Would young men be rioting in the streets if they didn’t have video games to pacify them?
Hear me out.
We are seeing record levels of young men unemployed and living with their parents: The future for them is bleak. Saddled with college debt, they can barely get a job that pays miimum wage, while living independently is forever out of reach.
I feel like at other points of history, there would be more social unrest, but things are exceedingly calm given the economics.
I was watching a video by Healthy Gamer, a gamer bro-turned psychiatrist. He points out that video games are very addictive and seductive because they MIMIC accomplishment. You can grind to get to the next level, you can gain new skills, you are continually put on a treadmill of constant progress. It’s very satisfying in a hollow way, satisfying in a way that might make you forget that society has nothing to offer you but debt and homelessness after you followed all the rules.
Are video games weapons of mass distraction, the metaphysical equivalent of a million Christians being fed to a million lions every day?
Escapism is a thing for a long time before we were born. Alcohol or drugs is an escape. At one point you realize that the world is full of pieces of shits that are also in control of everything.
Way before video games were a thing people often lived in multi generational housing out of necessity without riots.
Riots happen when people are starving.
If people are in the basement playing video games it’s because they aren’t starving. It’s the not the video games preventing the riots, it’s the Doritos.
Hey hun, new Doritos slogan just dropped
It’s interesting people keep coming with alternative reasons for riots that don´t even cover the riots in the last 50 years. Mass hunger has not caused any riots in the US probably since the 1930’s.
Ok so first of all, it’s not than just young men who play video games, so it’s kinda shitty to imply that it’s only young men.
It’s also shitty to imply young men are the people who are obligated to riot, or the only people who do riot.
We’ve noticed a trend of less violence from people over the last several decades, which started before video games, so video games might be unrelated.
There’s always been something that feels like accomplishment but isn’t. Reading about how to do something tricks your brain into thinking it’s done that or is making progress on a project, but education only goes so far.
So imo it’s probably a combination of things. Video games might be one of those things but people feeling like they are rebelling by just reading about countercultural things may also be a factor, as well as humans being less violent and also maybe people are just scared and don’t want to die.
Women escape reality with youtube, tabloids, tiktok, instagram, and more. They don’t need gaming to be distracted and yet, they are. Guys would just find another thing to be distracted by.
There’s another article (thread) saying there is no loneliness epidemic but a poverty epidemic. And yes, that’s the problem: the uber-rich just have taken as much as they could and will continue to take more. They bought up our apartments, our debt, our third places, are playgrounds, and more. They own the media to tell us that the problems are all due to minorities that have no power and want us to look down or be distracted by services that we give all our information too, and allow them to find more ways to hook us into distractive crap so that we don’t look up.
Want to solve loneliness, childlessness, poverty, etc? !twnw@fedia.io #TaxWealthNow #TaxWealth
Are you aware that women play games too
Yes, women make a majority of console and PC gaming.
Yeah, I was a little unsure if I should gender this discussion, but a few factors went into it:
- video games seem to cater to male-centered power fantasies;
- men are much more often the actors of street violence;
- men have a greater sense of entitlement to economic success;
- currently, men are doing worse than women on a lot of measures;
- and men seem to be remarkably politically active when their video game fantasy-life is threatened.
Totally agree that economics is at the root of all of it, and at the root of all of that is wealth (and power) concerntration.
Edit: Keeping in mind gender essentialism is bullshit, men in general tend to be more attracted by themes of power and control, women more by themes of connection. I think the gendered nature of the distractions we are bringing up reflect that.
I see where you’re coming from now and can understand your line of thinking. It is a difficult question because it is difficult to predict. Gaming is also a source of radicalisation.
Whether removing it altogether would lead to a sizable mass of men to become politically active and engaged, that I kind of doubt. Gaming is more accessible now and there are many poor men that game. Poverty goes hand in hand with worse education and more precarity. Removing one source of distraction from a badly and/or insufficiently educated man would not necessarily lead to an awareness of the source of their struggles. It might make them receptive to influences claiming to know the source of their struggles, but unfortunately, I believe that most of those influences are controlled by those who actually are the source of the problem.
