It's not just video games either. Add Netflix and social media, and soon, VR, to the equation, and it's pretty clear that the game of life offers insufficient rewards relative to one's efforts. I don't believe we ended up here due to some grand conspiracy, but I do think that the top 1% have gotten so skilled at trapping wealth and therefore opportunity that it's really screwing over everyone else. Even as a relatively successful adult who doesn't game (no time for it, and I avoid things I know are addictive) I felt the game is rigged. Most of us have gotten to the point that we literally never expect to retire (though we will literally run into some physical constraints at some point when our bodies and minds begin to fail us). So we grind through work, pay our bills, and hope to God we don't get cancer or Alzheimer's. When life seems so unrewarding, it's unsurprising that many seek refuge in games and other entertainment (Netflix, social media, news feeds, etc)...
Any way you slice it this is not going to end well. Essentially we're in a Great Depression of an entirely new sort.
One thing that's great about gaming as an addiction: it's very inexpensive. This has been changing for the worse with all the pay to win stuff, but there's still a fair amount of cheap gaming out there. With a gaming addiction, never leaving the house and a minimal food budget I wonder how much the average gamer subsists on each month.
I had a friend whose brother would go to work and come home and play video games every day. That was literally it. Work, pay rent, game, eat sleep. I watched him repeat this cycle when we were hanging out. He didn't even have much to say most days.
The hikomori in Japan are already adopting this terminal frugality en masse.
It's like the world is catching up to Japan and its problems: slow growth, deep government debt, ballooning social entitlement spending, and un/under-employed youth.
One that I graduated high school with in particular comes to mind. We all played video games back then. Half Life, Goldeneye, Starcraft, Everquest, etc. He was a smart guy, driven, usually made better grades than me (I was lazy in high school). Took a job at an medical supply company after graduating from high school intending to work for a few months before starting college.
Well, when it came time to start school, he tried to balance work, school and an ever increasing amount of time in front of the TV or computer playing games ... and failed. Dropped out of school after one semester. Got an apartment with a couple of his coworkers where they would mostly play games when they weren't working. I went over a few times. It was depressing to watch. You really want to say, "Dude, is this really what you want to do?"
Spent seven years working that same job stocking shelves and spent the rest of the time drinking and playing whatever the newest game was that month. He'd message me at like 12am asking if I was playing anything and I'd be like, nope, studying. He'd type "LOL" (back in the AIM days).
When World of Warcraft came out, he was instantly drawn into the WoW universe. He'd stay up all night playing. Broke up with his girlfriend because he was playing WoW literally every waking moment. Started being late to work, eventually lost his job and lost his apartment (I'm guessing his coworkers asked him to leave when he couldn't pay rent). Moved back in with his parents and still, just ... gaming. All the time. He'd just spend whole days sitting in front of WoW or some other video game. For three years that was all he did.
Eventually, his parents had to SHUT OFF THEIR INTERNET and have an intervention to reach him. Obviously I don't know the full story of what happened, but after that he did start to pull it together.
Got back into school at 29 and just recently graduated with a business degree. He's managed to "stay clean from games" (his exact words, BTW) for the last seven years. I can't imagine what an immense struggle that must be considering how ubiquitous they are now.
All told he lost more than 10 years of his life.
The whole time I'm looking on at this and thinking, if he was drinking, we would call this alcoholism. But what do we call it when it's video games?
Hard to blame anyone for spending their time doing things where success is quantifiable and quickly displayed.
This is the Western countries' version of hikkikomori and there will only be more of it as education and good opportunities become out of reach for more people.
Men seem more likely to do this than women because of the societal pressures on them to get a job and run the rat race of dating and climbing a nonexistent corporate ladder.
For those people living in major job centers or major job creation industries it seems unfathomable, but there is an entire American generation out there experiencing this, being told that they're not shit if they don't go to college and work a 9 to 5 (which really is more of a 9 to 9). I don't blame them for opting out of such useless propaganda. Not everyone enjoys or is interested in computer programming, and starting your career in your 20s without an inherently marketable skill is terrifying for most people.
