I loved this so much. I had played video games before the pandemic, but I have begun playing them much more regularly in covid times, starting with Animal Crossing in March (when I thought I would be quarantining for a few months, tops) and continuing with Link's Awakening, Stardew Valley, and Hades.
Animal Crossing's simultaneous release with the start of sheltering in place has been huge for feeling connected to friends and family. My parents didn't want my sister to play, but I ended up buying her a switch and playing with her (now that it's been over a year since we were together in person) has really strengthened our relationship. Seeing her avatar, who looks so much like her, makes me incredibly happy.
But also, when I was having such, such a hard time managing my ever-rising anxiety, Animal Crossing was the only thing that could quiet it. I've since moved on (except playing with my sister), but in those initial months, I really cherished taking off my shoes, stepping off the green grass of my island, and walking along the shore as the island's music faded into the sound of the ocean.
As someone who both benefited from the escapism afforded by video games in my teenage years and now works in the video game development industry this NYT article was extremely disappointing. The tired old stereotypes characterising gamers as isolated loners, forecasting that gamer children will grow up lacking social skills. I'm tired of hearing it.
Playing games has been part of human interaction for thousands of years. Archaeologists have found evidence of ancient game pieces dating to Egyptian times and beyond. Playing games is part of how we develop our motor and intellectual skills in childhood, and offers us ways to explore new experiences, exercise mental capacities and form new social connections. It is an intrinsic part of being human that gets given lower priority in adulthood, but never really goes away.
As for gamers being loners, I can point to any number of examples of people forming lasting friendships through games. Even relationships leading to happy marriages. I have friends whom I have made through gaming for whom I would drop everything if they asked me for help, and I know they would do the same for me. What brought us together was a common interest, just like people who meet friends at their golf club, swimming class or pottery club. And we talk about other things than just games, exactly like people do after the football match, jogging meet or painting class. We encourage each other through tough times, celebrate each other's victories and mourn each other's losses. We remember gaming moments of the past and re-tell the stories of them just like the fishermen telling stories about that epic marlin they caught, and yes, the odds we vanquished also grow bigger with every time we tell our tales.
Video games are an industry that is here to stay. It is an industry that outperforms the movie industry in terms of revenue and employs thousands of people all over the world. Whether the New York Times likes it or not, it forms part of the modern day discourse about society and the world we live in. I just wish we would be accepted as such.
“We can escape into a good book or escape into the tales of Geralt of Riva in The Witcher on Netflix without a second thought. But for some reason it is suddenly a problem if we want to escape into Midgar in the Final Fantasy 7 (Square) remake?”
To see this hypocrisy even more clearly, it’s ~fine~ to read The Witcher books, or even to watch The Witcher show, but playing The Witcher video games is ~suddenly a problem~.
I think you can be okay with gaming but concerned about it, or anything, in excess. If I think about how I feel after doing something with high dopamine rewards in excess (e.g. social media), the answer is not great. Some of this may be conditioning from a productivity obsessed culture, but I guess I don't feel fully satisfied with the response that we're just making too big of a deal if we have concerns about gaming, or screens, or even song lyrics. Often this argument comes with the caveat "of course, you shouldn't do X all the time," but our culture incentivizes excess. I guess my issue with both the response and the NYT piece is it leads people to blame the parents rather than helping them (as was predictably happening in the comments section) and to focus on individual rather than societal solutions.
I've long held that there's no inherent value to any of our pastimes... which is why I'm always so irked when people treat video games with disdain. I have friends who love to while away their weekend by binging The Office for an nth time, but will be aghast at my plans to play Cyberpunk on a Saturday night (obviously now, in the Pandy, no Saturday night includes external plans, but you get my drift).
My father remarried later in life, so I have three half-siblings who are just now entering their teens. I have been sure to advocate for their exposure to gaming as a legitimate hobby, and, luckily, that has been supported. (un)Surprisingly, my siblings are wonderfully well-rounded individuals who are curious about the world, active in extra-curriculars, voracious readers, and highly-achieving students. Their love of gaming hasn't precluded them from any of it.
Granted I'm only in my mid-30s, and I have no children of my own, but moral panics often seem to involve a a younger generation's enthusiasm for something that is foreign (and thus uncomfortable) to an older generation. If only that older generation would take the time to learn a bit about that new object of enthusiasm, perhaps we could all enjoy a nice game of Smash Bros (or Call of Duty, etc etc).
