Video Games Don't Get Enough Hate

2025-09-09

Video games don't get enough hate. Having been held back from enjoying them in childhood, not entirely but enough, the first thing I did free of my parents was get into whatever free game I could much too deeply and spend too much time on it. I suspect this is not unusual now and if it is, it's because the part where parents attempt to limit gaming doesn't happen nearly as much. I think that's making them one of the great underanalyzed drivers of isolation, alienation, and general malaise today.

It is trendy to talk about smartphones, social media, and porn harming kids today, but a lot less so for video games. There was a period of our culture in the 80s to early 00s where it was the opposite. It was fashionable to deride and ban them. They were blamed for all sorts of societal ills and it was turly outrageous in some cases, like the Columbine shootings. But somewhere in all that spilled ink is probably a good chunk of reasonable criticism that has since fallen by the wayside. Off the top of my head I don't remember if Neil Postman tackled the issue, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I think services like Twitch or Discord exist largely because the need for socializaiton that video games impede is so great, people couldn't play them in the numbers they are today without such services. The first objeciton I hear is that video games don't impede socialization, that multiplayer online games do the opposite and provide opportunities for it. I think this holds about as much weight as the idea that social media connects us. By now it should be obvious that is true only in superficial ways and that the difference in kind matters as much as, if not more than, the difference in degree. If you aren't on a voice client (usually the particularly terrible Discord) you aren't actually talking to someone when you spend time in these games. If you aren't broadcasting with a camera on somewhere like Twitch, you aren't even having your face seen. All the social and emotional cues of voice and facial expression are lost, making for a community that is arguably autistic, if not the old idea of blind, deaf, and mute.

But okay, let's say you're on those services. You're still not in physical proximity. You still have context collapse. This is a known problem with social media. From Wikipedia:

Context collapse "generally occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another" with that new audience's reaction being uncharitable and highly negative for failing to understand the original context.

This has had a huge effect on the atomization of social bonds. It's made people distant and withdrawn, because there is variable reinforcement schedule going on where your anodyne comments will be taken reasonably most of the time but explode into an outrageous response from potentially numerous people, and you never know which it will be or when.

Fine, fine, you only play games with friends you knew in person once upon a time, old buddies who have moved away. Almost no one truly limits their gameplay this way, but let's assume you do. Here's the real bottom line: What do have when you're done? At most you will have some memorable moments, the context of which will be difficult to impossible to explain to most people, because there are thousands of games and the minutiae that need to be understood for most stories in them to be relatable is just not feasible most of the time. Mostly when people reminisce about such moments, they're doing so to complete strangers on social media who happen to be talking about the game. The answer to what you have when you're done with such games, is typically nothing. You will have created no art, exercised no muscles, and completed no journey. Some bits on a server somewhere will change and that's it. The most thrilling moment you can conjure will be told as if they are war stories in some context, but probably not even include people whose faces you know, and none of them will come to your funeral. It is a virtual world, ephemerally subject to the profitability of a game company maintaining servers.

I don't believe this is what human are meant to do. And it's not any one of these things that makes it so. You should have transient experiences in life, for instance. But the combination of factors is too much. There are too many different things potentially wrong with this way of spending at time, and people are spending so much of it, that the odds simply don't pan out. If nothing else, look at the results. Honestly, when you imagine someone described as "gamer," what comes to mind?