>Men seem more likely to do this than women because of the societal pressures on them to get a job and run the rat race of dating and climbing a nonexistent corporate ladder.
I think the social penalty of a young man dropping out is lower than a young women because their perceived social value is much lower. It is a lower height to fall from.
> Men seem more likely to do this than women because of the societal pressures on them to get a job and run the rat race of dating and climbing a nonexistent corporate ladder.
And perhaps because "taking care of themselves" pressure on women is much, much higher.
>Game designers often deploy a technique called “dynamic difficulty adjustment”. In many games, the software assesses a player’s skill and rebalances various attributes of the game accordingly, to keep the game fun and manageable for those of less ability. Gamers early in their careers, or who are simply struggling to pick up the skills necessary to succeed, are given a helping hand; their world might be more generously strewn with useful power-ups, for instance. As players advance, these helping hands are withdrawn.
This sounds really silly, but I honestly consider being thrown into the deep-end when learning how to play Tribes 1 (I started playing in 1999) and DOTA (started 2004) as a child greatly benefited my overall mindset and attitude as I grew older.
I think I qualify as a videogame addict. I've probably spent more than 1/3 of my waking hours since I was nine years old gaming. I'm approaching 5000 hours on DOTA2 alone since 2011, though I've played significantly less games in general within the past three years due to finally being employed. Programming feels just as good, and I get paid on top of it.
I think my social development was stunted, but I feel like I'm mostly normal now as an adult. I really don't have any regrets, and I plan to give my kids completely unrestricted access to their own computer and the internet as soon as they want it, barring any laws or regulations that prevent me from doing so legally.
When you look at UBI, you can consider it as the government supplying a "default job" to everyone, in the same sort of way it provides a few other "defaults" - mail (USPS) being a good example.
This provides a "minimum competition" against which any company must compete - FedEx is always going to have to be better than the USPS.
So notionally - if UBI provides a "default job", companies will have to offer better jobs than that, in order to attract any employees at all.
Except this article is pointing out that for a chunk of the population, that effect is already here, supplied by video games. The job (compensation considered) must be less shitty than playing video games all day.
Interesting take, but isn't this also the motivation for companies to automate as much of their workforce as possible? Nobody really wants to take orders at McDonald's for $9/hour and Ronald McOwner doesn't want to pay his workers $15+ when the minimum wage gets raised so he installs automated kiosks to take customer orders. Theoretically, those workers who lost their jobs to the machines are "freed" to pursue more productive ventures, but what we've actually been seeing is the 1% capturing that capital even more (as the poster above noted).
I think we're getting to a point where society is going to have to accept that vast swaths of the population are simply not necessary or otherwise employable, in the modern labor force, and hopefully, treating "labor" as an expendable market resource becomes an archaic concept, similar to how we view human slavery.
The problem is, the 1% will not change on their own, that has never been the case. The incentives are just not there for them to want to.
That is how you got alt-right. Bad job market and on the other hand portrayed as oppressor and reminded to check your own privilege. Video game is just the surface of the underlying illness. It is cheap(per hour), and accessible source of pleasure.
I think I see what you're saying here: This story is about young unemployed people who have many hours to spare and use them gaming. There are similar young people who use those hours on the alt-right parts of 4chan, Reddit or other online communities.
I dropped out and retired at 31 to a third world country. I'm going to study whatever I'm interested in while the economy sorts itself out. I may never re-enter the job maket. I'm ok with that. I'm not rich but it's really cheap here. I don't want to be forced into a rental market or stock market. The jobs don't pay enough and the margins are too thin. The risk is too high and all of my statistical modeling is telling me that the debt fueled market ends in tears. Good luck with that. Count me out. Don't blame me if you can't find someone to help you build software.
