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.
Great points. I'm gamer-adjacent myself, and when I think about it, I continue to be surprised (delightfully) by how many lasting and important friendships in my life evolved directly from the gaming networks of people I was already close to.
“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 do think video games tend to get a worse rap overall, but other forms of media get the "escapism" tar-and-feather treatment, too.
Maybe it has something to do with genre as well as medium. I think about how parents in my orbit received the Harry Potter books when they were new. I was a little older than their target audience, so I got to watch this unfold in real time. Lots of parents thought they were junk, "escapist" reading, because they were fantasy. Mine sure did—although I was too old for this to be a battleground, even had my parents ever cared to track or limit my reading (they had not). My aunt several times told my small cousin that she was required to read other books in between re-reads of Harry Potter. (My cousin—bibliovore and total Ravenclaw— solved this by having multiple books going at any one time.)
Maybe it's to do with genre and also gender. I hear this all the time about romance novels. They're "trash," "escapist," and "chick-lit." Even folks who love them say these things, half-guiltily.
Anyway, I want to complicate the idea that video games are uniquely picked on as negatively "escapist."
Totally agree with you on this — so-called "genre" reading, just generally, gets this designation, whether fantasy, sci-fi, romance, Western, etc. But it serves real purposes and provides real pleasures (and escapism!) as well!
Also worth noting that some of the earliest, defining reader-response research was on women reading romance novels (Janice Radway's READING THE ROMANCE)
I've not heard of this; it looks interesting indeed! I'm glad you mentioned (in the interview) talking to folks about their own experience of media, and how that's seen as less legit somehow than studying said media "objectively."
To my dying day I'll never understand this. 19th-century British classics are great reads because they were engaging stories. We seem to have lost that throughout the 20th century to the point where almost anything that's an engaging story is considered "genre" and equates to "lesser."
That’s a super fair observation, and you are totally right about genre works. There often seem to be varying >less than arguments, with >genre being one, >video games being another, and sometimes stacked. My original statement was a bit reductionist, but I think the point I was trying to make was that when all other markers are equal, such as the content (e.g., the The Witcher exists in multiple mediums) video games as a medium are looked down on more. Kind of like a stacked critique of critical fiction>genre fiction; book>video game. Personally, I’ve engaged with all of the above (including my specific example of The Witcher) and I think it’s a bogus critique, but I think it comes up a lot. I’m also thinking of the Book Is Always Better Than The Movie arguments, which I think falls along similar lines.
Good point, especially regarding The Book is Always Better. Even very lovely intelligent folks I know like to spout that one. I think I used to as well. What changed my mind (by making me actually think about it) was learning more about the concept of an adaptation—how putting "the same story" in a different medium is going to make it a different story, which makes the comparison of The Witcher games to The Witcher tv show not at all a straight-across one.
I agree! And I absolutely think it’s linked to genre, quantity and relative popularity too. So romance novels, Harry Potter and books that come in series are somehow seen as mass market and rotting our brains where ~serious~ literature is deemed worthy.
I also wonder if the moral panic is somehow linked to this impression of uncontrolled excess - ‘binge’-watching Netflix, reading eight Bridgerton novels, playing however many hours of Animal Crossing taps into a puritanical fear of an excess of pleasure that you also see with things like food, for example.
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.
Yeah, it's like with any other addictive substance that people use to cope with their emotions--a beer after work vs. drinking all night, every night. It's fully possible to have a healthy relationship with video games, but it's also very possible to have an unhealthy relationship with them. A few hours of gaming a day is nothing to worry about, the vast majority of the time. A few hours a day is a hobby. That said, there are a bunch of red flags in this story that people seem to be ignoring--the kid in question is playing games forty+ hours a week, he's lost interest in other hobbies, he's using them to block out negative emotions (not just for a few hours at a time, but for what appears to be essentially continuous). These aren't great signs, and if we were talking about a more obviously addictive substance like drugs or overwork or gambling, people would acknowledge that.
There are some parallels between escapism via books and escapism via video games, but there are also some differences. As somebody who had a much more ambivalent experience with games than most of the other posters here ... the reason that I chose games to numb myself with is that they're so much more effective at blocking out reality than other pastimes. When I read a book, unless it's a really good book--I read a couple paragraphs, and then I think about how I should be doing laundry, and then I read a few more pages, and think about my last phone call to my mom ... That doesn't happen with games. They demand your active concentration, on their time table. I don't think very much, if at all, about the real world when I'm playing a game. And in some ways this can be constructive! If, like me, you have a tendency to fixate emotionally on stuff in an unproductive way, there really isn't any better way to stop yourself from doing that than a video game. But there are also a lot of ways it can be abused, and the tendency to use them to numb yourself from negative emotions for long stretches of time is one of the most commonplace.