IMO, there’s a greater chance of more affluent and educated gamers to become aware of the circumstances. But they often will not be the ones doing the damage IRL as they have more to lose than the lower classes. Times are changing and they also possess less, especially housing, so the uber-rich might actually be creating a system where even “affluent” and educated people have so little to lose that they are willing to actually gamble and go protest, try to change the system, and violently or peacefully enact change.
In summary, my guess is that removing gaming wouldn’t change much - unless if it were done suddenly e.g the state said gaming is now illegal.
Riots don’t have to be INFORMED. They can just be an angry reaction or people without a conscious political purpose.
I think there are more media-related distractions available, such as movies, tv shows, porn, sports, music, social media (though sm can also be used to incite/organize protests/riots), plus the old mainstay of religion (which is also a propaganda tool, but in most cases pro-government). But yeah, all these distractions definitely help. It’s like Rome’s Bread And Circus.
I think social media and video games are in a class of their own, because they are something you can put EFFORT in and get REWARD out. Movies and TV just kill time without rewarding you with any senses of accomplishment.
I think SM is a net negative, too. Hear rumors that research shows that people engaged in twitter combat are less likely to do anything actually effective.
Before video games, TV, or Movies people just read books, which can feel rewarding. If that’s still too passive for you, people played instruments. We have thousands of years of entertainment to draw on.
I think you’re kind of on to something, and I think your ideas cohere with C. Thi Nguyen’s research (for an easy intro, listen to his interviews with Ezra Klein or Adam Connover).
I’m not sure I agree with everything though… I think games and social media are different in lots of ways. E.g. games simulate agency, and it can feel like video games are giving you choices, when really you’re quite tightly constrained by the developer’s ideas of how the world works mechanically and narratively.
Social Media is different in that you’re not constrained by narrative options, but your experience has massive feedback loops with ideas from others you interact with and algorithms (the latter strongly constraining the former). I don’t think social media gives agency-vibes, but it gives other forms of catharsis and other emotion triggers.
IDK, stuff like online petitions, online arguments and general virtue signaling behavior (which isn’t inherently bad TBF) can sure feel like you’re doing something without actually accomplishing much if you’re not also doing concrete things like rioting, striking etc.
Yeah, exactly. I actually worry that social media acts as junk food activism, an activity that feels like activism but really just takes up time and energy that could be used well to no effect.
How many times have you seen someone raging online arguing that they’re fighting for X and will always fight for them?
Yeah, true, they probably can sometimes.
Oh, thought leader Ezra “I’m Against Genocide Now That Israel is Unpopular” Klein? I like Adam Conover. Got that interview queued… 90 minutes! That’s a walking-the-dog-in-the-park video!
I don’t think games and SM are exactly the same, but they do each have reward loops that are more engaging than passive traditional media.
I think getting positive feedback for something you posted does fall under “agency vibes”", rewarding you with fake social points, whereas a video game would give a fake digital asset or ability.
Yeah, that Ezra… I know he has wack opinions on some things - they don’t really come up in that interview though.
I think I would consider agency and reward as distinct issues (that sometimes overlap). Agency to me is the feeling that your actions are leading to external effects that align with your intentions. That may or may not be associated with rewards.
Oh, well, if you are defining ACTUAL agency, yes, obviously, you want real-world effects. But I’m talking about the ILLUSION of agency, which is what video games and (more debatably) SM provide.
I think you need to take a close look at Ezra Klein and the very many people like him who get to the top of the pundit game by seeming independent but conveniently always seem to have opinions that line up with the power structure.
Think about it this way:
If you say, “I’m a bootlicking piece of shit,” nobody will care what you say.
If you say, “The rich control everything and the obvious implication is that we should make it so they control much less,” you will not get on any platforms owned by wealthy people (which is most of them).
The sweet spot is Ezra Klein: someone who can simulate independenct thought while at the same time serving the power strucutre.
His turn around on Israel was absolutely illustrative. “I am now against Israel because of all these facts that were public knowledge for all the time that I was supporting Israel.” His first instinct is to support Israel, because that’s where the money and the power are, But now that Israel is politically unpopular, he needs to abandon that position to maintain his credibility.
