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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 20 2017, @10:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the rent-is-due dept.

As video games get better and job prospects worse, more young men are dropping out of the job market to spend their time in an alternate reality. Ryan Avent suspects this is the beginning of something big

[...] Over the last 15 years there has been a steady and disconcerting leak of young people away from the labour force in America. Between 2000 and 2015, the employment rate for men in their 20s without a college education dropped ten percentage points, from 82% to 72%. In 2015, remarkably, 22% of men in this group – a cohort of people in the most consequential years of their working lives – reported to surveyors that they had not worked at all in the prior 12 months. That was in 2015: when the unemployment rate nationwide fell to 5%, and the American economy added 2.7m new jobs. Back in 2000, less than 10% of such men were in similar circumstances.

What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.

TFA is worth reading in full. Much more deliberative than usual.

Previously on SoylentNews: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Monday March 20 2017, @12:27PM (5 children)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Monday March 20 2017, @12:27PM (#481457)

    Well yes, predictable, but unsustainable.

    I mean, for all someone may live in a virtual world, their mind and body are a physical presence, and will need shelter, sustenance and nutrition, not to mention the cost of hardware and net connection to interface to the virtual world.

    All this requires physical money to pay for it, and while I am sure some people can make money in gaming, I don't think most will be able to. So, how do these people survive? OK, for now they can live with parents, but their parents won't be around forever.

    I guess you can have them live of benefits/welfare, but that only works as long as there is enough welfare to support all of them (and their immersion, which isn't cheap. I remember gamers spending large sums on rigs).

    Also, this reminds me a bit of what I heard about in Japan, where young people turned into recluses and never went out, had sex, relationships, etc.. in the physical world. They just interacted through their computers, mostly via games. This was the 90s-00s, so it could be that we are just catching up to them.

     

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday March 20 2017, @12:59PM (4 children)

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday March 20 2017, @12:59PM (#481471) Journal

    I guess you can have them live of benefits/welfare, but that only works as long as there is enough welfare to support all of them (and their immersion, which isn't cheap. I remember gamers spending large sums on rigs).

    Nah. New gaming hardware is expensive, but you eventually gaming technology will hit a functionality plateau (if it hasn't already) in which case 3 year old hardware will be 90% as good as the latest rig, but only 10% the cost, especially when purchased in bulk at government-welfare levels (ie tens of millions of units at a time). Hell, give it ten years and a Raspberry Pi will run like today's Playstation.

    As for welfare - You simply hole the gamers up in 3mx3mx2m boxes with a big screen gaming system built into one wall, a hammock, a shower / toilet / sink cubicle and a tap that dispenses soylent (tm) [soylent.com][2]. Maybe a hamster wheel, if there's space. Since you wouldn't have to worry about sunlight or fresh air, you could just pack these units into vast, concrete Gamercubes[1]. A gamercube 3km to a side and 20 stories high could easily house 11million gamers in one compact, efficient, easy to manage facility. Hell of a lot cheaper than the current welfare model, where we put people in actual houses and give them money for food and stuff, then watch them have kids and pay for them too. Having them all in one place would keep latency low, so they'd have nothing to complain about. Send the Resyk-roombas down the corridors twice a week to pick up the dead'uns before the smell gets too bad and I can think of no one objection that will possibly be raised against this proposal.

    [1] Subject to copyright negotiations with Nintendo over the name)
    [2] Dosage of soylent is controlled by weight & health monitoring sensors built into the hammock, aircon and toilet. Soylent can be automatically dosed with antibiotics, insulin and antidepressants as required to keep the gamers at a tolerable level of health.

    • (Score: 2) by rondon on Monday March 20 2017, @02:50PM (1 child)

      by rondon (5167) on Monday March 20 2017, @02:50PM (#481515)

      I read your title, but I have a question - if this was a check yourself in/out at will type of facility, would it be a bad thing? I'm leaning towards yes, but I'd love to hear arguments for both sides.

      Again, nothing is mandatory, and the facility is free to those who would like to check in. I guess the argument could go for any addict, to be fair. Color me slightly repulsed, yet intrigued.

      • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday March 20 2017, @05:22PM

        by Unixnut (5779) on Monday March 20 2017, @05:22PM (#481601)

        huh, when I read it, it just reminded me of the Matrix.

        Except it being some nightmare dystopian enslavement scenario, there may well be people who would willingly sit and be hooked up to virtual worlds like that for their lifetime. If you can emulate sensory inputs well enough, some people might be willing to spend their entire life in a dream world. Not sure about the comparison with addicts though. Main problem with addicts is the the damage and drain they do to other people and society themselves.

        If someone decides they want to spend their life in a cube hooked up to a computer, is that really having a negative effect on society? Sure you can claim the birth rate will drop as people don't get married and have kids, but you can't exactly force people to breed and rear children anyway.

        If work needs doing, then I am sure wages would rise due to lack of supply to the point where some people might be willing to forego the virtual world to do whatever physical labour is required.

        Not to mention, some jobs are virtual already. For example, programming could well be done through a terminal in the game. It would not surprise me in such a world that you could hire coders who live in these virtual worlds to actually do work needed in the physical world (which would allow them to pay for the sustenance of their physical form).

        In theory, with enough advancements in robotics, you could have telepresense robots that people could temporarily switch to if something needs to be done in the physical world, get the job done, get paid, and then go back to their respective virtual worlds.

        The more I think about it, the more I think you could actually make a society function like that. Not that I would want to be a part of it myself, but who knows, future generations might be more open to the idea. One day in the future I might be the old codger that doesn't want bionic implants and virtual worlds, shaking my stick at the plugged in people who can't even see me.

        Also, I am fine with the grandparents idea, on the condition that the buildings be painted on the outside to look like Nintendo Gamecubes themselves.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @05:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @05:22PM (#481602)

      We need to sponsor this. It's a solution to Islamic terrorism and fertility.

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 21 2017, @08:28AM

      by Bot (3902) on Tuesday March 21 2017, @08:28AM (#482011) Journal

      To my surprise
      Some twenty stories hiiiigh
      People getting hooked
      Reading on screen instructions

      Chorus: frag baby frag
      Gamer inferno
      Frag baby frag
      Shoot red mama down

      --
      Account abandoned.