(2017-06-14) Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead Of Getting Jobs Thats Okfor Now

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.)

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.

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

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

A young life spent playing video games can lead to a middle age without marketable skills or connections

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.

"In a very low-wage world," Avent writes, "more people will opt out of work. That will inevitably strain the social-safety net.

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.

Left unanswered is the question of what happens after one's basic needs are provided for

Hurst's research suggests that many people, or at least many low-skilled young men, would use it to play video games.

where games come in. They don't put food on the table. But they do provide, at least in the short to medium term, a sense of focus and success, structure and direction, skill development and accomplishment

As with welfare and transfer programs, there are trade-offs: They can cushion individuals from life's difficulties and hardships, but they can also provide disincentives to work by making unemployment more pleasurable. In economists' terms, video games raise an individual's reservation wage—the amount of compensation it takes to make someone choose to work.

Online multiplayer games can take even more time. In 2015, Activision CEO Eric Hirschberg reported that Destiny, a complex mass-multiplayer shooter that mixes role-paying elements with squad-based action, counted 16 million players, and that daily players put in an average of three hours a day.

One way of describing a game that has such pull on its players might be that it is fun. Another might be that it is addicting (Addiction).

Game designers, Wolpaw explains, tend to think in terms of making their products entertaining and, in many cases, replayable. Their goal, as straightforward as it may sound, is to make games that people want to play. Discussions about keeping players engaged happen, he says, but "not in a mustache-twirling, how-are-we-going-to-get-people-addicted way. There's a fine line between that psychology and good game design."

One way to do that, it turns out, is to give people a sense of earned achievement. "What games are good at—what they are designed to do—is simulate being good at something," Wolpaw says.

A game provides the sensation of mastery without the actual ability.

They sweated over their work with the anxiety and brow-furrowed determination of craftsmen and artists. I came to admire the way they shaped the games according to their whims and, equally, the way they had shaped themselves to the demands of the games

One month later, the startup I was working at crashed, a victim of the financial crisis. My girlfriend's advice—I promise I am not making this up—was to play video games. (Like I said, we are now married.) Not to the exclusion of all else, but to reduce anxiety and fill the gaps between the hours I spent job hunting each day.

The best of these games overwhelmed my capacity to think about anything else at a time when more thinking wasn't terribly beneficial

after long breaks, I have always made the choice to return to video games. And I suspect I always will. Because on the whole, they have made my life richer and better, more interesting and more tolerable.