I guess my point is that we don't need to go full moral panic on video games, but I wish this could be treated with more nuance. Video games aren't bad, but they can absolutely be used in bad ways, and kids need help figuring out how to use them constructively vs. destructively. (So do a lot of adults!)
I definitely agree with the point around video games being slightly different. Having gotten in many fights with my parents over "shutting down," I can say I was never quite myself when being forced to quit a Call of Duty session.
Recognizing these feelings seems like such an important part of the conversation -- a part that is rarely addressed. It's been a big part of working with my son, encouraging him to recognize when a game gives him some needed relaxation or downtime or stress relief, and when it starts to suck him in to addictive play and makes him cranky and tired. I wish there were more resources to help with this. He really wants to have a healthier relationship but doesn't want to hear this from his mom, and I'm sure a lot of kids feel the same way.
My oldest was addicted to Call of Duty. It was painful. He has since had a difficult time in his early 20's finding what he wants to do, be. I do not think it was video games that caused these issues. He disappeared and wrapped up in a nice warm cocoon where he could be in control. Reality was difficult. And by his own admission, video games do not make him feel good about himself. This article IS pretty generic. It would be great if someone wrote an article on bona fide gaming addiction. It is an actual disorder in the DSM; do not tie it to the pandemic or if you tie it to the pandemic, then bring in the rise in alcohol and drug addiction in adults as well.
Ours started with my kid's first Kindle at age 6 (I resisted for a long time but my son is a techie) and Angry Birds. It was a nonstop struggle basically until schools shut down (so actually has improved during the pandemic) and he wasn't using all his emotional energy to deal with middle school. It's so much better now, but we still have to have conversations about when you're *choosing* to play and when you can't stop (his main escape is Fortnite). That disappearing and being in a cocoon where he could be in control is exactly what our experience was, including knowing it didn't make him feel good about himself.
I am constantly having conversations with our school about how their over-reliance on gamified "educational" programs is making life almost impossible for kids like mine. I literally told them a couple of years ago that they might as well be giving a potential alcoholic a beer at lunch every day and insisting that "it's going to be part of his life so he might as well get used to it." They don't dismiss my concerns but just do not get it.
Absolutely agree with gamified school-based learning. I am in education and it drives me crazy. We have used it less and less. I work with 5th and up. Students do not appreciate it as a learning tool. They just do not.
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.
Same here, re: the xbox line. My husband absolutely plays video games to de-stress, routinely saying things like "gonna go put in some laundry and the game for awhile. I'll come up and make a pizza about 6?"
I think you or I could have a productive conversation with that panicking parent.
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?
I have to comment on your comment because I love finding name twins in the wild ☺️ and I've been playing animal crossing too! Such pleasant stress relief
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.
This, this, this. As Rachel put it: "The problem with moral panics is that they deflect resources away from determining the underlying cause of any particular problem." I've heard from a few people already who are like, why are you being anti-science with this piece, which, whew, the amount of anti-social-science thinking inherent to that response, but also: no one's saying there's no such thing as too much screen time, or that we shouldn't be thinking critically about all of this. But there's so, so much nuance, and that gets lost when we sensationalize the conversation.
Gah! That's so frustrating. Anti-science about what exactly??? Rachel's spot on with her assessments (I didn't read the NYT article but do I really need to?). I mean, my one kid who falls apart from regular loneliness, I don't know how much worse it would be without Roblox, Minecraft, and Houseparty. She can do things with her friends! It's awesome! If I didn't have to teach her math I'd probably let her do it all day (though staring at the screen for too long does promote crankiness, which is why we homeschool instead of doing remote). And even my kid who has struggled with addiction to screens, quarantine has given him a tremendous opportunity to actually build a healthy relationship where he's able to use Minecraft and Fortnite to socialize with friends he's never able to see. That's a good thing!
I'm sure she's familiar with Collin Kartchner, who very sadly died last year. He came to speak at our middle school, and then present to parents in the evening. I've never seen anyone have such an impact on my son. His whole thing was a campaign not to give kids smartphones, and his presentation was compelling, but he still took a practical perspective. We went up to talk with him after and he gave my son good advice on how to balance the craving for play with a healthy relationship to games. It's not that hard! But you do have to be open to nuance.
I still hate the math programs. Tried to get the Center for Humane Technology dudes to start reviewing and talking about those but it seems low on their priority list.
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.
I love this. Thank you so much for sharing it with all of us.
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.
Great points. I'm gamer-adjacent myself, and when I think about it, I continue to be surprised (delightfully) by how many lasting and important friendships in my life evolved directly from the gaming networks of people I was already close to.
“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 do think video games tend to get a worse rap overall, but other forms of media get the "escapism" tar-and-feather treatment, too.
Maybe it has something to do with genre as well as medium. I think about how parents in my orbit received the Harry Potter books when they were new. I was a little older than their target audience, so I got to watch this unfold in real time. Lots of parents thought they were junk, "escapist" reading, because they were fantasy. Mine sure did—although I was too old for this to be a battleground, even had my parents ever cared to track or limit my reading (they had not). My aunt several times told my small cousin that she was required to read other books in between re-reads of Harry Potter. (My cousin—bibliovore and total Ravenclaw— solved this by having multiple books going at any one time.)
Maybe it's to do with genre and also gender. I hear this all the time about romance novels. They're "trash," "escapist," and "chick-lit." Even folks who love them say these things, half-guiltily.
Anyway, I want to complicate the idea that video games are uniquely picked on as negatively "escapist."
Totally agree with you on this — so-called "genre" reading, just generally, gets this designation, whether fantasy, sci-fi, romance, Western, etc. But it serves real purposes and provides real pleasures (and escapism!) as well!
Also worth noting that some of the earliest, defining reader-response research was on women reading romance novels (Janice Radway's READING THE ROMANCE)
I've not heard of this; it looks interesting indeed! I'm glad you mentioned (in the interview) talking to folks about their own experience of media, and how that's seen as less legit somehow than studying said media "objectively."
To my dying day I'll never understand this. 19th-century British classics are great reads because they were engaging stories. We seem to have lost that throughout the 20th century to the point where almost anything that's an engaging story is considered "genre" and equates to "lesser."
That’s a super fair observation, and you are totally right about genre works. There often seem to be varying >less than arguments, with >genre being one, >video games being another, and sometimes stacked. My original statement was a bit reductionist, but I think the point I was trying to make was that when all other markers are equal, such as the content (e.g., the The Witcher exists in multiple mediums) video games as a medium are looked down on more. Kind of like a stacked critique of critical fiction>genre fiction; book>video game. Personally, I’ve engaged with all of the above (including my specific example of The Witcher) and I think it’s a bogus critique, but I think it comes up a lot. I’m also thinking of the Book Is Always Better Than The Movie arguments, which I think falls along similar lines.
Good point, especially regarding The Book is Always Better. Even very lovely intelligent folks I know like to spout that one. I think I used to as well. What changed my mind (by making me actually think about it) was learning more about the concept of an adaptation—how putting "the same story" in a different medium is going to make it a different story, which makes the comparison of The Witcher games to The Witcher tv show not at all a straight-across one.
I agree! And I absolutely think it’s linked to genre, quantity and relative popularity too. So romance novels, Harry Potter and books that come in series are somehow seen as mass market and rotting our brains where ~serious~ literature is deemed worthy.
I also wonder if the moral panic is somehow linked to this impression of uncontrolled excess - ‘binge’-watching Netflix, reading eight Bridgerton novels, playing however many hours of Animal Crossing taps into a puritanical fear of an excess of pleasure that you also see with things like food, for example.
That's a great point. Excess is simultaneously indulged and frowned upon in our culture.
Yes! The "serious literature" problem: ugh. I see this show up all the time in my own unconsciously-carried prejudices. Good call-out.
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.
Still, I appreciate the alternate perspectives.
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!
to clarify, I don't mean to say there's no value to our pastimes, but that it's wrong to apply value to some while withholding value from another.
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.
Yeah, it's like with any other addictive substance that people use to cope with their emotions--a beer after work vs. drinking all night, every night. It's fully possible to have a healthy relationship with video games, but it's also very possible to have an unhealthy relationship with them. A few hours of gaming a day is nothing to worry about, the vast majority of the time. A few hours a day is a hobby. That said, there are a bunch of red flags in this story that people seem to be ignoring--the kid in question is playing games forty+ hours a week, he's lost interest in other hobbies, he's using them to block out negative emotions (not just for a few hours at a time, but for what appears to be essentially continuous). These aren't great signs, and if we were talking about a more obviously addictive substance like drugs or overwork or gambling, people would acknowledge that.
There are some parallels between escapism via books and escapism via video games, but there are also some differences. As somebody who had a much more ambivalent experience with games than most of the other posters here ... the reason that I chose games to numb myself with is that they're so much more effective at blocking out reality than other pastimes. When I read a book, unless it's a really good book--I read a couple paragraphs, and then I think about how I should be doing laundry, and then I read a few more pages, and think about my last phone call to my mom ... That doesn't happen with games. They demand your active concentration, on their time table. I don't think very much, if at all, about the real world when I'm playing a game. And in some ways this can be constructive! If, like me, you have a tendency to fixate emotionally on stuff in an unproductive way, there really isn't any better way to stop yourself from doing that than a video game. But there are also a lot of ways it can be abused, and the tendency to use them to numb yourself from negative emotions for long stretches of time is one of the most commonplace.
I guess my point is that we don't need to go full moral panic on video games, but I wish this could be treated with more nuance. Video games aren't bad, but they can absolutely be used in bad ways, and kids need help figuring out how to use them constructively vs. destructively. (So do a lot of adults!)
I definitely agree with the point around video games being slightly different. Having gotten in many fights with my parents over "shutting down," I can say I was never quite myself when being forced to quit a Call of Duty session.
Recognizing these feelings seems like such an important part of the conversation -- a part that is rarely addressed. It's been a big part of working with my son, encouraging him to recognize when a game gives him some needed relaxation or downtime or stress relief, and when it starts to suck him in to addictive play and makes him cranky and tired. I wish there were more resources to help with this. He really wants to have a healthier relationship but doesn't want to hear this from his mom, and I'm sure a lot of kids feel the same way.
My oldest was addicted to Call of Duty. It was painful. He has since had a difficult time in his early 20's finding what he wants to do, be. I do not think it was video games that caused these issues. He disappeared and wrapped up in a nice warm cocoon where he could be in control. Reality was difficult. And by his own admission, video games do not make him feel good about himself. This article IS pretty generic. It would be great if someone wrote an article on bona fide gaming addiction. It is an actual disorder in the DSM; do not tie it to the pandemic or if you tie it to the pandemic, then bring in the rise in alcohol and drug addiction in adults as well.
Ours started with my kid's first Kindle at age 6 (I resisted for a long time but my son is a techie) and Angry Birds. It was a nonstop struggle basically until schools shut down (so actually has improved during the pandemic) and he wasn't using all his emotional energy to deal with middle school. It's so much better now, but we still have to have conversations about when you're *choosing* to play and when you can't stop (his main escape is Fortnite). That disappearing and being in a cocoon where he could be in control is exactly what our experience was, including knowing it didn't make him feel good about himself.
I am constantly having conversations with our school about how their over-reliance on gamified "educational" programs is making life almost impossible for kids like mine. I literally told them a couple of years ago that they might as well be giving a potential alcoholic a beer at lunch every day and insisting that "it's going to be part of his life so he might as well get used to it." They don't dismiss my concerns but just do not get it.
Absolutely agree with gamified school-based learning. I am in education and it drives me crazy. We have used it less and less. I work with 5th and up. Students do not appreciate it as a learning tool. They just do not.
Love that last line.
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.
Same here, re: the xbox line. My husband absolutely plays video games to de-stress, routinely saying things like "gonna go put in some laundry and the game for awhile. I'll come up and make a pizza about 6?"
I think you or I could have a productive conversation with that panicking parent.
Yep, my husband will sometimes retreat and play video games if he's had a stressful day. I read books, neither is intrinsically more valuable.
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?
I have to comment on your comment because I love finding name twins in the wild ☺️ and I've been playing animal crossing too! Such pleasant stress relief
Yes to creative family problem-solving! This is a lovely way to be together.
I do think sharing a quiet room staring at your own books is an excellent option too. :)
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.
This, this, this. As Rachel put it: "The problem with moral panics is that they deflect resources away from determining the underlying cause of any particular problem." I've heard from a few people already who are like, why are you being anti-science with this piece, which, whew, the amount of anti-social-science thinking inherent to that response, but also: no one's saying there's no such thing as too much screen time, or that we shouldn't be thinking critically about all of this. But there's so, so much nuance, and that gets lost when we sensationalize the conversation.
Gah! That's so frustrating. Anti-science about what exactly??? Rachel's spot on with her assessments (I didn't read the NYT article but do I really need to?). I mean, my one kid who falls apart from regular loneliness, I don't know how much worse it would be without Roblox, Minecraft, and Houseparty. She can do things with her friends! It's awesome! If I didn't have to teach her math I'd probably let her do it all day (though staring at the screen for too long does promote crankiness, which is why we homeschool instead of doing remote). And even my kid who has struggled with addiction to screens, quarantine has given him a tremendous opportunity to actually build a healthy relationship where he's able to use Minecraft and Fortnite to socialize with friends he's never able to see. That's a good thing!
I'm sure she's familiar with Collin Kartchner, who very sadly died last year. He came to speak at our middle school, and then present to parents in the evening. I've never seen anyone have such an impact on my son. His whole thing was a campaign not to give kids smartphones, and his presentation was compelling, but he still took a practical perspective. We went up to talk with him after and he gave my son good advice on how to balance the craving for play with a healthy relationship to games. It's not that hard! But you do have to be open to nuance.
I still hate the math programs. Tried to get the Center for Humane Technology dudes to start reviewing and talking about those but it seems low on their priority list.
Nia, I think you'll find this interesting — just came out today as well! https://dcoopermoore.medium.com/toward-a-patient-gamer-160a0765da82
Oh my gosh that's so good! Thank you :). This looks like a great newsletter, too.
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?