The Curious, Unparalleled Ickiness of Video Games

Making Sense of Their Mysteriously Potent Repulsiveness

A few months back, a tweet circulated that ranked hobbies that women found repulsive and unflattering in men, claiming that playing video games outmatched other leisure activities by a wide margin in inspiring negative affect among females. The stats were of questionable provenance and maybe downright phony, but they captured a real phenomenon anyway—like Ken Kesey once wrote, “it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” And the truth is that women generally despise the idea of their male partner playing video games. It’s a shockingly fierce and commonplace antipathy—husbands from years ago who caught hell for watching sports all day or playing a bit too much golf had little idea how innocuous their doings would be regarded by comparison to video games.

Women trying to reshape the character of men by policing their habits and leisure activities isn’t something new. Written many years ago, the Edwardian-era bachelors of P.G. Wodehouse’s novels constantly field attempts by officious fiancées to improve their souls by encouraging them to adopt vegetarianism, demanding they give up smoking or become teetotalers, or making them swap out their detective stories for more highbrow reading.

Wodehouse’s most consistently beleaguered character, Bertie Wooster, oils out of a dangerous engagement to novelist Florence Cray at some point, only to be re-entangled with her at the outset of Jeeves in the Morning via a comedic mixup when she erroneously believes that he’s buying a copy of her latest novel and a translation of Spinoza at the bookshop (he’s actually buying Spinoza for his trusty valet Jeeves, who’s perpetually extricating Bertie’s moneyed friends from the enthusiasms of these puritanical bête noires), and she’s gleeful that her efforts to expand his mind have taken root.

Notwithstanding this ancient tradition, somehow video games have excited special animosity from modern women, easily surpassing the irksomeness of more conventional vices. But what gives? What about video games inspires such acute revulsion? I’m fascinated by this and crowdsourced some opinions concerning the issue on Notes. Here’s a menu of somewhat refined theories about what could be going on.

1. Leisure

The smoldering ire toward husbands and boyfriends for pitiful romancing and lackluster contributions to household maintenance predates video games. Some speculate that women dislike men having hobbies or downtime at all, even if their beau ideal is a versatile, outgoing, and chummy person who would presumably be a hobbyist of some kind. It’s believable that women instinctively disagree with men about the appropriate quantity of leisure, and that could explain some baseline prejudice against most non-work activities. Moreover, that misalignment could be emphasized by people growing more conscientious with age, since men over-indulging (by comparison) in leisure are likelier to be members of younger cohorts (who are busily dating and playing video games and navigating those frictions).

Under this theory, however, video games aren’t exceptionally repulsive or distinguishable from other diversions—gaming is just comparably salient and popular these days. Maybe women respond vociferously about video games because it’s the most common form of leisure that their partners opt for and really they just dislike their partners opting for leisure at all. Or, adopting their perspective, men are too predisposed to luxuriating and require some oversight.

Unlike many other leisure activities, though, gaming occurs where it’s noticeable to women (viz., at home, shouting into your mic at your teammates), and some think that wives/gfs might find the proximity of exuberance and lassitude involved with gaming particularly irksome or malapropos while they’re working, cleaning, etc. Plus, as mentioned above, women are traditionally more puritanical creatures than men are, and according to Mencken, the proper definition of puritanism is “the haunting fear that somewhere, someone may be happy.” Other hobbies are pursued in separate locales—awareness of your partner’s relaxation isn’t so present and gnawing in those circumstances. Alternatively, something innocuous and asocial, like reading or building model ships, is doable at home too, but that stuff doesn’t produce such an eventful soundscape.

2. Opportunity Cost

Rather than possessing a puritanical hatred for leisure itself, another possibility is that females’ anti-gaming mentality could actually be thinly disguised grousing about everything that the men playing video games aren’t doing. Maybe video games aren’t intrinsically infuriating, but leisure keeps men from doing other stuff, and really it’s the insufficient alacrity to address tasks that women consider valuable which is the true underlying bugbear.

