Would young men be rioting in the streets if they didn’t have video games to pacify them?
Hear me out.
We are seeing record levels of young men unemployed and living with their parents: The future for them is bleak. Saddled with college debt, they can barely get a job that pays miimum wage, while living independently is forever out of reach.
I feel like at other points of history, there would be more social unrest, but things are exceedingly calm given the economics.
I was watching a video by Healthy Gamer, a gamer bro-turned psychiatrist. He points out that video games are very addictive and seductive because they MIMIC accomplishment. You can grind to get to the next level, you can gain new skills, you are continually put on a treadmill of constant progress. It’s very satisfying in a hollow way, satisfying in a way that might make you forget that society has nothing to offer you but debt and homelessness after you followed all the rules.
Are video games weapons of mass distraction, the metaphysical equivalent of a million Christians being fed to a million lions every day?
Probably going to be an unpopular take online but… A lot of the most chronically single people I know are very into videogames. Not sure which way the causation runs or maybe it’s a self reinforcing cycle but there does seem to be a relationship.
The folks I know tend not to be the angry incel type but I could very easily see a pathway that goes something like: video games are cheaper and easier than putting yourself out there, thus you isolate, but isolation kind of sucks and no one likes to blame themselves, so the “manosphere” and it’s precursors are there to tell you it’s actually women/wokeness/the Libs that are responsible for your angry singledom…" To me, I see them at least partially a factor in the hard gender split in politics these days.
The timing also kind of maps out. Video games have moved from niche to one of the most lucrative entertainment industries. The generation of young men raised by really quality games was coming to electoral age just about 2016 and boy, did things start going g off the rails.
I’m not blaming everything on videogames and do play some myself but I do wonder if they’ve contributed to the problem.
Definitely. I’m pushing 50 and know that, had games been more sophisticated, realistic, and able to be played online in my teens, I’d have struggled not to let that consume me. However, as it happened, the allure of gigs, beer, nights out, and girls didn’t really have much competition with the likes of Street Fighter 2.
On one hand, I definitely feel I’ve missed out on that gaming experience and to this day don’t have that shared interest that my younger colleagues have with each other. On the other, I see younger guys at work who are just regular dudes but have no family, friends, or partners outside work or their online world. And by younger, I mean pushing 40. We’re talking about decades where their free time has been spent mostly gaming.
To each their own—please don’t get prickly if you feel seen or think I’m being condescending. I can absolutely see how that can happen, and if you’re cool with that, then that’s all that matters. It’s just not the way I personally would want to live from my current perspective, although I know that had I been born a decade later, I’d probably be in the same boat.
I think it’s got more to do with the manosphere being an easily accessible community. There is almost no bar to entry, because they just need bodies to grift. You don’t need to pass a vibe check, you don’t need to have any sort of social skills. Matter of fact, failing to pass a vibe check and having no social skills make you an ideal recruit.
Manosphere is a huge part. I just think that the impressive improvements in video games have increased the pool of lonely young men on whom the manosphere preys.
As a crude example, I had surgery and finished Persona 5 while recovering. Mentioned that to a coworker when I returned and he was stoked and talked about his multiple playthroughs on that and his experience with the others in the series. With a full time job, that’s so very many weeks worth of time just devoted to a video game instead of meeting people, socializing, finding a partner etc.
Correlation vs. causation.
I think it’s a lot more likely that people who have little success meeting people, socializing, and finding partners are turning to videogames, as that’s a reasonably cheap mostly solo hobby.
Personally, if I’m not playing videogames, I’m out sailing. Not socializing.
Absolutely, there’s definitely folks who were already not good at socializing turning to video games. Buuut, I think the cheapness, ubiquity and quality have all improved so much that it has become a much easier alternative than it was in the past.
Like, if you lower the price of cigarettes, many who smoke those cheaper smokes would have smoked anyway. But as the price drops, it’s easier for those marginal smokers to continue to do so and for new ones to start. (You had to be pretty dedicated to suffer through Ultima VI etc.)
And the timing also kind of makes sense; for the last couple of decades there’s been a marked decrease in teenagers and young adults having sex. I assume part is the ubiquity of porn but I can’t imagine teenagers are just getting less horny…
Why not?
I kind of tuned out after PS2. Where would you put the dividing line for games of sufficient quality to act as a society-wide sedative? GTA4? Or would it be more social COD games?
and, yeah, there is a self-reinforcing cycle to manosphere ideology that’s really hard to break out of. guys go in thinking women are all gold digging bitches, and–surprise!–nobody wants to sleep with them, which just reinforces their belief, while simultaneously absolving themselves of needing to grow personally.
I’m going to date myself here but mid 90s and earlier games were fairly niche. There were definitely folks who played them a lot but today, I don’t think it’s entirely unusual for a kid to have spent a weekend gaming.
I don’t think there was a hard dividing line but as much as I loved say, Rebel Assault, you couldn’t really throw hundreds of hours into it.
I was hoping to maybe draw in some more current gamers. Like my last major time suck was Just Cause 2, but it it had very repetitive game loop that you just repeated different places. I never thought, “Wow, I got a lot accomplished playing Just Cause 2 all day.”