I really like this read, something just smells off about blaming young people for "wasting years" on video games. We've got a horribly stacked real life "game" where the boomers and elites have horded everything and fucked future generations, blaming an individual for dropping out and not wanting to really participate in that trainwreck is being dishonest at best.
I played plenty of computer and video games when I was young. I don't have as much time now but every once in awhile I'll go on a Rocket League or Overwatch binge and I wonder if modern games really do enrapture us more than 8-bit games ever could. It's not that older games weren't as well-designed as far as games go, but there's only so many times you can beat Super Mario Bros. 3/Super Metroid in a week, or in a lifetime. Whereas competitive multiplayer games with no defined ending has the tendency to make you lose track of time.
What is the labor market, if not an interminable, poorly designed MMORPG?
Most of us will be alive by the time there's enough economic incentive for all the things humanity needs, with only a token labor force. Many of the world's richest countries are already there, at least when it comes to their own citizens.
In the future (i.e. the present, in the software world), to the extent that employers need workers, they going to have to compete for them with high salaries and copious perks. We'll largely conquer poverty, and we'll have a very large lower-middle class working part-time, a smallish upper-middle class of knowledge workers, and tiny class of ultrawealthy capitalists.
Eh. Young men are "dropping out of the job market" due to a lack of ability to be accepted into it regardless of education or ability. And they're spending time doing lots more things than gaming, which you can see from rates of drug addiction and depression and suicide and so on.
Saying that they're dropping out of the job market to spend time gaming is bizarre and wrong. At various points in the article it hits vaguely onto the actual truth of the matter.
Yeah but "young men find out the job market is shit and turn to various other vendors of dopamine" just doesn't have the same ring. It's those gosh darned rock and roll video games ya know.
I haven't played video games in years but I think that's it not video games causing young men to drop out of the work force. Rather, there are other societal causes and young men without prospects for their future are going to fill their unused time with something.
Usually love the Economist -- and I read it regularly -- but I think this article is bullshit. It's the same kind of nonsense people were writing in the mid and late-90s: that violent games cause violent tendencies. Luckily, those claims ended up being completely debunked by dozens of studies.
Now, we have a "gaming epidemic" that has gripped the unemployed, underemployed, and depressed? Give me a break. Gaming is simply the cheapest form of entertainment and escapism today. In the 70s, it was movies. In the 60s? I don't know, drugs?
My point is that gaming is used here as a red herring (heck the article even admits to this: "gaming isn't the problem" in one of the last paragraphs). Really, this has nothing to do with gaming, and everything to do with the growing pains of every generation. The article also tries to awkwardly criticize common-sense truisms, e.g.: "Many gamers (Guillaume among them) report that they are happy with the decision to work less and game more."
Uh.. duh? Even I would be happy working less and gaming more, and I have a pretty awesome job. Is it really some kind of poignant discovery that people would rather have fun than work? Here's another example: "For Emily, and for many others, games were not the luxury luring her away from career. They were a comfort blanket and distraction, providing some solace when the working world offered only bitter disappointment."
And.. why is this bad exactly? Why is it bad to take some time off and decompress if you have a horrible job you hate? What's the alternative? Work yourself to the bone, fall in love with someone you hate, have some kids that hate you, get a divorce, and die alone? What is Mr. Avent's point here? Because I don't see one.
Disclaimer: I played Counter-Strike competitively and professionally from around 17-22 (I'd say on average 5-6 hours a day). I still play every now and then, but don't compete at tournaments or in leagues. I'm 30 now. Not only was my experience irreplaceable and positive (I made many life-long friends and met many cool people), but it also helped me with many other aspects of "grown-up" life:
- I learned to be goal-oriented and focused
- I learned how to lead and work with a team to succeed at a common goal
- I learned how to weed out shitty people that poison the environment
- I learned what it truly takes and how hard it is to be the top 1% at anything (even at a stupid video game)
- I learned how to negotiate contracts and balance budgets
I kind of get what you're saying, but the phenomenon is new: this isn't the only source I've seen that discusses that there is a growing amount of un- or under-employment among young men that seems to be accepted comparatively happily, with the hypothesis that compelling computer games are part of the difference.
I'm pretty sure that the analogy with movies is weak, although probably the 80s equivalent was sitting around watching TV all day (the moral panic I remember from that period).
"Why is it bad to take some time off and decompress if you have a horrible job you hate? What's the alternative? Work yourself to the bone, fall in love with someone you hate, have some kids that hate you, get a divorce, and die alone? What is Mr. Avent's point here? Because I don't see one."
I think that if you're that annoyed about the idea of this article using strawmen to beat up on the idea of gaming, you should have a little more awareness of the phenomenon in your own writing/thinking... Yep, I'm pretty sure that it's either decompress or "work yourself to the bone and fall in love with someone you hate".
I dunno, CS is one thing but I have played and know people who still play MMOs (EVE, WoW, FF, etc) and those tend to be a different beast. It's not hard to see why: the same desires and rewards that drive you forward in life can be instead applied in-game for a mere $15 a month. Actually in many regards WoW is more fun than real life, and when your friends are all playing the game.. yea that becomes life. I know what you mean by taking those in-game skills to real life... my success in real life comes somewhat from just applying the concept of grinding to a different domain ;)
As a thought experiment, what if we developed technology like the Matrix: full simulated reality you can plug into... you live in a simulated world that feels 100% real to you, except this simulated world is better than reality in various ways... I suspect it would be way more tempting than games are today, and certainly more tempting than movies to spent nearly all your time in the virtual world.
> "For Emily, and for many others, games were not the luxury luring her away from career. They were a comfort blanket and distraction, providing some solace when the working world offered only bitter disappointment."
> And.. why is this bad exactly?
According to the article Emily left her first job voluntarily. Why is that not ideal?
- Felt bad about herself while unemployed/underemployed
- Opportunity cost of not building job skills/experience (for 2+ years)
- Opportunity cost of not building normal adult skills and attitudes, like understanding that work isn't always fun, and adult life is about accepting a balance between fun and responsibility
- The more tangible opportunity costs of not building savings, a salary history, or contributing to retirement savings, which due to compounding interest is significantly more effective the earlier it begins
- The Fallout games really aren't open-ended enough to provide enough entertainment to take the place of a career
> What's the alternative? Work yourself to the bone, fall in love with someone you hate, have some kids that hate you, get a divorce, and die alone?
No idea how any of this follows from staying employed until a better job is available.
I'm in a similar spot right now. There is nothing as satisfying to me as playing StarCraft and honing my skills. When I worked as a software developer I didn't feel like I was improving my skills past a few months at each company. It was more like doing the same boring work over and over again.
Even when I do the same builds in StarCraft over and over again there's always an element of the other player trying to mess you up. It adds an unpredictability element. You can ALWAYS do better by playing faster and more accurately. There is always more skills to work on.
Good paying jobs are scarce and video games are relatively cheap for the amount of time you can spend on them. It's escapism. They are confusing correlation with causation.
> Video games are relatively cheap for the amount of time you can spend on them.
This has far-reaching consequences. With most goods, the consumer has to keep consuming (and thus creating demand). There's major concerns whether or not we can keep enough people working (and buying things) to keep the economy going, and video games don't contribute as much to aggregate demand. With an economic system that depends on continuous growth, we are trying to simultaneously squeeze more labor out of people while reducing the value of what people get out of it. This contradiction doesn't come with new luxury goods, but is a contradiction within capitalism that has been well described for almost two centuries: the dual nature of labour as capital and labour as a commodity.
>They are confusing correlation with causation.
Actually, this is one of the biggest questions of the paper cited, so the authors are not oblivious.
