Video games, like work, are basically a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks: Receive an assignment, travel to a location, overcome some obstacles, perform some sort of search, pick up an item, and then deliver it in exchange for a reward—and, usually, another quest, which starts the cycle all over again. You are not playing the game so much as following its orders. The game is your boss; to succeed, you have to do what it says.This is especially true in the genre that has come to dominate much of big-budget game development, the open-world action role-playing game, which blends the hair-trigger violence of traditional shooters with the massive explorable landscapes of games like Grand Theft Auto and the intricate craft and character leveling systems of pen-and-paper tabletop fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons.
The games consist of a series of assignments combined with a progression of skills, awards, and accomplishments, in which you, the player, become more powerful and proficient as a result of your dedication. And dedication is what these games require. It is not uncommon for single-player games to take upward of 60 hours to complete. Online, multiplayer variants can easily chew up hundreds or even thousands of hours of time, with the most accomplished players putting in dozens of hours a week for months on end. Although these games are usually packaged in a veneer of fantasy, they work less like traditional entertainment and more like employment simulators.
So it is perhaps not surprising that for many young men, especially those with lower levels of educational attainment, video games are increasingly replacing work. Since 2000, men in their 20s without a bachelor's degree are working considerably less and spending far more time engaged in leisure activities, which overwhelmingly means playing video games. Over the same time frame, this group of men has also grown more likely to be single, to have no children, and to live with parents or other family members.
The surprising thing about the stereotypical aimless young man, detached from work and society, playing video games in his parents' basement: He's actually happier than ever.
I can relate.
In March, I spent a chilly weekend playing Mass Effect: Andromeda. This is the fourth installment in one of the gaming world's most popular franchises, and it represents something of a reboot for the science fiction series, with a new protagonist and a new galaxy to explore.
In the game, I played Ryder, a young woman—my choice—who, after the prologue, becomes a "pathfinder," the lead explorer on a joint human-alien mission to settle the Andromeda galaxy. That role came with considerable responsibilities. When I arrived in the new galaxy, I discovered that the mission had already gone awry: The life-sustaining planets that I expected to find had been made barren by a mysterious alien menace, colonist ships had gone missing, and the space station that was supposed to serve as the mission hub had been divided by cultural disputes, bureaucratic infighting, and resource shortages. In addition to shooting a predictably large quantity of menacing aliens and robots, my job—and it was most definitely a job—was to solve all of these problems.
That meant collecting basic resources from nearby planets and developing them into useful technologies. It meant setting up outposts for colonists and assigning them to various tasks. It meant resolving thorny personality disputes between various administrators and staffers on the space station, and assisting other staffers with their work.
In some ways I was playing sci-fi CEO, but in other ways it felt more like being an all-purpose flunky. Much of the game involves menial chores. My character was equipped with a handheld scanner that can catalog items and provide technical information about many of the objects she encounters. The game offers rewards for scanning just about everything, which means that the play frequently descends into a kind of cataloging and list making, hunting down items to scan, using the scanner to trace wires and connections and solve ancient alien relic puzzles that rather suspiciously resemble games of Sudoku. Land on any of the game's planets and pull up a map, and you'll see that it's covered with icons and markers, each of which represents a task to complete, a person to talk with, an item to acquire.
Completing all of these objectives would take dozens of hours. Most are not even directly related to the game's core storyline. Instead they are what gamers refer to as side-quests—secondary activities and sideline time wasters embedded inside a massive virtual time waster.
The multitude of priorities and objectives means that there is always someplace to go, something to do, someone to talk to, or some object to fetch. Like many games, Mass Effect: Andromeda is designed to entice the player with a cycle of discovery, frustration, achievement, and advancement that never fully resolves, because each in-game accomplishment leads to the discovery of more tasks and objectives, more upgrades and abilities, more work to be done. At its best, it was satisfying, distracting, and frustrating, all at once. I found myself feeling not only that I could play forever, but that I must.
Andromeda is not the most entertaining game I have ever played, but with its endless array of tasks to complete and objectives to achieve, it is among the most job-like in its approach to game design. At times it hit rather close to home.
The game boasts an intricate conversation system, and a substantial portion of the playtime is spent talking to in-game characters, quizzing them for information (much of which adds color but is ultimately irrelevant), asking them for assignments, relaying details of your progress, and then finding out what they would like you to do next.
At a certain point, it started to feel more than a little familiar. It wasn't just that it was a lot like work. It was that it was a lot like my own work as a journalist: interviewing subjects, attempting to figure out which one of the half-dozen questions they had just answered provided useful information, and then moving on to ask someone else about what I had just been told.
Eventually I quit playing. I already have a job, and though I enjoy it quite a bit, I didn't feel as if I needed another one.
But what about those who aren't employed? It's easy to imagine a game like Andromeda taking the place of work.
The economy has rebounded since the great recession, and national unemployment now sits below 5 percent. But that figure only counts people who are actively seeking work. Even as the unemployment rate has dropped, labor force participation—the number of people who either work or want to work—has dwindled. In particular, young men without college degrees have become increasingly detached from the labor market. And what they appear to be doing instead is playing video games.
