OOn Sunday, the Observer magazine published a sensitive article about video game addiction, talking to therapists who work in the sector and an affected family. True, compulsive, life-altering addiction, whether to video games or anything else, is certainly devastating to those affected by it. Since the WHO classified gaming addiction as a specific disorder in 2018 (distinguished from technology addiction), the specialist National Center for Gaming Disorders, established in the UK, has treated just over 1,000 patients. Thankfully, the numbers suggest it’s rare, affecting less than 1% of the 88% of teenagers who play games.
The article asked the question, “why are so many young people addicted to video games?”, which no doubt struck a chord with many parents who despair about the amount of time their children spend in front of computers and consoles. Speaking as the Guardian’s games editor and correspondent, however, we think that many of us who worry about how much time our teenagers spend playing games are not dealing with an addiction problem, nor with compulsive behaviour. If we want to know why so many teenagers choose of their own free will to spend 10 or 20 hours a week playing games, instead of pathologizing them, we need to look around us.
Gen Z are the most closely monitored generation ever born. We criticize children and teenagers for not going out – but at the same time we are limiting their freedoms and closing off their spaces. Parents will reminisce about spending days outside, biking around the neighborhood, but at the same time they’re treating their kids’ smartphones like tracking devices, demanding regular checkups, hacking into their resources on social media and keeping a database of their activities and friend groups. The pandemic may have subsided, but it wasn’t just lockdowns that were keeping children inside.
And even without parental anxiety surrounding them: where should teenagers go? In the past decade, YMCA data shows that more than 4,500 youth jobs have been cut and 750 youth centers have closed. According to the Music Venue Trust, two music venues at the base close each week. The nightclub industry is in free fall. Teenagers can’t hang out in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided that these rare recreational spaces belong only to their little ones; Town squares and skate parks and pedestrian areas that were once public are now being insidiously privatized, monitored via CCTV and controlled by private security guards.
It’s no wonder, then, that teenagers are drawn to the worlds of online video games, the last spaces left to them that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures—the last places where they are largely beyond the control of adults. . You can spend all day with your friends on Red Dead Redemption or Minecraft or Fortnite doing whatever you want without being pushed or complaining or having to spend £5 on a latte every 30 minutes. If you can’t use therapy, you can at least relax with comforting games like Stardew Valley, Unpacking or Coffee Talk, or chat with your in-game friends. You can travel freely and for free in Elden Ring or Legend of Zelda; no elderly relative can suddenly vote to limit your entry to the continent in Euro Truck Simulator.
It is certainly true that spending all day in the bedroom is unhealthy and alien. But can you blame this generation for being more anxious and withdrawn? They were recently imprisoned in their homes for over a year. There is mass despair and disillusionment in a world in which home ownership is a fantasy, where lifelong careers are increasingly rare, and where young people are accused of being lazy and complacent. The minimum wage for an 18-year-old in this country is £8.60, which means an hour’s work can buy him just one pint in a London pub; that is if they can find work at all.
Aside from gaming, the media landscape is dominated by news sources that mock and disparage young people as smart while criminalizing them. The Tories’ last-ditch effort to drum up support ahead of the election was to bring back national service to 18-year-olds – to teach them respect and public mindedness. This is the generation that simply put their lives, their friendships, their love affairs and their education on hold to save their grandparents. We should not be surprised that they want to escape to virtual worlds. We should be surprised that they ever want to go back to what we built for them.
Meanwhile, real action on the climate emergency is being stymied by ineffectual politicians colluding with polluting corporations and right-wing conspiracists who deny there is a problem at all. Experts wring their hands over the extent to which we should allow protesters to block roads while water companies fill the sea with human excrement. These people will all die when it’s time to reap what we’ve sown, but Gen Z won’t be—that’s the only eternal job they’re sure to get.
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Today’s teenagers play games more than any previous generation. They are also suffering a mental health crisis, with one in three reporting mental health problems, from anxiety and depression to, yes, addiction. If there is a connection between these things, it is not causal. We’re prone to blame everything from smartphones to social media and video games for the problems our kids are experiencing—everything, that is, except ourselves.