OOn Sunday, the Observer magazine published a sensitive piece on video game addiction, featuring therapists working in the sector and a family affected. True, compulsive, life-altering addiction, whether to video games or otherwise, is of course devastating for those affected. Since the WHO classified gaming addiction as a specific disorder (separate from technology addiction) in 2018, the specialist National Centre for Gaming Disorders set up in the UK has treated just over 1,000 patients. Fortunately, the figures suggest it is rare, affecting less than 1% of the 88% of teenagers who play games.
The article asked, “Why are so many young people addicted to video games?”, which undoubtedly struck a chord with many parents who despair about the amount of time their children are spending on computers and consoles. However, as a video games editor and correspondent at the Guardian, we believe that many of us who worry about the amount of time our teenagers are spending on games are not dealing with an addiction problem, nor with compulsive behaviour. If we want to understand why many teenagers are choosing to play games for 10 or 20 hours a week by choice, rather than pathologising them, we need to look around us.
Gen Z is the generation we’re most closely scrutinizing. We criticize kids and teens for not going outside, but at the same time we’re limiting their freedoms and closing down their spaces. Parents will reminisce about how they spent entire days outside, biking around the neighborhood, but at the same time they’re treating their kids’ phones like tracking devices, demanding regular check-ins, infiltrating their social media feeds, and creating a database of their activities and friend groups. The pandemic may have subsided, but it wasn’t just lockdowns that kept kids inside.
And even without parental fear to constrain them, where are teenagers supposed to go? In the last decade, YMCA data shows that more than 4,500 youth services jobs have been cut and 750 youth centres have closed. According to the Music Venue Trust, two grassroots music venues are closing every 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 are for their toddlers only; city squares, skate parks and pedestrianised areas that were once public are now being slyly privatised, monitored by CCTV and patrolled by private security guards.
It’s no wonder then that teenagers are retreating into online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that aren’t mediated by their parents or other authority figures – the last places where they’re largely beyond the reach of adult control. You can spend all day with your mates in Red Dead Redemption or Minecraft or Fortnite, doing whatever you want, without being displaced or moaned about, or having to spend £5 on a latte every 30 minutes. If you can’t access therapy, you can at least relax with soothing games like Stardew Valley, Unpacking or Coffee Talk, or talk things through with your mates in-game. You can travel freely and for free in Elden Ring or Legend of Zelda; no elderly relatives can suddenly vote to restrict your access to the continent in Euro Truck Simulator.
It is undoubtedly true that spending all day in your bedroom is unhealthy and alienating. But can you blame this generation for being more anxious and withdrawn? They have recently spent more than a year locked in their homes. There is enormous despair and disillusionment in a world where home ownership is a fantasy, where stable careers for life 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 that an hour’s work would just buy them a pint in a London pub; if they can find work at all.
Gaming aside, the media landscape is dominated by news sources that ridicule and smear young people as woke softies, while also criminalizing them. The Tories’ last-ditch attempt to drum up support before the election was to reinstate national service for 18-year-olds – to teach them respect and civic awareness. This is the generation who put their lives, their friendships, their love affairs and their education on hold simply to save their grandparents. We shouldn’t be surprised that they want to escape into virtual worlds. We should be surprised that they ever want to return to the world we built for them.
Meanwhile, real action on the climate emergency is being stymied by ineffective politicians who cozy up to polluting corporations, and right-wing conspiracy theorists 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 be dead when the time comes to reap what we’ve sown, but not Gen Z – it’s the only job for life they’re guaranteed.
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Today’s teens are playing more games than any other generation. They’re also suffering from a mental health crisis, with one in three reporting mental health issues ranging from anxiety and depression to, yes, addiction. If there’s a connection between these things, it’s not causation. We love to blame everything from smartphones to social media to video games for the problems our kids are experiencing – everything except ourselves.