I can easily spend a dozen hours on video games while forgetting about food; is it possible to spend the same quantity of time eating and not thinking about games ? I don't think so. Even if it is - I'd never want to meet people who can achieve that...

Food is nourishment for the body. Games are nourishment for the mind and spirit. Ergo, games are food. Therefore, as noted, the argument is pointless.

Mmmh, manuals. I remember the days when you would open a new game and just time chew on the manual for awhile before even booting up the game. GOG provides digital copies of manuals, of course, but it's not the same. If you print them out, they just taste bland, and if you put them on a USB stick they're hard to digest and give you really horrible gas.

Also, this is relevent:

http://videogamepotpourri.blogspot.com/2012/10/pair-of-dice-lost.html
I agree that the time/money value is much greater where videogames are concerned.

Seriously, you don't get hungry in so many hours?

I'm a pretty... passionate guy. When I'm seriously into something, I tend not to notice such trivialties ;P.

Also - as far as stereotypes go, I gracefully avoid the "fat awkward nerd" one, which is, at the very least, amusing to think about...

Actually, I'm a bit underweight.

I put mashed potatoes in my DVD drive once.

Didn't work.

That can be argued the other way. There have been some really bad/short single player games that can be completed in a few hours that have come out at $60.

For $60 I can get plenty of food that will make me happier for longer.

Argument solved.

(and now, to read the OP.)

I don't even understand why this age-old argument still exists.

Food causes weight problems, fattens your liver, gums up your arteries, and increases your risk to develop life-threatening cardiovascular conditions. Moreover, it may even poison you if you commit an error as simple as mistaking a 0 for an 8, and consume 2-year-old yoghurt. The inconvenient truth is, in fact, a quite simple one: FOOD KILLS.

Games, on the other hand, make people happy. They also prevent disasters that could easily happen if people went more often to the dangerous and unpredictable "real life", a place where no walkthoughs ease your progress and where you can't even load a savegame if you messed up. Also, most importantly, games often require players to enter complex serial codes, and thereby train them in distinguishing 0s from 8s, which in turn _protects_ them from the risk of eating 2-year-old yoghurt.

The only real problem with games is this newfangled "digital distribution" business. The cardboard boxes tasted bland, but at least they filled the stomach, and they never ever decayed.

If you ask me, Muhammad Ali, in his prime, was much better than anti-lock brakes.