This is such bullshit. Right now you can walk into a long haul trucking job with zero years experience and be making $70k minimum with a $10-20k signing bonus after a short month long training. And that's one of myriad trades that are available today. The lie that has been sold to America's youth that everyone has a "right" to go to college and is entitled to a job upon graduation will go down as one of the greatest crimes committed against an entire generation.
I got great grades. Didn't matter, no one with enough capital to employ human beings wanted me to do anything for them. So I have to come up with fake things to do. If you don't like it, maximize employment and start hiring people not for profitability but with an aim towards developing people into what you consider maturity to be. Our powerful people like the Uber CEO don't seem to be concerned with whether they are designing a society in which people can have thriving marriages and support children. The Uber CEO apparently believes that he himself is not mature.
you mean, the cruel world tell them to be ashamed of their gender, their country, their life - then they have to pay for their students debts and think about how they wont ever afford a house and they prefer going to an alternate reality? no way!
I personally love escaping reality by playing games. There's other ways, but it's a pretty fine one. Better than depression.
US seems to be centered around spending your whole life working. 10 days of vacation, are you serious? That is only 2 weeks per year. I can't imagine only 2 weeks of holiday with my 3 kids.
Maybe you should look more towards Europe for some solutions. More vacation days, flexible work system (4/5th, part-time, etc.), incentives to stay a couple of months at home.
Maybe those gamers would be perfectly happy having a part-time jobs and spending the rest of the time gaming.
As an example: one of our people managers here (in Belgium) is working 4/5th, and she's doing a great job.
I played A LOT of competitive Magic: The Gathering from about age 14-21. We used to call it "cardboard crack" so we all understood that the game was addictive. I had a lot of fun and met some great people, but even back then I knew that I had a problem with the game and that I was addicted to it. This was before people talked about gaming addiction and I don't think American society understood that it could actually be a serious issue. I knew people who got addicted to EverQuest (aka EverCrack) and watched them go MIA for six months at a time from the Magic scene and drop out of high school to play EverQuest for 12 hours a day. This was back in 1999, so gaming addiction definitely isn't new.
I found that gaming addiction becomes self-reinforcing once you start putting a significant number of hours into gaming. Once you spend enough time gaming you'll end up not having enough hours to fulfill your real world commitments, like studying. Not fulfilling your real world commitments will cause you stress (failing a test) and you'll seek relief by going back to gaming. This can become a vicious cycle quickly as the more you game to relieve your stress, the more stress you end up creating for yourself by having even less time to fulfill your real world obligations.
The kids I knew who had the most unstable families were the ones who paid the highest price for their gaming addiction and ended up not graduating from high school. So I'm not surprised that unemployed young men who have unstable professional lives are getting hit hard by gaming addiction now. I hope they can break the cycle. I burned off a lot of hours playing Magic and I do sometimes wonder what could have come of that time if it had been spent elsewhere.
I dunno, I also played a lot of competitive M:tG, between 17 and 22, but I found it very fulfilling. I made some of my life-long friends through it, I went to places all over Europe (for tournaments) and overall had a ton of fun. That was mostly before the advent of Magic Online, I understand that now Magic can be largely played like other online video games (plus the skill level is way higher, because the most obsessed people can just practice 100 hours per week), whereas in the past it explicitly required you to socialize to have playtesting partners, borrow cards, split rides to tournaments etc.
[+] [-] laughfactory|9 years ago|reply
Any way you slice it this is not going to end well. Essentially we're in a Great Depression of an entirely new sort.
[+] [-] narrator|9 years ago|reply
I had a friend whose brother would go to work and come home and play video games every day. That was literally it. Work, pay rent, game, eat sleep. I watched him repeat this cycle when we were hanging out. He didn't even have much to say most days.
The hikomori in Japan are already adopting this terminal frugality en masse.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|9 years ago|reply
This is just like the Japanese Neets.
[+] [-] peckrob|9 years ago|reply
One that I graduated high school with in particular comes to mind. We all played video games back then. Half Life, Goldeneye, Starcraft, Everquest, etc. He was a smart guy, driven, usually made better grades than me (I was lazy in high school). Took a job at an medical supply company after graduating from high school intending to work for a few months before starting college.
Well, when it came time to start school, he tried to balance work, school and an ever increasing amount of time in front of the TV or computer playing games ... and failed. Dropped out of school after one semester. Got an apartment with a couple of his coworkers where they would mostly play games when they weren't working. I went over a few times. It was depressing to watch. You really want to say, "Dude, is this really what you want to do?"
Spent seven years working that same job stocking shelves and spent the rest of the time drinking and playing whatever the newest game was that month. He'd message me at like 12am asking if I was playing anything and I'd be like, nope, studying. He'd type "LOL" (back in the AIM days).
When World of Warcraft came out, he was instantly drawn into the WoW universe. He'd stay up all night playing. Broke up with his girlfriend because he was playing WoW literally every waking moment. Started being late to work, eventually lost his job and lost his apartment (I'm guessing his coworkers asked him to leave when he couldn't pay rent). Moved back in with his parents and still, just ... gaming. All the time. He'd just spend whole days sitting in front of WoW or some other video game. For three years that was all he did.
Eventually, his parents had to SHUT OFF THEIR INTERNET and have an intervention to reach him. Obviously I don't know the full story of what happened, but after that he did start to pull it together.
Got back into school at 29 and just recently graduated with a business degree. He's managed to "stay clean from games" (his exact words, BTW) for the last seven years. I can't imagine what an immense struggle that must be considering how ubiquitous they are now.
All told he lost more than 10 years of his life.
The whole time I'm looking on at this and thinking, if he was drinking, we would call this alcoholism. But what do we call it when it's video games?
[+] [-] nitemice|9 years ago|reply
[1](http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3488130.htm) [2](http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/features/video-...)
[+] [-] hbosch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Aeolun|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamaal|9 years ago|reply
The same forces that destroy a person, also make a person great.
Replace video games with 'work'. And with 10 years of doing it day and night, you would quite literally be a successful guy in any profession.
[+] [-] firstpost1234|9 years ago|reply
This is the Western countries' version of hikkikomori and there will only be more of it as education and good opportunities become out of reach for more people.
Men seem more likely to do this than women because of the societal pressures on them to get a job and run the rat race of dating and climbing a nonexistent corporate ladder.
For those people living in major job centers or major job creation industries it seems unfathomable, but there is an entire American generation out there experiencing this, being told that they're not shit if they don't go to college and work a 9 to 5 (which really is more of a 9 to 9). I don't blame them for opting out of such useless propaganda. Not everyone enjoys or is interested in computer programming, and starting your career in your 20s without an inherently marketable skill is terrifying for most people.
[+] [-] pbkhrv|9 years ago|reply
Not as terrifying as starting your career in your 40s without an inherently marketable skill because 20s and 30s were spent playing video games...
[+] [-] xor1|9 years ago|reply
Women also have more options.
[+] [-] researcher11|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projektir|9 years ago|reply
And perhaps because "taking care of themselves" pressure on women is much, much higher.
[+] [-] xor1|9 years ago|reply
This sounds really silly, but I honestly consider being thrown into the deep-end when learning how to play Tribes 1 (I started playing in 1999) and DOTA (started 2004) as a child greatly benefited my overall mindset and attitude as I grew older.
I think I qualify as a videogame addict. I've probably spent more than 1/3 of my waking hours since I was nine years old gaming. I'm approaching 5000 hours on DOTA2 alone since 2011, though I've played significantly less games in general within the past three years due to finally being employed. Programming feels just as good, and I get paid on top of it.
I think my social development was stunted, but I feel like I'm mostly normal now as an adult. I really don't have any regrets, and I plan to give my kids completely unrestricted access to their own computer and the internet as soon as they want it, barring any laws or regulations that prevent me from doing so legally.