I wouldn’t waste any more time on him.
edit: ezra asks the tough questions like: what is right? what is true? But he only answers the question"what is right for ezra klein? As such, his only utility is as a ruling class bellweather.
I’d credit the global reduction of lead exposure
I’d say video games play a very minor role in this. Distractions have always existed and video games is far from the only one existing now. And it’s not like we haven’t seen huge protest movements by young people recently, for example in Nepal.
What is the gaming situation in Nepal, though?
Phone gaming is very popular and most young people there have phones. Not everyone can afford consoles or a PC, but that’s a growing market too, especially in Kathmandu. But if anything, it’s phone games that are most aggressive about using addictive mechanics.
Yes, but I think I’m trying to focus in on the sense of AGENCY that a modern RPG might give you. I don’t know that a phone game, as addicting as it is, is as metaphysically satisfying.
I mean phone gaming is also stuff like Genshin Impact these days. We’re long past the days where phone gaming was mainly Candy Crush, quite a few phone games have similar levels of agency and complexity as your average AAA console release. Maybe not compared to a really in-depth CRPG, but most people in the west don’t play those either.
What’s a good game to illustrate what you’re talking about? Genshin Impact?
I often wonder if gaming may also be responsible to the drop in violent crime seen over the last 30 years.
I like to attribute that to removing lead from petrol
Worth a reference for those not in the know, shit’s crazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
Hah! 😂
Probably going to be an unpopular take online but… A lot of the most chronically single people I know are very into videogames. Not sure which way the causation runs or maybe it’s a self reinforcing cycle but there does seem to be a relationship.
The folks I know tend not to be the angry incel type but I could very easily see a pathway that goes something like: video games are cheaper and easier than putting yourself out there, thus you isolate, but isolation kind of sucks and no one likes to blame themselves, so the “manosphere” and it’s precursors are there to tell you it’s actually women/wokeness/the Libs that are responsible for your angry singledom…" To me, I see them at least partially a factor in the hard gender split in politics these days.
The timing also kind of maps out. Video games have moved from niche to one of the most lucrative entertainment industries. The generation of young men raised by really quality games was coming to electoral age just about 2016 and boy, did things start going g off the rails.
I’m not blaming everything on videogames and do play some myself but I do wonder if they’ve contributed to the problem.
Definitely. I’m pushing 50 and know that, had games been more sophisticated, realistic, and able to be played online in my teens, I’d have struggled not to let that consume me. However, as it happened, the allure of gigs, beer, nights out, and girls didn’t really have much competition with the likes of Street Fighter 2.
On one hand, I definitely feel I’ve missed out on that gaming experience and to this day don’t have that shared interest that my younger colleagues have with each other. On the other, I see younger guys at work who are just regular dudes but have no family, friends, or partners outside work or their online world. And by younger, I mean pushing 40. We’re talking about decades where their free time has been spent mostly gaming.
To each their own—please don’t get prickly if you feel seen or think I’m being condescending. I can absolutely see how that can happen, and if you’re cool with that, then that’s all that matters. It’s just not the way I personally would want to live from my current perspective, although I know that had I been born a decade later, I’d probably be in the same boat.
I think it’s got more to do with the manosphere being an easily accessible community. There is almost no bar to entry, because they just need bodies to grift. You don’t need to pass a vibe check, you don’t need to have any sort of social skills. Matter of fact, failing to pass a vibe check and having no social skills make you an ideal recruit.
Manosphere is a huge part. I just think that the impressive improvements in video games have increased the pool of lonely young men on whom the manosphere preys.
As a crude example, I had surgery and finished Persona 5 while recovering. Mentioned that to a coworker when I returned and he was stoked and talked about his multiple playthroughs on that and his experience with the others in the series. With a full time job, that’s so very many weeks worth of time just devoted to a video game instead of meeting people, socializing, finding a partner etc.
Correlation vs. causation.