Agree with the framing here - I think a larger point can be made that escapism into anything in too large a quantity can be damaging, whether video games or books. I don't play video games but I read 70 books last year during a pandemic in which many friends rediscovered their xboxes. I can comfortably say that a handful of those books were read in an attempt to fill time I didn't know what to do with, and to calm some anxieties. If I still had an xbox the story might have been different.
My wife and I got a good laugh out of the “what are you going to do when you are married and stressed? Tell your wife that you need to play Xbox?” line in the article. She and I both play video games—sometimes together—and I have actually had that conversation (stressed, want to play videogames) with her.
I live in a suburbish location (technically in city limits but materially/culturally a suburb), around a lot of highly educated professional types in the young Gen-X/old Millennial range, and essentially everyone plays video games.
Maybe the real moral panic is that if you play videogames you’ll wind up as a bougie person living in the ‘burbs.
Yes, yes, yes to all of this. Our family of three went all in on Animal Crossing during the pandemic, and many people scoffed. Isn't it better to all be looking at a screen and talking, creating, problem-solving, and laughing, than just staring at a movie or even our own books?
As someone who has one kid with a serious screen addiction problem and another for whom playing Roblox with friends was literally the only thing that helped with loneliness during lockdown, I really appreciated this interview.
One of the things that's frustrating for me as a parent is that the "all video games are bad and turn your brain to mush" perspective actually makes it more difficult for people with legitimate addiction problems to get help and support. People often tell me screen addiction doesn't exist and it makes me want to cry, not only watching my own kid's struggles, but hearing from other parents in my community who have the same troubles. Like anything else, there are just some people for whom developing a healthy relationship with these activities is going to be harder.
The other thing I would love to hear more about is the *quality* of the games we're talking about. This is a particular problem in school. In our district at least, much of the math education has been gamified through programs like IXL and Xtra Math, and despite the students' overall hatred of them and lack of evidence that they help with learning, neither administration or the school board are willing to look more closely at whether there are gamified education programs that do a better job actually helping the kids learn rather than just rewarding or penalizing them for computational speed or lack thereof. And there are! Math game programs like ST Math are really good. But it's like textbooks and curricula -- you actually have to vet them to see what can support learning.
Sorry, this is all something I spend a lot of time working on at the local level so I have a lot of thoughts :) A great interview. There's so much more here to unpack, and areas that I wish would get addressed with this kind of nuance.
For the record, I don't think Plato was *wrong* about literature affecting how and what we remember. Nor were folks wrong to worry about how massive (and fast-adopted) tv consumption (and then internet consumption, and now smartphone ubiquity) might affect human brains, social patterns, etc. And you could argue that the regular portrayal of life as films, along with the cult of the film star, *has* changed how (for example) folks think about their own physical beings.
None of those were the end of the world, which I think is the larger point here. They don't represent some kind of Fall from Grace, or Intelligence, or whatever. That message is something I really appreciate about this interview.
I do want to point out that these shifts *were* pretty radical, and you can argue that they had some broadly negative effects.
I'm living for this critique. Video games are something I don't personally enjoy but I fully stand by everyone's right to have them and that they are good!
I remember commenting to my best friend that her husband's English must have improved during their relationship, since she had lived in the US on and off as a child. I was corrected that no, in fact, his was much better than hers when they got together as teenagers, because he'd been making friends and practicing English on Xbox since he was a kid!
I know several people who have made now "real life" friends and even gotten jobs off of those relationships from video games.
Is there some gender anxiety happening under the surface, too? I can't help but think that these tired critiques of video games (they make people more violent, less social, emotionally disconnected) are veiled anxieties we have specifically about modern boys/men. Are video games a scapegoat for an actual problem of how we socialize men and boys? I can't help but make a connection to this post and your previous interview with Patrick Wyman about bro culture...
I heard an interview last spring with a researcher who looked at what health activities (like exercise and mindfulness) impacted people’s well-being in China during lockdown. She found that the experience of flow was the one thing that correlated with higher ratings of well-being. Video games are a great way to induce a state of flow! After that I dropped the judgement about my kids video game use (and my self judgement that I was a bad mom to let them play for so long). If it is a coping mechanism that works for them who am I to judge?
I loved this so much. I had played video games before the pandemic, but I have begun playing them much more regularly in covid times, starting with Animal Crossing in March (when I thought I would be quarantining for a few months, tops) and continuing with Link's Awakening, Stardew Valley, and Hades.