[+] [-] RangerScience|9 years ago|reply
This provides a "minimum competition" against which any company must compete - FedEx is always going to have to be better than the USPS.
So notionally - if UBI provides a "default job", companies will have to offer better jobs than that, in order to attract any employees at all.
Except this article is pointing out that for a chunk of the population, that effect is already here, supplied by video games. The job (compensation considered) must be less shitty than playing video games all day.
[+] [-] recondite|9 years ago|reply
I think we're getting to a point where society is going to have to accept that vast swaths of the population are simply not necessary or otherwise employable, in the modern labor force, and hopefully, treating "labor" as an expendable market resource becomes an archaic concept, similar to how we view human slavery.
The problem is, the 1% will not change on their own, that has never been the case. The incentives are just not there for them to want to.
[+] [-] ganfortran|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] flashman|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] proudofyou|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] acjohnson55|9 years ago|reply
Most of us will be alive by the time there's enough economic incentive for all the things humanity needs, with only a token labor force. Many of the world's richest countries are already there, at least when it comes to their own citizens.
In the future (i.e. the present, in the software world), to the extent that employers need workers, they going to have to compete for them with high salaries and copious perks. We'll largely conquer poverty, and we'll have a very large lower-middle class working part-time, a smallish upper-middle class of knowledge workers, and tiny class of ultrawealthy capitalists.
[+] [-] anjc|9 years ago|reply
Saying that they're dropping out of the job market to spend time gaming is bizarre and wrong. At various points in the article it hits vaguely onto the actual truth of the matter.
[+] [-] Asooka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guskel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvt|9 years ago|reply
Now, we have a "gaming epidemic" that has gripped the unemployed, underemployed, and depressed? Give me a break. Gaming is simply the cheapest form of entertainment and escapism today. In the 70s, it was movies. In the 60s? I don't know, drugs?
My point is that gaming is used here as a red herring (heck the article even admits to this: "gaming isn't the problem" in one of the last paragraphs). Really, this has nothing to do with gaming, and everything to do with the growing pains of every generation. The article also tries to awkwardly criticize common-sense truisms, e.g.: "Many gamers (Guillaume among them) report that they are happy with the decision to work less and game more."
Uh.. duh? Even I would be happy working less and gaming more, and I have a pretty awesome job. Is it really some kind of poignant discovery that people would rather have fun than work? Here's another example: "For Emily, and for many others, games were not the luxury luring her away from career. They were a comfort blanket and distraction, providing some solace when the working world offered only bitter disappointment."
And.. why is this bad exactly? Why is it bad to take some time off and decompress if you have a horrible job you hate? What's the alternative? Work yourself to the bone, fall in love with someone you hate, have some kids that hate you, get a divorce, and die alone? What is Mr. Avent's point here? Because I don't see one.
Disclaimer: I played Counter-Strike competitively and professionally from around 17-22 (I'd say on average 5-6 hours a day). I still play every now and then, but don't compete at tournaments or in leagues. I'm 30 now. Not only was my experience irreplaceable and positive (I made many life-long friends and met many cool people), but it also helped me with many other aspects of "grown-up" life:
- I learned to be goal-oriented and focused
- I learned how to lead and work with a team to succeed at a common goal
- I learned how to weed out shitty people that poison the environment
- I learned what it truly takes and how hard it is to be the top 1% at anything (even at a stupid video game)
- I learned how to negotiate contracts and balance budgets
[+] [-] glangdale|9 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure that the analogy with movies is weak, although probably the 80s equivalent was sitting around watching TV all day (the moral panic I remember from that period).
"Why is it bad to take some time off and decompress if you have a horrible job you hate? What's the alternative? Work yourself to the bone, fall in love with someone you hate, have some kids that hate you, get a divorce, and die alone? What is Mr. Avent's point here? Because I don't see one."
