around with the invention of computers and home computing to the point where people could have computers in their home to be able to play video games. And they've just grown and grown and grown and grown to the point where now they're a major entertainment thing, really. And they're absolutely everywhere. Big, small consoles, internet. phones, right? There's different kinds of video games, reasons, genres, designers, everything is so much more than it used to be back with Pong. Pong was sort of officially the first video game that you could play and it was very simple. You were just sending a little white pixel back and forth. A pixel, by the way, are the individual squares that you see on your screen. Each one of those is a single pixel. And the resolution of your screen is determined by the number of pixels that you see on your screen. And the resolution is how clear something is, right? How many pixels there are. Those words are very connected. And so Pong was a very low resolution game, or low res, if you will. And it was just you and one other person who would move essentially a paddle or a stick back and forth on a screen and bounce a ball. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Right. But nowadays video games are humongous massive products or they can be massive products and projects built by hundreds of people to be sold to millions of people. There are humongous video games that are mainstream and they're almost as big as movies in some ways. The literal size of a video game file also has grown a ton. I find it quite interesting that a lot of old games are tiny. We're talking megabytes of data. The game itself is tiny. It's hard to explain other than by using words like megabytes. But a phone, a modern phone, can fit thousands or potentially even millions of these little old games. However, big games take up gigabytes and sometimes tens of gigabytes, right? There's some games nowadays that take up 50 gigabytes or more. And that is so many times more than the old games that it's really hard to understand. It's really hard to wrap your mind around. But I think that's really interesting. In fact, something that I'm interested in, in general, is that idea of simplicity and how much you can fit into a single, or like a megabyte, right? A tiny file. And I think I've seen some videos of people doing challenges where they try to make the smallest game they can, and they have to get creative and reuse ideas and textures and code in order to make things as small as possible. But that's not really the main concern nowadays because we do have a lot more storage space, right? It's pretty easy to buy 32 gigabytes of storage for a couple of dollars. Whereas in like 40 years ago, 32 gigabytes would have been humongous, right? That would have been absolutely unfathomable, unthinkable 40 years ago, but it's pretty, small nowadays, right? A single high res photo that's like in really, really high quality can be half a megabyte. That's not that common, but that's pretty large. But like if you have all of the possible stuff in there, it can be possible, right? These podcasts are pretty small in comparison, but there's still a couple of megabytes depending on how long they get. Anyways, I'm getting off topic. I want to talk about video games because I grew up playing a good amount of video games. They were a thing that I really enjoyed as a kid, but I don't really play video games at all anymore. They've almost completely left my life. And I find that interesting because I think about video games in a very positive way. I remember them and I like them in sort of abstract, but I don't really like playing them. As a kid, I played a lot of different games. I didn't have that many, right? Sorry, different kinds of games, I would rather say. I didn't actually play that many different games in and of themselves, like the actual literal games, because I didn't have a ton of... I didn't really spend a ton of money on them. My parents didn't buy me tons of video games. And so I mostly played the same few a bunch of times, but they were very, very different games. I guess is a better way to say it. Yeah. There's a lot of variety in there, which I think is good, right? Having variety is good. And I, I specifically played a lot on my PlayStation two was a console that I had for a long time. I also played on a Nintendo DS, was a favorite of mine. And then eventually I bought myself a Wii, a Nintendo Wii, which are still fun, honestly. Those are still a good console. That's still a good video game system because the games are a little goofier. You have to move your body around. And so I think they're generally a little more approachable to the average person. And those are the games that I played a lot. Oh, also a Game Boy. I played a lot on a Game Boy. That was a big one too. I spent a lot of hours playing just a couple of different games, like just over and over and over and over and over again. But afterwards, when I was a little bit older, so in my teenage years, that's when I started to play a little bit more on computers. I still didn't play that many different games, even though I had the option to at that point, but I like to sort of choose individual games and kind of play those a lot more. That was also when I started to play, I guess, fewer or less video games in general, because I started to watch more movies, TV shows, YouTube videos, and just do other things on my computer. Like, that's what I think has taken the role in my life now, is that I still sit at the computer a lot and I do things, but I do other things now, like projects or like this, I record podcasts, I record simple English videos, I do small coding projects. There's a bunch of different things that I do at my computer that fill the gap, I guess, of playing video games. Another big one of those is language learning, because that's, I guess, my primary hobby, right? I spend several hours every single day learning languages, so I think it's fair to say that it's a pretty big part of my life. But I'm not exactly sure why I don't play video games much anymore. I think the main reason is that I don't feel like I'm being that productive when I'm doing it, and I like to feel like I'm doing something. But when I play video games, it almost feels like I'm wasting time. but not in the way that I necessarily enjoy because, I mean, I liked playing video games when I was younger. I really enjoyed it. I liked to pass the time that way. But I think now I just don't enjoy that as much, right? That active process of playing and doing something isn't something that I enjoy as much. And so if I'm doing something that I don't feel is productive and that I don't really enjoy, that's not a great combination. Right? I'd rather do things that I enjoy or that I feel are productive. And maybe they combine, right? Like, for example, learning Czech is something that I enjoy doing and also feel productive doing. And so that's a perfect hobby to have, to do. And so I think that's the main reason I don't play video games. But the other one, more subtle one, that I want to throw some extra words in here with, is that the kinds of video games that I usually enjoy are video games that are very grindy. And that's not a super common word. That's a word that a lot of English native speakers wouldn't really know unless they played video games. grindy or to grind in a video game is where you have to play this, where you play the same game a lot, doing something that's relatively repetitive or doing the same thing. So doing the same thing over and over and over and over again is what we call the grind, right? Or a grind or grinding or whatever it is. And I generally like that kind of thing. I don't really know why it makes my, my brain likes it. It's enjoyable. However, I don't really like doing it in a video game because I feel like I can make that progress somewhere else. Like I said, I feel like I'm not being productive. Because that's essentially what language learning is. It's a bit of a grind. You have to put in the hours, you have to put in the time to get there. And so I almost treat language learning like a video game in that way. And I think that's why I end up being pretty successful when it comes to language learning. Anyway, I think I'm gonna leave it there for today. I think I've talked enough about video games. Let me know down in the comments. Do you play video games? Do you like video games? What are some of your favorite games? Or if you don't, what are some words that you learned that you thought were interesting? But that's everything for today. I'm really glad that you could be here for this interesting episode of A Daily Dose of English, and I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.
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