orcishgamer: Culture and gaming appear to be psychologically necessary for our well being. As soon as you are in no danger of starving to death you need stimulation and we've used gaming and other forms forms of culture for this for 10s of thousands of years. The bit of common wisdom you are sharing and that I've quoted has been shown to be incorrect by vast bodies of anthropological, sociological, and psychological study and work.
hedwards: That is true, but there's a metric crap load of high quality free games out there these days. I've just been playing Tux Kart lately, and it's well designed and polished. Perhaps not the best of the genre, but it holds up well. Same goes for Super Tux, high quality game, completely free.
RPGs can be a bit tougher, at least for the comprehensive ones, but there are still free ones around that are quite good.
What you say is true, though there is value in a shared cultural experience, it's actually a terribly interesting discussion to me (and sometimes I fear, only me). In this case, however, I was just using it to illustrate a false, if extremely common, premise that comes up in these discussions. i.e. the argument "you don't need games" is very probably false in most of the ways that matter to us as a civilization.
The best way to make sure that everyone can engage in culture and shared experience is a whole other road, something that's worth discussing at length, but it'd probably derail this thread completely:)