I think it’s a lot more likely that people who have little success meeting people, socializing, and finding partners are turning to videogames, as that’s a reasonably cheap mostly solo hobby.
Personally, if I’m not playing videogames, I’m out sailing. Not socializing.
Absolutely, there’s definitely folks who were already not good at socializing turning to video games. Buuut, I think the cheapness, ubiquity and quality have all improved so much that it has become a much easier alternative than it was in the past.
Like, if you lower the price of cigarettes, many who smoke those cheaper smokes would have smoked anyway. But as the price drops, it’s easier for those marginal smokers to continue to do so and for new ones to start. (You had to be pretty dedicated to suffer through Ultima VI etc.)
And the timing also kind of makes sense; for the last couple of decades there’s been a marked decrease in teenagers and young adults having sex. I assume part is the ubiquity of porn but I can’t imagine teenagers are just getting less horny…
Why not?
Never thought about it like that! It’s probably just like how so many under 30s living with their parents these days isn’t a sign of distress, they probably just love their parents more than every other generation!
What fascinating insights you have.
I asked “why not?” to a specific assertion. Teenagers getting less horny. I think it’s entirely reasonable that this is the case, now that we have endocrine disrupting chemicals being dumped into the environment.
Yes, people not having money to spend don’t go out as much. That is not the fault of videogames, that is the fault of capitalism and pollution.
I kind of tuned out after PS2. Where would you put the dividing line for games of sufficient quality to act as a society-wide sedative? GTA4? Or would it be more social COD games?
and, yeah, there is a self-reinforcing cycle to manosphere ideology that’s really hard to break out of. guys go in thinking women are all gold digging removed, and–surprise!–nobody wants to sleep with them, which just reinforces their belief, while simultaneously absolving themselves of needing to grow personally.
I’m going to date myself here but mid 90s and earlier games were fairly niche. There were definitely folks who played them a lot but today, I don’t think it’s entirely unusual for a kid to have spent a weekend gaming.
I don’t think there was a hard dividing line but as much as I loved say, Rebel Assault, you couldn’t really throw hundreds of hours into it.
I was hoping to maybe draw in some more current gamers. Like my last major time suck was Just Cause 2, but it it had very repetitive game loop that you just repeated different places. I never thought, “Wow, I got a lot accomplished playing Just Cause 2 all day.”
Bread and Circus. They take different shapes over the ages, but the core remains the same.
Desperate people don’t riot.
Revolutions are started by the “middle class” (or at least someone that can afford to miss a few paychecks).
Desperate people will fight to the death to defend a rich person tossing a couple crumbs off the table for them, because those crumbs are what keeps them from starving.
Could also be that poor people are much more easily thrown in prison or murdered by police.
Nah, that happens to anyone that disagrees with the system, poor or otherwise.
There’s a reason that pretty much every revolution in history was started by people that were either decently comfortable or an oligarch.
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Yes.
When we were kids in the 60’s, we were perpetually bored and getting in to trouble.
Its not that we were socially active, we just had nothing to do, and wanted to impress girls.
What kind of trouble did you get yourself into?
Though you had less to complain about economically.
Mostly mindless vandalism and stupidity.
Also you do know there was the Vietnam war and the oil embargo, right? That all the factories shut down in the 70’s and nobody had any work because everything got outsourced to asia.
They didn’t say you had nothing to complain about, only that there was less.
Yes, Vietnam was a huge factor in the US, but you’ll also find that “the 60s” also happened in Europe; there was a component that was just a reaction to strict traditional society–or at least something in common that had nothing to do with an adventure in Indochina.
I guess I don’t know the nitty-gritty details of the economic situation in the 70’s, but I don’t think your generation was as economically fucked as the current one, though the drop off you may have felt might have been more severe locally.
From my perspective it was worse back then. I lived in a small town, when the war ended all the factories shut down, the town started to die and we almost ended up homeless. If my uncle hadn’t helped us out, my life would have been a different story. Then just as we started to get back on our feet the oil embargo hit and the off shoring started. The current reality isn’t near as bad.
Thanks for sharing that; I know things got bad before Reagan Saved The Country /s, but most of the details are from driving through some abandoned mill towns and from listening to Allentown from Billy Joel.
Hm. I wonder if there would be a way to compare economic stress between generations? But, yeah, having NO job is pretty stressful; and there’s no way you could know that the economy was abot to turn around.
I think today things are looking grim because the job market is so competitive, people feel forced to get a college degree to even get a foot in the door, and now they’ve started their life in a debt that in a better world would have been a mortgage, and they might be able to get a job, but it’s not going to pay for a car, an apartment, and their college loans, and the future is bleak af because the trend lines towards everything getting more expensive while jobs pay less and less have been ongoing for DECADES.
Yes
I would argue they are a great distraction but ultimately it falls apart when individuals come to realize that you really only have so much time to spend on stuff that doesn’t really provide much value to your life or other people you care about. The real problem is how addicting they are
I suppose its a perspective of priorities. I would much rather grind out a promotion or a financial plan rather than play video games because it provides greater overall value, and more importantly for consistency, a greater sense of satisfaction in the progress and put-togethered-ness of my life. But more paramount is the issue that with the friction-less society that we have built around consumerism it makes it really hard to even think about what we actually want and properly take the time to consider the cost-benefit analysis of our decisions.
Now with AI, I fear the offloading of cognitive function and friction will worsen this further in the short term (20ish years)
Uprising because of lack of games? Seriously? Most people won’t overthrow the power of capitalists because no one has provided a working theory without capitalists. And changing some for others just doesn’t make sense. And this is not about games at all. Moreover, you are not even close to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. In my 18 years I couldn’t have something to eat. That is bottom, not live with parents.
As if a person swinging a sledgehammer at work for 10 hours and then going into their favorite shooter for an hour will immediately go to protests if they don’t have a shooter. Of course not.
I think that hiearchy of needs is misapplied and misunderstood.
People with food and housing kill themselves when their life loses meaning.
People without housing find Jesus because meaning is more important than collecting cans.
People kill themselves for various reasons. Mostly because of a mismatch between expectations and reality.
No Jesus will help you survive in the snow town at -30 degrees Celsius. These stories are good in the south, but not in the north.
Ok, granted, you can not find meaning if you are literally DEAD, but I think people are drawn to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs because they think it is actually some kind of pyramid you climb as a human being. You don’t think about community UNTIL you have housing. You don’t think about meaning UNTIL you have community.
But as you yourself have acknowledged, it does not work that way: someone with food and housing can kill themselves because expectations do not match reality. Someone who is homeless might survive because they think they have a mission to write music or whatever.
And yes, stories like “oh no, I have a loan, and I can’t pay it off, and nobody will hire me, even though all I know how to do is study, and I have a piece of paper” are very funny to me. If you want to make money, you will. By whatever means necessary. Just accept that the world isn’t as you dreamed.
UPD: and just admit yourself bankrupt. You won’t get a loan anymore, but on the other hand, if you can’t pay it back, that’s not so bad either.
How many people in your family have committed suicide? My cousin committed suicide in my family. I know exactly what I’m talking about. When you have nothing to eat, you don’t think about how bad it is that there are few cinemas around. You look for food. For a long time. For hours. You just don’t have time for anything else. This is real experience, not beautiful stories from social networks.
I don’t really think we’re disagreeing on anything.
You want me to understand that starving actually does suck, and I’m not disagreeing; I’m saying, “yes, and”.
Yes, starving does suck, and so does not belonging to a community or having hope for the future or having no purpose in life. And if you want to play personal credibility, I’ve been in the hospital for wanting to kill myself more than once and I went in on a full belly each time.
People need a variety of things in a variety of combinations at different points of their lifes. There is not stable pyramid guiding human psychology the way their obviously is for human biology. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has been criticized by smarter people than me on these points, and you can read their work if you’re interested.
I don’t argue that she was criticized. I just say that the problem described in the post—protests about games and comparisons with other countries—is irrelevant. In addition, for some reason, the topic starter included “evil capitalists” in the post. Maybe I didn’t describe it very well because I’m using a translator. Personally, I see this literally as a problem of the golden billion. Maslow’s pyramid is just an example.
Let me explain in more detail. Surely everyone was told as a child what successful future awaits them. How everything will be wonderful. Boundless horizons. Hardly any parent wouldn’t want this for their child. But reality isn’t like that. It doesn’t guarantee not only earnings but even life. Harsh truth. Therefore, all these sufferings in the spirit of: “cursed capitalists are profiting from us, let’s protest more. If something happens, will we protest even more?” seem very funny to me.
Especially for the USA, because the post was clearly written by someone from there. Guys, capitalists in 1996, if I’m not mistaken, provided your country with a lot of jobs at chicken factories just by giving one country free chicken under monopoly conditions. But luck doesn’t always turn its face.
So as it was sung in one Russian song:
We galloped merrily on wooden horses, We marched in war against the foolish adult world. We led an army of songs and toys together, We were very brave children.
But one day, in every child’s heart, it suddenly became empty, The fairy‑tale thread was torn. We got there, and it turned out there was simply no one to defeat. There are no adults here except us.
Time ran out, the veil fell, and everything that had so drawn us, that has always been inside us.
UPD: That’s why I wrote that suicide is almost always the result of unrealistic expectations.
I’m OP and didn’t explicitly call out “evil capitalism” by name, I don’t think. I don’t think capitalism is particularly evil, it’s just locus of propaganda that allows the system to parasitize everyone else. SInce everyone defends the system by saying, “capitalism is good!” people attack the system thinking “capitalism is bad!” But the problem is the system of aggregating power to a few that potentially exists in EVERY society.
Like, yeah, this idea that we just get rid of “capitalism” and welcome in a new Utopia is really silly. Most people won’t state that theory outright, but it’s clearly underlying their thoughts:
- Overthrow capitalism.
- ???
- Utopia!
People suck. Societies suck. And I think it always has been that way and I think it will always be that way–at least eventually. I think the best thing to do is fight for the PRESENT and forget about the future.
I love your song, btw. What’s the title? I regret selling my bayan.
Edit: Ah, yes, I have more to say, just agreeing with you. I remember watching the Muppet Movie, the original one, as an adult–though they all have a common theme–and realizing how TOXIC it is. It firmly plants in everyone’s head that they can literally be a star.
Several years later, Tyler Durden in Fight Club said it out loud: We we were all raised to think we could all be movie gods and rockstars; but we can’t. We were lied to. And we’re pissed off. {or something like that}
I think kids raised in the US today have been told: go to school and go to college MINIMUM. What they are finding when they graduate is the economic situation is horrible and now they are PERMANENTLY in debt. I think it’s natural to be angry about that, to be put into a position of financial slavery by society…
But also you’re right–expectations have a powerful effect on people.
Edit:
But I also want to talk about existential depression, which I have. Everyone believes in SOMETHING–which is why Maslow is full of shit. That is to say, at bedrock, EVERYONE has a purpose or a meaning, something they cling to so they have a role in the world and hope for the future. For a lot of people it used to be religion, for other people it might be their career, or their family, or politics (see the myth of progress above). It’s extremely powerful and pervasive.
But at some point, you might lose your anchor. If you built your life and your children, they could die. If you built your life around your career, you might become disabled. If you built your life around faith, you might become an atheist (rare). And at that point, you have to ask yourself, what is the point of being alive?
That’s the existential crisis.
This is casually treated by a parade of comfortable white men. Camus basically just said to laugh it off. Isn’t it absurd!? we’re supposed to say. Easy enough when your life is full of material comfort and social belonging as a top professor in academe. But what if you’re poor, what if you’re alone, what if you have no purpose in the world, no accomplishments, no celebrations? What then? Existential philoosophy has very little to offer people who suffer.
One of the reasons religion is so powerfully felt among the poor and the struggling is that it offers JUSTICE. They suffer now, so they will be rewarded later. The wealthy have pleasure now, but will burn in hell later. To see that they live in an unjust world where what they want is denied them is emotionally unbearable for most people, so they fall into religion.
Thanks for the convo. I enjoy your perspective.
