what rhythm games mean to me and why hobbies matter

rhythm games have been my main hobby for the better part of a decade at this point and they have completely altered my life trajectory on more than one occasion. one of the benefits of being into arcade rhythm games as well as at home games i.e. osu!/beat saber is that the community aspect is much more potent, as the very action of playing the game requires face to face interaction to some degree. it's way easier to have beef with someone over osu! DMs than it is to call someone a shitter to their face, so people are generally nicer and you can get a lot closer with the friends you make via this hobby. not to discount internet friends (my best friends lives in arizona and we've never met irl) but given how capitalism has completely wiped third spaces off the map having something tangible is super nice. the average age of arcade-goers is also much higher than any online space i have ever been in due to the requirement of paying money per-play, needing a car and a license to go to the arcade, and a much higher bar for social skills. while i have seen the occasional child who's much better at iidx than they have any right to be they are usually significantly easier to interact with than a random 14 year old on discord. i wonder why that could be. (/s)

also, rhythm games inspired a much deeper interest in japan that surpassed what i would've been interested in had i just stuck to anime/manga. being into something that's already pretty niche in japan means that meeting real japanese people on twitter became much easier. so here i am, studying abroad for a year on the opposite side of the planet (i'm a white american, sorry), way farther out of my comfort zone than i've ever been. while most of my peers are treating this as an extended vacation, visiting large metropolitan areas to visit anime stores, seeing anisong artists live, and see huge popular shrines, my rhythm game interest has lead me to some of the more integral yet more hidden aspects of japanese culture (mainly by virtue of being able to make friends with japanese people rather easily via common interest). this has also been a huge motivation for language study. 

and i owe all of this to downloading osu back in 2014.

this leads me to the ultimate point of this blog post, which is that hobbies are really important. like, really important. more important that i can really stress and i encourage anyone who's younger than me reading this to take this advice to heart: find a hobby that mainly happens in real life. discord and other sns is great, but finding a hobby irl will put you so far ahead of your peers, especially heading into your adult life. you will CONSTANTLY hear adults complain about how making new friends is extremely difficult once you're out of school, how they have nothing to look forward to after work, how dating is hard because they have no common interests, etc etc etc. these problems are all solvable by just having a hobby. whether its something super fucking nerdy like arcade rhythm games or tabletop card games i.e. magic the gathering, or something a bit more popular like a weekly sports club or a book club, these things are important to maintaining a healthy social life as our world gets more and more digitized and as capitalist interests try and do anything they can to keep you online so they can farm more of your personal information and sell it to third parties.

i have a lot more thoughts on this topic but life is busy and i suck at writing so organizing and presenting my ideas clearly takes a lot of time, of which i don't have at the moment. i appreciate anyone who took the time to read all of this and i hope everyone has a great day :)