Boys and video games in different stages of life

Update: I’m told this entire post is the subject of Mere Fidelity’s August 27 episode with Andy Crouch (called “Put Social Media in Its Place”). Hand over heart, I had not listened to it when I wrote this piece and still have not listened to it. The relevant question now is whether my friend had listened to it or whether, more intriguingly, he is the next Andy Crouch. My bet is on the latter.

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A friend made a remark the other day that I want to expand on here.

He commented that there’s an important difference between teenage girls’ relationship to social media, on one hand, and teenage boys’ relationship to video games, on the other. In the former case, social media both creates and exacerbates all kinds of antisocial problems: friend drama, FOMO, anxiety, depression, loneliness, eating disorders, body image issues, lack of self-esteem, and the rest. In the latter case, there appears to be very little of this sort of thing; the effects are, on the whole, neutral or benign, especially if the boys in question have a relatively healthy home life and a diverse “activities” portfolio: sports, reading, board games, outdoor exploration, camping, rough-housing, sleepovers, church, school, youth group, and more.

At the same time, much of our public discourse about technology, gender, and social ills focuses—rightly—on video games. Why?

Two reasons. First, video games can absolutely become an addiction, a mono-activity that swallows up all the other options in the healthy array listed above (together, that is, with YouTube and pornography). Second, video games’ antisocial effects play out in disordered male lives not primarily in preteen and teenaged lives, but when boys grow up: in their twenties and thirties.

As a matter of fact, my friend pointed out, so far as he could tell, his sons’ gaming habits were embedded in and reinforced a broadly healthy network of social relationships. It didn’t pull them out of friendship and face-to-face activities but further into them.

I think he’s right. It’s not something I’d considered in depth before, though, so a few thoughts.

First, this resonates with my own experience. I played Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation from early elementary through the end of high school, and they were for the most part heavily social experiences. Even when the game was one-player, I either played while buddies watched (and vice versa—always providing running commentary) or consulted constantly with friends who were also playing the same game at the same time (The Ocarina of Time, say, or Metal Gear Solid). I even subscribed to multiple gaming magazines, which means that my gaming habits encouraged the regular reading of print media!

Second, this view resonates with my observations of my own boys. What they want to do above all is play with their friends, whether their friends are in the room (Smash Bros or Gang Beasts) or online (Fortnite or … Fortnite). When they see their friends, they talk about when they played together the day before and immediately plan times to play with one another later that day or weekend. When they have birthday parties, they all congregate in the same room and find ways to play (Deo volente) for hours on end. I recall a middle school birthday party when I did the same thing, with a house set up with multiple TVs and a round robin NFL Blitz tournament. Again: social, not antisocial.

Third, the key component here is that gaming time isn’t unlimited and doesn’t descend into the dark abyss of late nights and endless, lonely play. You don’t have to tell me that there are households with no limits on screen time. But assuming there are limits, and the limits are real, and the boys in question really do spend much or most of their waking hours not gaming but swimming and jumping on the trampoline and playing Risk and reading epic fantasy and playing foosball and climbing trees and riding bikes around the neighborhood and walking the dog and shooting hoops and, and, and … then I’m just not that worried about the presence of video games in the lives of boys in middle and high school.

Fourth, however, life doesn’t end at eighteen or twenty-two. What my friend’s remark also brought to mind was that the challenge of video games and young men in our culture is not pre- but post-graduation (whether graduation here refers to high school or college). That doesn’t mean that no adult man in his twenties or thirties should play video games—although, cards on the table, I will admit that I’ve not seriously played a video game since my freshman year of college. (I recall it fondly: Beating Half-Life 2 over the Christmas break. Probably the only thing that could ever pull me out of retirement would be a third entry finally getting made.) That was a full twenty years ago. I have buddies who’ve continued gaming to various degrees since college, but I can’t relate. It lost its luster a long time ago.

So with that caveat in place, it seems clear to me that the pressing social question for (present and future) adult men in Gen Z and Gen Alpha is what role, if any, video games should play in their lives. In my perfect world it would be nil, minus the occasional nostalgic afternoon or competition with one’s nephews, nieces, and children. Since that’s not this world, the practical question becomes: What is healthy gaming for adult men in the 2020s and 2030s? What types of game? Within what limits? And do the answers change based on the man’s employment, marital, or paternal status?

I’m not in a position to give universal, much less concrete, answers, except that my suggested limits would be predictably strict. More to the point, if it is true that the more one games the less likely one is to eat well, exercise, have good friends, go to church, find a spouse, and/or have and raise children in the home, then it would seem obvious that as a society we should desire the least gaming possible for men in their twenties and thirties. Gaming as a child and teenager and even young adult would, by the time boys leave the home, go the way of bunk beds and cooties, curfews and driver’s permits. The axiom would be Pauline: When I was a child I gamed like a child; when I became a man, I put away childish things.

That rhetoric is strong, I admit; I freely allow that, as a non-gamer, I’m biased against gaming in a way that may not let me see how it could find a small but meaningful role in a balanced adult life. If it can, the onus is on those who think so to make the case and display it in their lives. At the moment, video games and adult men don’t mix well, for themselves or for the rest of society.