Are Video Games Good?

Yes. No. Maybe? Regardless, you should definitely spend less time playing them.

My parents had a rule: no more than one hour of video games per day. I thought it was a dumb rule. Now, I think it’s one of the smartest things they did. I certainly spent more time playing outside as a result. More books were read.

While I would not have forsaken reading or the outdoors completely, the scale would have been lopsided. In high school, the rules relaxed during the summer, I spent hours per day playing Final Fantasy 7. I was clicking a mouse for Starcraft long after I should have been in bed.

But I still played Tennis and Basketball. I still spent time with friends. Part of this I owe to our church, with its set times of forced social interaction, but being a hermit was never an option. Likewise, I still read through all the Wheel of Time books in one year (seven of them had been released). Dune captured my imagination during this same period.

Things have changed.

Even in the suburbs, there are rarely kids playing outside. If my boys didn’t have each other, they would have no one to play with or explore with. When I was a kid, pickup games of street football, baseball, soccer, tag, and more were common. You could step outside and find others ready to sweat and share in the suffering of the summer humidity, everyone ushered outside by their parents, the doors barred and locked.

Now the streets are quiet. Not always, but mostly.

And if there are no kids living in your immediate vicinity, they might as well not exist, even if they are just around the corner.

Boys don’t read. They don’t even watch movies anymore.

Video Games Are Bad

From It’s Good to Be a Man:

Men who are hooked up like junkies to the dopamine drip of virtual fornication (porn) and fake dominion (video games) are worthless for the task of being fruitful in real life and imposing genuine order on their worlds.

Arguments against video games have been around since Pong, but reached a fever pitch after Nintendo released the NES. You’ve probably heard all of the arguments, both sensible and hysterical. I’ll try to stick to the sensible side.

Video games are immersive entertainment, with all the good and bad of other entertainment, but with different pitfalls. Some deeper, some shallower. Like all entertainment, dedicating hours and hours per day to nothing but fun leads to a frivolous, shallow life.

Aaron Renn places video games in the “vice” category and suggests that grown men avoid them, unless playing them with their kids. I wouldn’t go that far, but I’m sympathetic to the argument. If you’re immersed in a video game, you often think about it even when you’re not playing it. It colonizes more of your mind and prevents contemplation of other things.

From

Danny Sullivan

’s insightful confession that also echoes my own experiences:

If my time with Elden Ring were confined to my time playing, well, I would still be spending many hours on it when I could be doing something far more meaningful, but at least it would occupy discrete chunks of my day. Instead it’s become an all-consuming obsession that pushes any and all other topics right out of my mind.

In particular, open-world games like Elden Ring are engineered to pacify men. Scan this article and read some of the comments. Here’s one:

This is not healthy. When the game is over, there will be nothing. So much potential, sown to the wind, not even to return in the form of a whirlwind. Strength and vitality dissolved like tears in the rain. A life spent on nothing but trivial things, as ephemeral and nameless as a puff of wind on some random Saturday afternoon in 1997.

But wait! Some people become professional players. That’s directly profitable.

Like most professional careers in entertainment, they are rare, and most of them are short. Esports careers last, on average, 4-5 years, and most quit in their mid-twenties. Ironically, this is on par with the average NFL career.

What will they do after esports? Go bankrupt like many former NFL players? Drive a truck?

Men were meant for more than pretending to be a hero, engaging in fake conquest, fighting fake injustices in fake worlds.

And yet…

The Real Time Sink and the Real Culprit

Worldwide, male gamers spend about 1.71 hours per day on video games. However, female gamers spend 1.43 hours per day on video games. Not a huge gap.

Teenagers spend more. Usually up to 3 hours per day.

However, how does it compare to other screentime activities?

4.8 hours per day on social media. And almost half of that time is during school hours.

All facilitated by smartphones. Even when you break it down by gender, boys still spend way more time on social media than playing video games.

Video games aren’t the main problem. They might be a force multiplier, but that means they need something to multiply with. Add in smartphones and easy access to pornography, and you have a deep pit instead of a shallow ditch.

Video games, for the most part, could be left at home, which prevented some of their worst tendencies. Now, when people go out, they are still staring at a screen, having fake conversations, living inside their own heads.

Video Games Are Better Than the Alternative

Now, I’m going to make a bold claim that might contradict everything I’ve said above.

Without video games, we would have almost no functional young men in society.

Our culture has undermined so much of what it means to be a man. There is no recognized rite of passage. Outside of some sports, there are no places to form a brotherhood. Public schools cater to girls. We emasculate most boys before they ever grow up.

Throw in fatherless homes, and you have a cocktail that whithers future men before they have a chance to grow a backbone.

Video games give the majority of boys an outlet for many things they cannot get anywhere else.

• Solve problems and complicated puzzles

• Engage in healthy competition

• Be part of a team outside of adult supervision

• Have a social club with some kind of telos

But most important is that video games provide objective measures of "good" and "success."

There is no pretending in video games. You are either good or you are not. Period. Age, race, sex, ancestry, whatever. It doesn't matter. There is no "race card" or "sex card" in video games (though there has been no lack of trying).

The Last Redoubt

Seeing video games as a refuge for men helps explain GamerGate, which was a serious backlash against attempts to hound gamers about diversity, inclusion, and equity. Video games are the last male space. At least, a space that looked recognizably male and allowed men to engage in male-coded ways of fierce competition and communication.

Men didn't care if women wanted to play. But like all male spaces, once you introduce some women, most of those women want to start changing things. Instinctively, however, most gamers knew they were in one of the last bastions of cultural masculinity.

So they fought back. They defended their territory.

And that is good.

Good, But Not Objectively Good

I think the world would be a better place for men if video games did not exist. Where they were not a substitute for real-life conquest and adventure.

The world would also be a better place with a faithful father in every home and where cancer didn’t ravage the bodies of our loved ones.

But we don’t live in that world. In our current cultural context, video games can be a good. They are not objectively good in the Platonic sense, but they might be a net positive in a world that desires effeminate men. It would be better for boys to have a father who pushed them outside, threw the ball with them, or grabbed them to go on adventures, no matter how small.

But many boys don’t have those fathers.

Video games are clearly a problem if you are spending all of your nights and weekends playing them, but they are not the worst problem to have. Social media is worse. Watching the news and getting anxious is worse. Watching porn is worse.

In a world that desires to fry boys' minds with porn and mindless streaming entertainment, video games keep brain-cells firing. They help keep a small, vital spark alive.

The desire to compete is good. The desire to "git gud" is good.

If you’re in your 20s, though, and spending more than 10 hours per week on video games, I recommend you cut back. Find different hobbies.

What Does This Mean for Fathers of Boys?

Here is some practical advice.

• No smartphones until they turn 18.

• Strictly limit video game time per day or per week.

• Don’t hesitate to do a forced fast from screentime.

If you’ve neglected this part of your son’s life, it’s not too late. Ironically, one of the best things you can do is to play games with your boys in order to get them to play video games less.

Enter their world, then encourage them to greater things. Pace and lead.

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