I think that if you're that annoyed about the idea of this article using strawmen to beat up on the idea of gaming, you should have a little more awareness of the phenomenon in your own writing/thinking... Yep, I'm pretty sure that it's either decompress or "work yourself to the bone and fall in love with someone you hate".
[+] [-] chillacy|9 years ago|reply
As a thought experiment, what if we developed technology like the Matrix: full simulated reality you can plug into... you live in a simulated world that feels 100% real to you, except this simulated world is better than reality in various ways... I suspect it would be way more tempting than games are today, and certainly more tempting than movies to spent nearly all your time in the virtual world.
[+] [-] gdulli|9 years ago|reply
> And.. why is this bad exactly?
According to the article Emily left her first job voluntarily. Why is that not ideal?
- Felt bad about herself while unemployed/underemployed
- Opportunity cost of not building job skills/experience (for 2+ years)
- Opportunity cost of not building normal adult skills and attitudes, like understanding that work isn't always fun, and adult life is about accepting a balance between fun and responsibility
- The more tangible opportunity costs of not building savings, a salary history, or contributing to retirement savings, which due to compounding interest is significantly more effective the earlier it begins
- The Fallout games really aren't open-ended enough to provide enough entertainment to take the place of a career
> What's the alternative? Work yourself to the bone, fall in love with someone you hate, have some kids that hate you, get a divorce, and die alone?
No idea how any of this follows from staying employed until a better job is available.
[+] [-] iopq|9 years ago|reply
Even when I do the same builds in StarCraft over and over again there's always an element of the other player trying to mess you up. It adds an unpredictability element. You can ALWAYS do better by playing faster and more accurately. There is always more skills to work on.
Work pales in comparison. It's just not exciting.
[+] [-] diogenescynic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notthemessiah|9 years ago|reply
This has far-reaching consequences. With most goods, the consumer has to keep consuming (and thus creating demand). There's major concerns whether or not we can keep enough people working (and buying things) to keep the economy going, and video games don't contribute as much to aggregate demand. With an economic system that depends on continuous growth, we are trying to simultaneously squeeze more labor out of people while reducing the value of what people get out of it. This contradiction doesn't come with new luxury goods, but is a contradiction within capitalism that has been well described for almost two centuries: the dual nature of labour as capital and labour as a commodity.
>They are confusing correlation with causation.
Actually, this is one of the biggest questions of the paper cited, so the authors are not oblivious.
[+] [-] marknutter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daodedickinson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zobzu|9 years ago|reply
I personally love escaping reality by playing games. There's other ways, but it's a pretty fine one. Better than depression.
[+] [-] koonsolo|9 years ago|reply
Maybe you should look more towards Europe for some solutions. More vacation days, flexible work system (4/5th, part-time, etc.), incentives to stay a couple of months at home.
Maybe those gamers would be perfectly happy having a part-time jobs and spending the rest of the time gaming.
As an example: one of our people managers here (in Belgium) is working 4/5th, and she's doing a great job.
[+] [-] touchofevil|9 years ago|reply
I found that gaming addiction becomes self-reinforcing once you start putting a significant number of hours into gaming. Once you spend enough time gaming you'll end up not having enough hours to fulfill your real world commitments, like studying. Not fulfilling your real world commitments will cause you stress (failing a test) and you'll seek relief by going back to gaming. This can become a vicious cycle quickly as the more you game to relieve your stress, the more stress you end up creating for yourself by having even less time to fulfill your real world obligations.
The kids I knew who had the most unstable families were the ones who paid the highest price for their gaming addiction and ended up not graduating from high school. So I'm not surprised that unemployed young men who have unstable professional lives are getting hit hard by gaming addiction now. I hope they can break the cycle. I burned off a lot of hours playing Magic and I do sometimes wonder what could have come of that time if it had been spent elsewhere.
[+] [-] taway_1212|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projektir|9 years ago|reply