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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 06 2017, @04:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the in-it-for-the-game dept.

A very interesting piece of long form journalism cum memoir about the way video gaming has subsumed and changed the way we live, interact, and think.

To the uninitiated, the figures are nothing if not staggering: 155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November's presidential election. And they play them a lot: According to a variety of recent studies, more than 40 percent of Americans play at least three hours a week, 34 million play on average 22 hours each week, 5 million hit 40 hours, and the average young American will now spend as many hours (roughly 10,000) playing by the time he or she turns 21 as that person spent in middle- and high-school classrooms combined. Which means that a niche activity confined a few decades ago to preadolescents and adolescents has become, increasingly, a cultural juggernaut for all races, genders, and ages. How had video games, over that time, ascended within American and world culture to a scale rivaling sports, film, and television? Like those other entertainments, video games offered an escape, of course. But what kind?

In 1993, the psychologist Peter D. Kramer published Listening to Prozac, asking what we could learn from the sudden mania for antidepressants in America. A few months before the election, an acquaintance had put the same question to me about video games: What do they give gamers that the real world doesn't?


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 06 2017, @06:49PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 06 2017, @06:49PM (#475733)

    More like a hollywood actor talking about politics or my plumber talking about astrophysics, an authority in one are doesn't apply too well to others. So I wouldn't be surprised if the Tetris author had weird opinions about FOSS or biochemistry or if zero point nine repeating is in fact equal to one or whatever.

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