Under this theory, the issue isn’t with what video games are but with the assortment of things that they aren’t: moneymaking, housekeeping, planning outfits for family portraits, writing Christmas cards, etc. Gaming doesn’t positively contribute to the relationship (at least, not obviously enough), and it’s valueless to women directly, so every moment of gaming is, in the eyes of these theoretical hetero female partners, a pricey opportunity cost for the partnership, and the boiling anti-gaming animus is a function of that.

In modern times, leisure—especially male leisure—is something that primarily obstructs status accumulation, and as all savvy, upwardly mobile women know, their raison d’être is accumulating status. And the opportunity costs of leisure have skyrocketed, so that’s probably something women are scanning for and contemplating as they wrestle with modern life, neck-deep in some existential struggle to have it all. With lofty home prices, weighty student debt burdens, intensifying inter- and intra-generational inequality, and misalignment between their biological and professional timelines, the stakes are unusually steep for women in choosing a mate, and the potential for leisure is meager.

High-end careers consume heaps of time, and status is now chiefly accumulated by high-end careerism. Mixing in social, housekeeping, and familial commitments that many women view as essential is probably already overambitious without needing to squeeze in episodes of spacing out and blasting fictitious enemies in some nonexistent realm or hunting for a catalog of artificially rare virtual items. The high-pressure tug-of-war between competing identities of upwardly mobile females is already something to steer way-the-hell clear of; men regularly enjoying video games instead of likewise overworking and embroiling themselves in an identity crisis could signal a worrying potential to jeopardize that balancing act.

3. Addiction

Another complaint about gaming is about the volume of time it demands—that it’s more addictive than other hobbies. Gaming isn’t manifestly deleterious in the way drug addictions are; it’s not even financially devastating like a gambling addiction. But any addiction can generate downsides sua sponte, even if whatever you’re addicted to is superficially benign. As mentioned above, the drawback to playing video games—especially competitive games that men enjoy—is mainly the time investment and corresponding opportunity cost.

Does gaming impose larger temporal outlays than other hobbies? On average, it probably does. Developing skill and expertise at anything requires serious time, but it’s not ordinarily a problematic temptation for adult males to dedicate themselves toward chasing that type of uncommon proficiency. It happens: men become quasi-obsessed with random things like woodworking, but something about gaming’s combo of tactical coordination, competitive atmosphere, etc., proves dangerously entrancing for the median guy in a way that’s difficult to picture vis-à-vis something like auto racing or metalwork.

But still, this explanation isn’t really about gaming qua gaming. Basically everything is potentially addicting. Even if video games pose an unusually high risk of addiction, would women regard a guy blowing through the same quantity of time and energy on metalwork as equally icky? Also, the peril of addiction justifies a circumspect attitude toward video games, but not an intemperate revulsion; the type of animosity produced by video game addiction is the well-grounded, hard-won disfavor of veteran girlfriends rather than a mysteriously reflexive and intense disgust with men playing video games in general.

4. Ambition Sinks

Per the Ambition Sink Theory, women are especially sensitive to the ambition, resources, and social status of their male partners, and they regard video games as powerfully retarding the maximization of those attributes (even more than other hobbies). By honing their competencies and ascending hierarchies in digital worlds (often specified by rankings or level systems, but these frequently translate into esteem from other gamers), men are exactly replicating the kind of ambition and social climbing their female counterparts cherish, but those men are unable or unwilling to effect similar traction in the outside world, within the status hierarchies that women view as legitimate and benefit from.

This juxtaposition of male industriousness in the virtual realm and their fecklessness offline is vexing, and the frustration of trying to convince their partners to swap those levels of effort could be what’s so infuriating. Maybe what burns up women so much is seeing the particular thing the covet routinely misallocated (in their view) and their inability to coax male partners into redirecting those same energies towards gathering momentum in the workforce and improving the couple’s social standing.

Because such a large fraction of what’s potentially appealing about men as companions (to women, at least) is their career potential, even women with super-elongated mating timelines often need to place uncertain bets and forecast their partner’s future earnings (to the extent men do any forecasting, it’s more about downside risk and less about upside). So, it’s understandable that women would monitor ambition like this theory supposes: maybe female hatred of gaming emanates from a fear that they’ll need to readjust projections about their partner downward, spoiling their impression of him and requiring her to discount her expectations more steeply. Are women managing their romantic portfolio like investors in this way? Do men give them little choice by being otherwise undesirable?

An impecunious pursuit absorbing their partner’s ambition isn’t always sufficient to disgust women, though. For example, they wouldn’t object to him postponing careerism to prepare for competing in the Olympics; they’d gladly stomach the financial hardships entailed by something like that, given there’s potential validation that translates to status hierarchies women value (e.g., from something like the Olympics). Thus, if hatred of video games is tied to wasting ambition, it’s not entirely focused on financial standing—it’s more about status.

5. Jealousy

Another possibility is that women are outraged by being momentarily overtaken in priority. Before the invention of video games, hardly anything could capture a man’s attention strongly enough to immunize him from the distractions of a pretty figure. Under this theory, younger girlfriends/wives have rarely (or maybe never) dealt with a male partner being temporarily impervious to her charms. Even if she doesn’t demand the entirety of his attention, she knows that she could recapture his focus whenever truly required.

But men are so uniquely enraptured by video games and often can’t exit immediately without leaving their online buddies in a jam or injuring their standing in the game, that it places women in an uncomfortable position where their sexual mystique isn’t quite the nuclear-grade super-weapon they’re accustomed to lugging around. Maybe some women perceive this potency as critical to the viability of their relationship or something—video games threaten their monopoly on that level of captivation, and just like how they’d be uneasy about another woman exercising that ability to spellbind men on their SO, seeing video games achieve similar effects is unsettling for them.

6. Childishness

The dominant theory seems to be that video games are childish. This is a less obvious guess than competing explanations, so the convergence here probably reflects something genuine. Females disfavoring men with jejune hobbies is understandable, but the predisposition to evaluate romantic prospects—even concerning guys in their early twenties, when you’re planning to delay childbirth for decades—by scoping them out for signposts of rarefied maturity, is stunningly forward-looking.

Obviously, there’s something going on with female preferences and the age of male partners. There’s lots of age-gap talk circulating, and there’s a continuous uproar from women about their husbands/boyfriends being immature because they aren’t volunteering for/concentrating on stuff like domestic chores or hosting duties with convincing gusto. Maybe expanding inter-generational inequality has exaggerated a pre-existing female preference for maturity. Are young women imploring their youthful partners to mimic older (wealthier) males in some kind of cargo-cult strategy since nobody other than Boomers can afford a house or something?

Whatever the case, I’m majorly nonplussed by the unyielding conviction that gaming is so childlike. What is it about gaming that’s inherently juvenile? The explanation can’t just be based on the notion that people who play video games are young: the median age of gamers has surely migrated upward for the past several decades. Moreover, the slice of population playing organized sports is young too, but playing hockey on the weekends with your buddies isn’t suspected to radiate this icky vibe. Thus, playing video games cannot seem childlike solely because of demographics—there must be something innately childish about it.

But consider a counterexample. Adult women retaining their childhood obsession with Disney is off-puttingly juvenile, too; maybe it’s not a deal-breaker—few things are deal-breakers for men—but it’s unappealing specifically because it’s childish. Men, however, wouldn’t balk at their girlfriend playing video games or find that strangely immature. So, do video games read as juvenile to women but not to men? Apparently so, per the judgment of women championing this hypothesis, but it remains peculiar to me—I just don’t share ready access to this gut instinct that gaming is childish.

Analysis

Inverting the facts, we can study the flip side of this phenomenon, and maybe some of its shadows can prove revealing. As mentioned above, men wouldn’t be repulsed by their romantic counterparts playing video games. Is that because men are less uptight, less paranoid about social status, less worried about their wives stockpiling resources, or a mixture of all of those things? Or is it just that men are programmed to be so much be less picky in general? It is somewhat challenging to imagine guys sifting through their options with a sufficiently fine-toothed comb to eliminate romantic prospects based on her hobbies.

