A few weeks ago I plugged in my old Playstation 3 and, for the first time in a while, played some video games. I was looking for a leisure activity that was slightly less passive than TV and significantly more mindless than reading a book. The games I had lying around were over a decade old, but despite the dated graphics I found it was easy to get absorbed in the tasks at hand: navigating virtual environments, jumping, shooting, and solving puzzles aimed at the level of a precocious middle schooler. Good video games are so absorbing they shut out most other thought and feeling. If you weren’t spending all your time killing things or trying not to die you might be able to call them meditative. Time and circumstance melt away as you transition from level to level, racking up points, items, currency, and any other collectable that’s there to tickle your brain’s reward receptors. The power of this absorption is why, despite their massive popularity, games are still sometimes characterized as an anti-social waste of time for shut-ins and unproductive losers.
I was enjoying myself so much I started to wonder if I should invest in newer, more sophisticated hardware. I spent the following weeks watching videos of Playstation 5 games, which are comparatively dazzling in the levels of immersion and sophistication they offer. Did I dare subject myself to the seductive, time-sucking delights Sony Group Corporation was offering me?
I am part of the first generation to have grown up with home consoles. I remember playing a NES at my friend’s house, and eventually getting a Sega Genesis of my own, followed by a Sega Saturn and Playstations 1, 2, and 3. These things were marketed to me, often contained subject matter I cared about (monsters, wrestling, cartoons), and helped fill the oceans of idle time I, an only child living in the suburbs, found myself swimming in.
Video games are, ideally, fun, but their real appeal lies in the cycle of completion and reward they strategically dole out to players. In this way, they closely resemble a related vice: gambling. The key difference is that gambling exists to separate people from their money, whereas video games exist to separate people from their money and their time. From Candy Crush to MarioKart to The Last of Us, the goal of a video game is to keep you playing, and to this end players are provided with abundant opportunities to acquire and complete. All this acquiring and completing gives the player a sense of really doing something. And our brains love getting stuff done, especially if we can do so without leaving the couch.
Real life has a similar system of completion and reward—the world of work and wages. Most employed people spend their working lives completing productive tasks for monetary rewards. While many people might like their jobs enough, most do not find their work all that immersive or addictive. We know this because most people retire as soon as they get the chance, and spend their non-working hours doing other things, like playing video games. For most people, work is like a really dull video game with distressingly high stakes (being able to afford food, staying off the street).
There are a minority of people who play a very different game at work—one where they have high degrees of control and where the rewards can be immense. This is the world of bosses, executives, leaders, and other high ranking, well-compensated members of white collar life (plus professional athletes and artists). These jobs may not always be fun, but I believe they provide the kind of meaning, excitement, agency, and reward that video games simulate so effectively. That most people, by design, cannot access these types of jobs, and are left with a digital simulacrum of them can be viewed in one light as a small but worthwhile compensation and in another as a bleak indictment of capitalism. I think it’s probably both!
In short, I believe video games are so popular because humans love doing, and there’s a lack of meaningful, exciting work and activity irl. Do I enjoy running around a digital jungle? Yeah. Would I rather take a hike through a real jungle? Definitely. But the real jungle is far away; I can’t visit it for a few hours every night before bed like I can the digital one.
There’s an old stereotype of a gamer: unpopular and un-athletic, retreating to their basement where they can live out a fantasy of heroism. This situation has as much to do with technology as it does with a social milieu that does not provide sufficient opportunities for community and activity. If there were no unloved, under-stimulated kids, maybe the hundred billion dollar video game industry would not have risen up.
Or maybe it would have anyway. These days video games are played by all kinds of people. You can have friends, a family, spend time outdoors, and spend a few hours every night shooting zombies in the head. (Eventually even old people will game—I have no doubt that the retirement homes of the future will be stocked with Nintendos.) It’s a great way to pass the time, and I don’t see much of a difference between shooting a zombie in the head on your PS5, watching an actor shoot a zombie in the head on TV, or writing tweets about how good the zombie tv show is. These are all ways to pass the time at home. And when wildfire smoke and extreme heat makes outdoor activity dangerous, I’m glad I can have an outdoor-esque experience available to me. But there is something a little dystopian about the increasing retreat into digital worlds as the real world—particularly the natural world—is becoming so degraded.
Instead of building a a society where meaning, power, and reward is more evenly distributed, we’re inventing digital substitutions for these things and using casino tactics to get people hooked (see also: the gamification of social media). If you are the CEO of Sony or Apple, which recently announced its “augmented reality” headset, you are unlikely to spend most of your time playing video games with a pair of goggles strapped to your face.1 You will instead be playing the game of life at the highest level. If you want to experience a boost in self-esteem and meaning, you need only go to your workplace, where you control the direction of a giant corporation and where your employees will defer to your every command. When you want to pursue your curiosity, you can have dinners or meetings with the most interesting and/or powerful people in the world. When you want to experience a beautiful environment you need not do so digitally—you will live in beautiful homes, on beautiful properties. You will have the means to immerse yourself in nature, or surround yourself with beautiful art. Interested in adventure? Go anywhere in the world. Go to space.
In other words, the affluent have an incredible amount of options in how they experience life, and one can view the push toward digital immersion as an attempt to extend access to (artificial) nature, art, connection, and meaning as widely as profit margins will allow. And there is something to be said for being able to turn on a TV or open your phone at the end of the day, when in the past you might be stuck staring at the walls of your hovel. I’m not against personal technology, I just don’t think it’s the answer to certain deficits in our society and culture. As immersive, digital worlds get increasingly sophisticated I worry they’re offering not a great distraction at the end of the day but a poor substitution for something in increasingly short supply.
Even Mark Zuckerberg, who seems like the kind of freak who would gladly live in virtual reality full time, owns an enormous property in Hawaii and spends his free time doing stuff like this: