I think there is good reason to be skeptical of hardcore sports fans who are above a certain age. Sports all use the same basic tricks to trigger to pleasure mechanisms of the brain. As such, anyone who is sufficiently intelligent should be able to figure out that they're all basically the same, and thus to be avoided after a certain point if one wants to keep growing as a person.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy watching genuinely novel sports when they come out like Foosball or Ultimate Frisbee, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that sports can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits.
But at it's root most serious sports today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain.
That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation.
I think your comment is actually a convincing argument that we should be skeptical of hardcore sports fans rather than a convincing argument that we shouldn't be skeptical of hardcore gamers.
Playing sports has the side benefit of making you fit. While physical activity may indeed be a "repetitive basic need", fulfilling that basic need regularly will still make you a happier, healthier person.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy watching genuinely novel sports when they come out like Foosball or Ultimate Frisbee, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that sports can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits.
But at it's root most serious sports today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain.
That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation.