Table of Contents
There’s a great little bar here in Northern Tasmania whose theme is a recreated ’80s games arcade, complete with arcade machines and a plethora of ’80s kitsch. One night there, with my adult sons, I stunned them by beating the pants off them at the games. They were so used to pantsing me, on the few occasions they’ve persuaded me to try out their fancy modern console games, that they’d never considered that I was an OG gamer.
I was 13 when Space Invaders kicked off the videogaming revolution. Through most of my adolescence and into my early 20s, I pumped money into the pinnies like a junkie stealing VCRs to score that next hit. When I got my first computer, yes, I wasted too much time playing Warcraft and Doom than was good for me. I don’t play videogames now, though, even though my kids bug me to and the modern games look pretty amazing.
But here’s the thing: I just don’t have time. By which I mean, I have plenty of spare time, but I’m not going to waste it playing videogames. H P Lovecraft once grumbled that he couldn’t see the point of playing games and, I have to say, I can see ol’ Grandpa Theobald’s point. Sure: I could while away a couple of hours playing Halo (the only console game I ever really played), but those are a couple of hours I could be spending avoiding writing my next fiction work.
We have more free time, more comfort and more material abundance than any civilisation in history. The drudgery that consumed our ancestors has been automated away. For the first time ever, ordinary people have long stretches of unstructured time – genuine boredom – in which to think, create, build or simply become the men and women they were meant to be.
Instead, we fill that golden space with video games.
Hugh Howey, the science fiction author, when asked in a podcast what were the behaviours that transformed him from the man who never completed anything, to the man who had sold millions of books, answered simply: “I quit video games”.
I heard him say this about five years ago, and it was an authority I needed to help me follow my intuition, and do the same. While in the years following there has been an occasion or two where I returned to the world of the virtual, for the most part, video games, that had dominated my identity since a young child, were dispensed with: I no longer thought of myself as a ‘gamer’.
The Delinquent Academic writer says that he had already ditched drugs and alcohol. Hearing Howey’s answer was a flash of insight: videogames were the same “brilliantly engineered trap designed to keep the male mind chasing simulated glory while the real hero inside you quietly dies”.
Hearing Howey claim that simply quitting video games was the key that unlocked his productivity was hard to believe, until I did it myself. It was astonishing how much more I did with my time. I became fitter and stronger, learnt how to make music, played more sport, read more, got more sleep, became happier and less angry, and thought of myself as no longer a child but a man - because men do not play video games.
He got, he says, the boilerplate defence: ‘Lots of successful people play!’ Lots of successful people are high-functioning alcoholics or addicts, too: but most alcoholics and addicts are not successful people. The successful gamers are the proverbial one per cent. The other 99 per cent are not in that category. If you play more than two hours a day, you’re an addict. Imagine what you could do with that time. Write. Read. Run. Fight. Play an instrument. Do what you were born to do. Two hours every day, over a decade, is the difference between a life of quiet regret and one of actual achievement.
I recently had this conversation with my aspiring author son. He’s actually completed a first draft of a novel and (I believe I’m not blinded by parental prejudice) it’s pretty good. A bit raw, as all first drafts are, but I read it in two sittings. With polish, it’s something he could be proud of.
But that first draft’s been sitting there for months, now. Despite him only working part-time at a day job. The days off, he spends mostly playing video games. Instead of playing games, I said, lock yourself in your room and finish that fucking re-write. Or work on the next first draft.
I’m not just being a grumpy old man yelling at the cloud. The peer-reviewed literature backs it up. Gaming is not correlated with many good outcomes at all. It will destroy your mind, body and soul.
Physically, the time sink reduces exercise and leads to worse dietary choices. Gamers report eating more unhealthy, sugar-laden junk than non-gamers.
Gaming screws up sleep, big-time. Gaming before bed is worse than almost any other screen activity. Blue light suppresses melatonin, high-intensity games keep the brain wired and late-night sessions steal hours you’ll never get back.
It’s no great shakes for your brain, either. Even after controlling for prior attention problems, more gaming predicts more attentional deficits in youth. Experimental studies show first-person shooters impair sustained attention and goal-directed behaviour: exactly the skills every successful adult needs. Many young men now think they have ADHD when they simply need to turn the console off.
Emotionally, gaming is linked to depression, poor self-esteem, anxiety and avoidance behaviours. It offers a short-term escape from reality but reinforces the very patterns that make real life feel unbearable. Social anxiety skyrockets when the only ‘friends’ you see are avatars.
The ICD-11 recognises excessive video gaming as a disorder2, whereas, while mentioning it and having diagnosable criteria (and “requiring further research”), the DSM-V technically does not. For criterion, they both focus on excessive use (over two to three hours a day), continued use despite negative outcomes, lying about how much one plays (especially to themselves), using gaming as an avoidance strategy as described earlier, and desensitisation – the need to play more to experience the same level of dopaminergic satiation.
Although there are obvious differences between gaming addiction and something like drug addiction (e.g., gamers do not experience the same physiological withdrawal symptoms, though they still ‘crave gaming’), in many ways, the brain of a gaming addict looks the same as the brain of a gambling or drug addict.
For writers, gaming is a particularly heinous drug. Writers are nothing if not task-avoidance machines. Writers will do just about anything to avoid having to actually write.
That is the quiet tragedy. Modern Westerners have been handed the rarest luxury in human history – boredom – and we have used it to remain perpetual boys in digital playgrounds while the real world passes us by.