In a September 2016 piece for Chicago Booth Magazine, adapted from a speech delivered the previous June, University of Chicago economist Erik Hurst described his 12-year-old son's fanatical devotion to gaming. "If it were up to him," Hurst wrote, "I have no doubt he would play video games 23 and a half hours per day. He told me so. If we didn't ration video games, I am not sure he would ever eat. I am positive he wouldn't shower."
For Hurst, the pull that games exerted on his son helped illustrate what's happening to young men in the broader economy. Between 2000 and 2015, he said, the percentage of lower-skilled men aged 21 to 55 who had a job dropped from 84 percent to 77 percent, "a massive change relative to historical levels." The decline is particularly acute among men in their 20s. Employment fell 10 points over the same period, from 82 percent to 72 percent. In 2015, he noted, 22 percent of men in their 20s who lacked a college degree had not worked a single day during the previous year—up from 10 percent in 2000.
In 2000, just 35 percent of lower-skilled young men lived with family. Now a slight majority of lower-skilled young men reside with their parents, whether they're employed or not. For those who lack employment, the figure is 70 percent. The vast majority of low-skilled young men—roughly 90 percent—have not built families. "If you're not working, as a man in your 20s with less than a bachelor's degree, you're pretty much single and childless," Hurst said last year on the podcast EconTalk.
In follow-up interviews, the economist has stressed that his research is preliminary and ongoing, and the particulars are subject to revision. Working papers released in the fall of 2016 and the spring of 2017 told essentially the same story: Low-skilled men are working less and living at home more.
The surprising thing about the stereotypical aimless young man playing video games in his parents' basement: He's actually happier than ever.
Instead of working, they are playing video games. About three quarters of the increase in leisure time among men since 2000 has gone to gaming. Total time spent on computers, including game consoles, has nearly doubled.
You might think that this would be demoralizing. A life spent unemployed, living at home, without romantic prospects, playing digital time wasters does not sound particularly appealing on its face.
Yet this group reports far higher levels of overall happiness than low-skilled young men from the turn of the 21st century. In contrast, self-reported happiness for older workers without college degrees fell during the same period. For low-skilled young women and men with college degrees, it stayed basically the same. A significant part of the difference comes down to what Hurst has called "innovations in leisure computer activities for young men."
The problems come later.
A young life spent playing video games can lead to a middle age without marketable skills or connections. "There is some evidence," Hurst pointed out, "that these young, lower-skilled men who are happy in their 20s become much less happy in their 30s or 40s." So are these guys just wasting their lives, frittering away their time on anti-social activities?
Hurst describes his figures as "staggering" and "shocking"—a seismic shift in the relationship of young men to work. "Men in their 20s historically are a group with a strong attachment to the labor force," he writes. "The decline in employment rates for low-skilled men in their 20s was larger than it was for all other sex, age, and skill groups during this same time period."
But there's another way to think about the change: as a shift in their relationship to unemployment. Research has consistently found that long-term unemployment is one of the most dispiriting things that can happen to a person. Happiness levels tank and never recover. One 2010 study by a group of German researchers suggests that it's worse, over time, for life satisfaction than even the death of a spouse. What video games appear to do is ease the psychic pain of joblessness—and to do it in a way that is, if not permanent, at least long-lasting.
For low-skilled young men, what is the alternative to playing games? We might like to imagine that they would all become sociable and highly productive members of society, but that is not necessarily the case.
"Every society has a 'bad men' problem," says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University. Cowen's 2013 book Average Is Over envisions a future in which high-productivity individuals create the vast majority of society's economic value, while lower-skilled individuals spend their days on increasingly inexpensive entertainment that helps order their lives and allow for a baseline level of daily happiness. Hurt's research suggests that we may be witnessing the beginnings of that world already.
In terms of behavior and performance, Cowen says, "Variance for men is always higher." That is, men are more likely to exhibit extremes of character and behavior, both positive and negative. A whole generation of men obsessively playing video games during their prime decades of life may not be ideal, but most would agree that it is preferable to riots.
Are riots a possibility? In his 2016 book The Wealth of Humans, journalist Ryan Avent writes about the evolution of the labor market from the industrial revolution through the coming era of automation and artificial intelligence, which he argues will make millions of jobs obsolete. Avent envisions a possible future in which wages for low-skilled individuals grow ever smaller, and in which many have a difficult time finding work at all. Even if we eventually adapt to the new labor market—finding, for example, work servicing the computers and machines that perform much of the world's labor—the economic disruption will be severe, and it's likely to produce political and social upheaval.
"In a very low-wage world," Avent writes, "more people will opt out of work. That will inevitably strain the social-safety net; societies will be ever more clearly divided into those who work and pay for social programmes and those who live off of them." If this dynamic is not handled with care, he worries that it could lead to "intense political conflict" between those two groups. Indeed, Avent raises the possibility that the global rise of populist movements on both the left and right may be an early signal that such tensions are already building.
Discussions about low-skilled unemployment and the future of work—or the lack of it—invariably turn to the prospect of reforming the welfare state by instituting a universal basic income. In many ways, the heart of the issue is not gaming but worklessness and its consequences.
Basic income proposals vary (see "The Indestructible Idea of the Universal Basic Income"), but the core idea is to provide everyone, rich or poor, with a guaranteed payment that would allow him or her to live without working, or at least significantly reduce the need to generate income. The goal would be to create a system in which everyone is entitled to a minimum standard of living, one that is sufficient but not very luxurious.