Animal Crossing's simultaneous release with the start of sheltering in place has been huge for feeling connected to friends and family. My parents didn't want my sister to play, but I ended up buying her a switch and playing with her (now that it's been over a year since we were together in person) has really strengthened our relationship. Seeing her avatar, who looks so much like her, makes me incredibly happy.
But also, when I was having such, such a hard time managing my ever-rising anxiety, Animal Crossing was the only thing that could quiet it. I've since moved on (except playing with my sister), but in those initial months, I really cherished taking off my shoes, stepping off the green grass of my island, and walking along the shore as the island's music faded into the sound of the ocean.
As someone who both benefited from the escapism afforded by video games in my teenage years and now works in the video game development industry this NYT article was extremely disappointing. The tired old stereotypes characterising gamers as isolated loners, forecasting that gamer children will grow up lacking social skills. I'm tired of hearing it.
Playing games has been part of human interaction for thousands of years. Archaeologists have found evidence of ancient game pieces dating to Egyptian times and beyond. Playing games is part of how we develop our motor and intellectual skills in childhood, and offers us ways to explore new experiences, exercise mental capacities and form new social connections. It is an intrinsic part of being human that gets given lower priority in adulthood, but never really goes away.
As for gamers being loners, I can point to any number of examples of people forming lasting friendships through games. Even relationships leading to happy marriages. I have friends whom I have made through gaming for whom I would drop everything if they asked me for help, and I know they would do the same for me. What brought us together was a common interest, just like people who meet friends at their golf club, swimming class or pottery club. And we talk about other things than just games, exactly like people do after the football match, jogging meet or painting class. We encourage each other through tough times, celebrate each other's victories and mourn each other's losses. We remember gaming moments of the past and re-tell the stories of them just like the fishermen telling stories about that epic marlin they caught, and yes, the odds we vanquished also grow bigger with every time we tell our tales.
Video games are an industry that is here to stay. It is an industry that outperforms the movie industry in terms of revenue and employs thousands of people all over the world. Whether the New York Times likes it or not, it forms part of the modern day discourse about society and the world we live in. I just wish we would be accepted as such.
“We can escape into a good book or escape into the tales of Geralt of Riva in The Witcher on Netflix without a second thought. But for some reason it is suddenly a problem if we want to escape into Midgar in the Final Fantasy 7 (Square) remake?”
To see this hypocrisy even more clearly, it’s ~fine~ to read The Witcher books, or even to watch The Witcher show, but playing The Witcher video games is ~suddenly a problem~.
I think you can be okay with gaming but concerned about it, or anything, in excess. If I think about how I feel after doing something with high dopamine rewards in excess (e.g. social media), the answer is not great. Some of this may be conditioning from a productivity obsessed culture, but I guess I don't feel fully satisfied with the response that we're just making too big of a deal if we have concerns about gaming, or screens, or even song lyrics. Often this argument comes with the caveat "of course, you shouldn't do X all the time," but our culture incentivizes excess. I guess my issue with both the response and the NYT piece is it leads people to blame the parents rather than helping them (as was predictably happening in the comments section) and to focus on individual rather than societal solutions.
I've long held that there's no inherent value to any of our pastimes... which is why I'm always so irked when people treat video games with disdain. I have friends who love to while away their weekend by binging The Office for an nth time, but will be aghast at my plans to play Cyberpunk on a Saturday night (obviously now, in the Pandy, no Saturday night includes external plans, but you get my drift).
My father remarried later in life, so I have three half-siblings who are just now entering their teens. I have been sure to advocate for their exposure to gaming as a legitimate hobby, and, luckily, that has been supported. (un)Surprisingly, my siblings are wonderfully well-rounded individuals who are curious about the world, active in extra-curriculars, voracious readers, and highly-achieving students. Their love of gaming hasn't precluded them from any of it.
Granted I'm only in my mid-30s, and I have no children of my own, but moral panics often seem to involve a a younger generation's enthusiasm for something that is foreign (and thus uncomfortable) to an older generation. If only that older generation would take the time to learn a bit about that new object of enthusiasm, perhaps we could all enjoy a nice game of Smash Bros (or Call of Duty, etc etc).
Thanks for this thoughtful interview!
Agree with the framing here - I think a larger point can be made that escapism into anything in too large a quantity can be damaging, whether video games or books. I don't play video games but I read 70 books last year during a pandemic in which many friends rediscovered their xboxes. I can comfortably say that a handful of those books were read in an attempt to fill time I didn't know what to do with, and to calm some anxieties. If I still had an xbox the story might have been different.
My wife and I got a good laugh out of the “what are you going to do when you are married and stressed? Tell your wife that you need to play Xbox?” line in the article. She and I both play video games—sometimes together—and I have actually had that conversation (stressed, want to play videogames) with her.
I live in a suburbish location (technically in city limits but materially/culturally a suburb), around a lot of highly educated professional types in the young Gen-X/old Millennial range, and essentially everyone plays video games.
Maybe the real moral panic is that if you play videogames you’ll wind up as a bougie person living in the ‘burbs.
Yes, yes, yes to all of this. Our family of three went all in on Animal Crossing during the pandemic, and many people scoffed. Isn't it better to all be looking at a screen and talking, creating, problem-solving, and laughing, than just staring at a movie or even our own books?
As someone who has one kid with a serious screen addiction problem and another for whom playing Roblox with friends was literally the only thing that helped with loneliness during lockdown, I really appreciated this interview.
One of the things that's frustrating for me as a parent is that the "all video games are bad and turn your brain to mush" perspective actually makes it more difficult for people with legitimate addiction problems to get help and support. People often tell me screen addiction doesn't exist and it makes me want to cry, not only watching my own kid's struggles, but hearing from other parents in my community who have the same troubles. Like anything else, there are just some people for whom developing a healthy relationship with these activities is going to be harder.
The other thing I would love to hear more about is the *quality* of the games we're talking about. This is a particular problem in school. In our district at least, much of the math education has been gamified through programs like IXL and Xtra Math, and despite the students' overall hatred of them and lack of evidence that they help with learning, neither administration or the school board are willing to look more closely at whether there are gamified education programs that do a better job actually helping the kids learn rather than just rewarding or penalizing them for computational speed or lack thereof. And there are! Math game programs like ST Math are really good. But it's like textbooks and curricula -- you actually have to vet them to see what can support learning.
Sorry, this is all something I spend a lot of time working on at the local level so I have a lot of thoughts :) A great interview. There's so much more here to unpack, and areas that I wish would get addressed with this kind of nuance.
For the record, I don't think Plato was *wrong* about literature affecting how and what we remember. Nor were folks wrong to worry about how massive (and fast-adopted) tv consumption (and then internet consumption, and now smartphone ubiquity) might affect human brains, social patterns, etc. And you could argue that the regular portrayal of life as films, along with the cult of the film star, *has* changed how (for example) folks think about their own physical beings.
None of those were the end of the world, which I think is the larger point here. They don't represent some kind of Fall from Grace, or Intelligence, or whatever. That message is something I really appreciate about this interview.
I do want to point out that these shifts *were* pretty radical, and you can argue that they had some broadly negative effects.
I'm living for this critique. Video games are something I don't personally enjoy but I fully stand by everyone's right to have them and that they are good!
I remember commenting to my best friend that her husband's English must have improved during their relationship, since she had lived in the US on and off as a child. I was corrected that no, in fact, his was much better than hers when they got together as teenagers, because he'd been making friends and practicing English on Xbox since he was a kid!
I know several people who have made now "real life" friends and even gotten jobs off of those relationships from video games.
Really nice. There is quite a lot of scientific research out there that debunks the alleged "harm" of screen time. The Jacobs Foundation, for which I've done a lot of work, focuses on children's learning and development –– you can read some great takes on research in their blog https://bold.expert. Like this interview I did waaaaay back in 2017: https://bold.expert/theres-huge-potential-for-moral-panic-when-new-media-technology-emerges/
A bit unfair, I think, to imply that the Times article was devoid of references to research. Also there was this:
Crucially, the research shows only associations, which means that heavy internet use does not necessarily cause these problems.
On my rereading, I did not see any fearmongering, only the concerns and fears expressed by the parents and researchers.
Is there some gender anxiety happening under the surface, too? I can't help but think that these tired critiques of video games (they make people more violent, less social, emotionally disconnected) are veiled anxieties we have specifically about modern boys/men. Are video games a scapegoat for an actual problem of how we socialize men and boys? I can't help but make a connection to this post and your previous interview with Patrick Wyman about bro culture...
I heard an interview last spring with a researcher who looked at what health activities (like exercise and mindfulness) impacted people’s well-being in China during lockdown. She found that the experience of flow was the one thing that correlated with higher ratings of well-being. Video games are a great way to induce a state of flow! After that I dropped the judgement about my kids video game use (and my self judgement that I was a bad mom to let them play for so long). If it is a coping mechanism that works for them who am I to judge?