Most of the theories presented above aren’t exclusively applicable to video games—distracting from romantic effort or eating away at future cash flows are downsides of any captivating hobby. But gaming could be a prominent vector for a macédoine of annoyances. Several theories presuppose a brutally transactional mentality about relationships is driving female video game animus, but the reflexive character of the anti-gaming antipathy doesn’t fit seamlessly with the cynical gamesmanship implied by these views. If they are accurate, and some kind of rudimentary dynamic forecasting really is behind the ickiness of video games, it’s more likely unthinking guesswork than the result of careful tabulation. It’s also unclear whether such a transactional reflex is chiefly about maximizing future payouts or leveling unbalanced housework duties and nursing a private paranoia/indignity about lopsided scorecards.

I can’t really imagine professionally mediocre women completely sidelining their anti-video-game mindset for high-achieving guys: I’m pretty sure I remember hearing a professional athlete (worth, like, over a hundred million dollars) lament his wife hectoring him about gaming. Stuff like that majorly complicates attempts to disentangle this anti-video-game attitude. If a woman with such a tumescent bank account and the resources to hire endless staff shares this anti-gaming instinct, then whatever’s going on could be a bizarre evolutionary misfire.

Another sketchy underlying assumption behind several of these theories is the expectation that guys would substitute their gaming with something like housecleaning or longer work hours if only they could be peeled away from the joysticks. It’s totally possible, however, that expunging video games from the world would primarily result in men opting for some other mix of leisure rather than swiftly conforming their activities to the priorities of women. Young men are often fantastically irresponsible creatures even without exposure to video games.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, men have long managed to focus their energies on ventures and pastimes that inspire frustration among the opposite sex, and while centuries of women have mercilessly reproved their husbands for drinking or repeatedly hidden their tobacco, the special disgust reserved for gaming—a superficially innocuous pastime—is a whole new level of forced asceticism.

There’s little doubt that the convivial, smoking, champagne-gargling Etonians of Wodehouse’s novels would be playing video games instead of reading detective fiction or mingling at the Drones Club these days (reading detective novels would now be considered pretty cultured), and I sympathize with some level of dismay about that—it’s undoubtedly a less vibrant social outcome. This might be especially tragic for people who are advantaged by (and/or invested in) civilization heavily integrating social relationships and reputation management into the assessment and ranking of other humans across myriad domains (read: women).

Moreover, I should clarify that active, venturesome, outdoorsy hobbies are plainly sexier than video games, but that’s because something like surfing is sexy, though—not because of how obviously repulsive video games are. The rumored ickiness radiating from video games makes me feel like a 19th century scientist being lectured about bacteria or gamma rays. I’ll trust the expertise and data, but it’s a queer theory about something that’s invisible to me. Others, however, seem to think that it’s just so fucking obvious that it’s self-explanatory.

The feminine parallel to video games is plainly social media, which is similarly poisonous and has hacked into female brains with corresponding intensity, and yet while it’s also irksome and exhausting, picturing men react to female social media usage with equally passionate revulsion seems implausible and bizarre. It’s clear, however, that both video games and social media have accessed some hardwired evolutionary male and female psychological artifacts, respectively, and they’re causing people’s brains—teenagers especially—to short-circuit, so regardless of whether it’s originating from tenderhearted or self-serving motivations, the instinctive female revulsion toward video games is probably deserved.

If disgust reflexes are meant to protect humans from stuff like ingesting poisonous material, then video games triggering that reflex in women is probably valid, since the classification of gaming as something hazardous is at least defensible, if not wholly fitting. Maybe if men could be similarly discriminating about their mate selection, they could likewise muster some kind of pushback against women’s social media habits; though, such efforts are probably doomed—the die is cast, it seems: the tech is too powerful, our brains are too compromised, and the heinous admixture of coordination problems and addiction at play here would require some kind of heroic maneuvering to facilitate our escape. Godspeed to anyone trying to unwind this mess.