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I like video games. There, I admitted it. Despite the massive campaigns to de-stigmatize such confessions, it still feels like a slightly shameful and childish thing for a grown man to admit. It’s almost like saying that I still play with action figures or pick my nose: childish activities that only bleed over into adulthood due to some personal fault or cultural deficiency. I have a graduate degree and a full-time job that often demands more than forty hours of my time per week. I’m a husband and a father of four kids. But sometimes I spend hours staring at a screen and clicking my mouse at phantoms, the same way I did when I was nine years old. And I still feel a little strange admitting that.
You will find many people bemoaning the lives lost to video game addiction, mostly the lives of young men who may also be addicted to porn and marijuana. Full disclosure: I too am one of those moaning. But unlike some other pundits, I can’t condemn gaming wholesale. Porn ought to be banned, and we went too far with marijuana legalization; I don’t think any Christian in good conscience could use either recreationally. Gaming, on the other hand, is more complicated.
Gaming addiction is a genuine problem. I recognize this. You can find harrowing testimonies of people (mostly young men) who got sucked into their online worlds and never came back. Evidence is accumulating that gaming is a significant contributor to the malaise of young men that we frequently hear about. Men who game too much are less likely to have a job or be the kind of “marriage material” young women are looking for. Women, of course, play games and even get addicted to them, but there’s a clear gender imbalance when it comes to the problem.
I want to help people who are non-gamers understand the appeal, especially to young men who are lost or addicted in some way. Games are like a powerful drug, and if we can’t appreciate what makes them so alluring we will never be able to pull people out of their clutches. Games are fundamentally childish, which is the source of their power. And we have to think very carefully about how to deal with this very real power.
The Power of Building Together
I started playing games when I was very young; we never had a gaming console in my family, but there were plenty of DOS games. The anti-console stance was a very intentional decision on the part of my parents, and I am grateful because I ended up spending more time doing interesting and worthwhile things with my time than I would have if we’d had a console. Our family also played a lot of board games together, for instance. Even so, many of our earliest video-gaming adventures were opportunities for family togetherness; often my father, my brother, and I would do the same level back-to-back to compete. There were a handful of split-screen games that we played together as well, and one advantage that most consoles have over PC games nowadays is that it is much easier (and cheaper) to play with other people in the same physical space.
As a nerdy, introverted kid who wasn’t good at sports and at one point had more imaginary friends than real ones, I relished the escape into various fantasy worlds that games provided. Games were a very special way to bond with my dad. They also gave a simulacrum of power, whether I was building an amusement park or shooting my way through a space station. When played with others, this power becomes a shared task or competition, giving you all of the thrills of building something in real life with far less actual work.
I suspect that men in particular are more susceptible to these social aspects of gaming because men prefer to do things together rather than talk face-to-face. When the thing you’re doing together involves slaying a giant monster or demonstrating your tactical skill over a friend, the sense of camaraderie and self-worth that permeates one’s playtime can become very potent. I have never participated in a barn-raising or won a medal for anything more significant than archery at summer camp, but the social boon of gaming lets us feel the sense of accomplishment and togetherness that are otherwise available only through participation in such projects.
The draw of games is undoubtedly linked to the decline of the activities they simulate. It’s good that there are far fewer wars nowadays, but most men still long for a way to make the world better through redemptive violence, whether that’s with marksmanship (as in shooter games) or strategic prowess (as in larger-scale strategy games). Building things is more of a hobby than a job or necessity, and we tend to contract out a lot of work to specialists who will get the job done more reliably than we would if we tried, say, fixing the toilet at home with a friend. Even community-oriented activities of love and generosity tend to happen more through less exciting task-sharing, such as when the men of a church coordinate via email so that they know whose turn it is to mow an elderly widow’s lawn.
Even changes in sports have an effect here: highly specialized, competitive youth leagues weed out many children far too early by discouraging those from playing who are just not good enough. I personally found my niche in martial arts at a county rec program, but even thirty years ago I felt like I did not belong in soccer or baseball because of my natural skill limitations. This problem is far worse now.
Some of these things can be changed, others can’t. The practice of barn-raising won’t come back, and it’s unlikely that skilled manual labour will become more democratized rather than less. We can accept that enjoying the social benefits of games can be worth it even if they lack the physical benefits of alternatives like sports or music, but even that can come only with careful moderation. Sarah Eekhoff Zystra discusses this very clearly in her deep dive on gaming and boys:
I honestly do think video games can be a way for boys to enjoy friendships together. But if it’s all you do together, that’s a pretty shallow friendship. If most of your friends live in other cities, they can’t help you when your car breaks down, or come over for pizza on a Friday night, or join your church small group. In 1990, 45 percent of young men said they’d turn to friends first when wrestling through a personal problem. Today, that’s down to 22 percent.
Studies on video games and loneliness show that the motive for playing matters. If you play to be with friends, video games don’t make you feel lonely. But if you’re playing to escape from hard real-life circumstances, you feel more isolated. You’re also more likely to become addicted.
Men gathering to play a sport or watch football together on a Saturday afternoon may not be particularly useful to anyone else, but one of the advantages these kinds of activities have over gaming is that they naturally end. The game finishes, it gets dark outside, people get hungry. Gaming on a screen is potentially infinite. And that’s where the real danger lies.
Spending too much time gaming with others is bad, and the kind of social interaction you can have while gaming varies from the benign (e.g., playing on a console together with friends) to the harmful (e.g., exposing yourself to hateful or lewd content). Yet a great deal of gaming isn’t social at all; the vast majority of games are either exclusively or optionally single-player.
Every solitary, frivolous activity has the power to take over someone’s life. When novels were, well, novel, people warned about their power. That may sound silly today—except when you consider that people do get addicted to reading printed smut and that it is entirely possible to distract oneself from a good life by endlessly reading. More importantly, when it comes to distraction power, reading novels is to gaming what chewing gum is to cocaine. Gaming can suck people into a cage of addiction and distraction from which it is incredibly difficult to escape.
A Simulacrum of Power
Why is gaming so powerful? As mentioned earlier, games offer a simulacrum of power, but it isn’t just power that’s tempting. Endless power is actually quite boring, and every discussion of games online eventually turns to the balance of power and the difficulty level. People want to be challenged. What draws people in to play over and over again is that games give players just enough power, which they then use to obtain rewards, which are guaranteed to be proportionate to their effort.
Well-designed games teach players the mechanics of their games in a step-by-step fashion, handing out rewards at particular milestones and making each repetition a bit harder than the one preceding it. The harder the task, the better it feels when you finally figure out the puzzle or take down the big bad guy. New powers or options are unlocked upon reaching goals, adding novelty and complexity, but all of it is carefully balanced so that players will feel more accomplished if they put more time, energy, and effort into the game. For games in which you compete against other people (which are often made up of short matches five to thirty minutes in length), the possibility that your next adversary might be a little more challenging than the last is often the draw. Random chance is another powerful way to provide challenge and novelty as well as make the game loop quicker. Everything from cosmetic customizations to arbitrary achievements are added in to give players the impetus to play again.
Real life, of course, has no such effort-response curve. You can spend your entire afternoon trying to figure out how to fix a leak and still have to call the plumber. Games give you all the tools you need to fix the imaginary leak and usually enough hints on how to fix it. You can train hard but still lose the big football game against the other team; you can imagine what would happen if a player could restart the championship match and play again over and over until they finally win.
Children play imaginary games to experience the wonders of the world in a safe and controlled manner. This is a fundamental and beautiful part of childhood. Adults who retreat to their game worlds are doing so in order to feel the safety and joy of being a child again. Only a child can shoot an imaginary gun at a friend while shouting, “Pew! Pew!” For once you know what a real gun does to someone, you cannot enter the realm of imagination in the same way. A retreat into a fantasy world is fine as long as it is brief and temporary, but the more time you spend on Pleasure Island, the more you turn into a donkey.
A retreat into a fantasy world is fine as long as it is brief and temporary, but the more time you spend on Pleasure Island, the more you turn into a donkey.
Games have had the most power over me at the times of my life when I felt the most powerless. Whether that was due to patients dying at the mission hospital where I work or projects that were meant to help people who were going sideways, I felt ineffective and often hopeless. Being clinically depressed made it worse. I escaped into games, especially turn-based games that could be paused at any moment should I be called to the hospital. Such games also let me fool myself into thinking that I could work for half an hour, “just take one more turn,” and then go back to work. (There’s a reason why one of the most popular strategy games that is practically a synecdoche for addictive games has the unofficial slogan “One More Turn.”)
The Power to Return to the Real
As I was struggling with life-and-death decisions, I wanted something meaningless that I could sink my time and energy into, something that didn’t matter whether I won or lost but still stacked the odds in favour of winning. I wish I found more relief in something like playing music, which at least has something resembling an effort-response curve, but games are better at manipulating my feelings. I am certain I’m not the only one.
For someone who is less privileged and powerful than I am, I can see how gaming could be even more powerful. I can still get sucked in for a few hours at a time on a weekend, so someone who really has nothing better to do with their time could easily spend most of their day in front of the screen. It’s incontrovertible that gaming addiction is making many young men into poorer romantic partners, and the social opprobrium directed toward gamers is a result of these problems.
Not all gamers are alike, of course, which is why I think that blanket condemnations of gaming are likely to be ineffective and that women who declare gaming a dealbreaker as they’re looking for a husband are throwing out the wheat with the chaff. Many men are able to balance their gaming with the rest of their life, just like many people are able to drink a glass of wine at dinner without becoming drunk. Lumping all gamers together is a futile strategy.
I urge men who know their gaming is not good for them—and how can they not, if they hit the pause button for long enough?—that there is a world full of great challenges that are simply more worthwhile than games. You should recognize that your mind has been trained by the effort-response curve of games to give up more easily on real-life challenges. You will often feel disappointed despite your best efforts. You should have at least one other hobby that requires physical skills. You should be striving for more, not settling for less.
Video games have found ways to simulate many different experiences—conquering the world, escaping from a haunted house, helping the needy, building a thriving farm. One even cleverly managed to put you in the shoes of Oedipus murdering his father with a twist than many imitators have tried and failed to re-create ever since. But while there may be dating simulators and games where you put a bullet in the head of Lucifer himself, there’s still no game that teaches us how to love or grow in virtue. You don’t need to give up games entirely to experience either of these, but if you want love and virtue you must have the strength of character to turn off the screen when it’s time and love real life more than you love the game.