Scenario A: Your partner spends 20 hours a week practicing an instrument that doesn't make sound, but demonstrates increasing technical mastery through a complex ranking system visible only to other silent-instrument enthusiasts.
Scenario B: Your partner spends 20 hours a week on an activity that could theoretically lead them to leave you, but currently just wastes time.
Which bothers you more?
If you're like most people, A feels uniquely maddening in a way B doesn't. This might explain the asymmetric reactions to gaming versus social media use between genders. As the article notes, even a professional athlete's wife - someone with essentially unlimited resources to outsource any neglected tasks - still hectors her husband about gaming. This suggests something deeper than mere opportunity cost or time waste is at play.
The "addiction" theory falls short - other addictive hobbies don't generate the same visceral disgust. The "jealousy over attention" theory seems plausible but doesn't explain why women don't react similarly to other absorbing male hobbies like fantasy football or car restoration. And while many write it off as just being "childish," this doesn't explain why women react more negatively to gaming than to other supposedly immature male pursuits.
What makes gaming special is that it demonstrates male capability for sustained, competitive, hierarchical achievement... being channeled into status systems that women consider illegitimate. It's not just time wasted, but visible proof of ambition misallocated. The Wodehouse reference illuminates this - his characters' leisure pursuits were socially embedded and status-generating within systems women valued. Even "wasteful" male hobbies like golf or social drinking historically served to build business relationships and social capital. They might trigger resentment over time spent, but not disgust, because they at least theoretically improved the man's career prospects or social standing in ways that could benefit his partner.
Modern gaming represents a pure sink of male achievement drive - effort poured into hierarchies that generate neither resources nor social capital that could serve the partnership. It's not just useless, but actively demonstrates a willingness to excel at something with zero partnership payoff.
This is why social media, while similarly "wasteful," doesn't trigger parallel male revulsion - it represents a potential threat of relationship defection, though not a betrayal of potential. A man might feel threatened by his partner posting thirst traps or maintaining a network of admiring followers, though expressing such concerns gets quickly labeled as controlling or abusive.
Watching a capable man spend his energy on purely virtual achievements feels like watching someone with the strength to hunt spending all day practicing spear-throwing at illusory deer. The visceral disgust might be an adaptive response saying "this person is demonstrating high capability but zero actual investment in things that matter."
This is it right here. There is no other activity that improves literally nothing about a man and instead wastes every achievement driven on a meaningless fake world. Almost everything else improves *something* for the investment of time ... his physical health, social relationships, musical ability or practical skills, character, knowledge, something. Video games are just taking energy and time meant for improving one's life and self and having adventures and investing it in a fake version for zero value. it's hard to think of a female equivalent but maybe it'd be if she spent 3 hours a day pushing buttons to watch a fake avatar of herself working out and becoming beautiful, while the real life version just got fatter and fatter.
I used to play an instrument (got some rave reviews on youtube even), but eventually I quit, in part because I realized that it just wasn't useful. I was never going to be a pro, and getting better was too much like work.
I don't think playing an instrument is useful. It just has cultural cachet. I think women tend to care about cultural cachet a lot, and come up with rationalizations for why it's important.
I think it really depends on the game re: whether it builds useful skill.
* Lots of games build hand-eye coordination or reflexes. (Would you object to pool or ping-pong as useless hobbies? There's that cultural cachet again...) Super Mario 64 has been shown to ward off dementia.
* Lots of games reward strategic thinking or ability to solve puzzles, training your ability to predict in advance how some formal or semi-formal system will work out, and identify creative strategies. There are games that have explicit or implicit themes around scientific discovery and engineering; see for example https://store.steampowered.com/app/367450/Poly_Bridge/
* Some games are very story-driven, so insofar as reading fiction improves intuition about people or what have you, those games would be expected to do the same.
* Other games are very social, giving you the opportunity to stay in touch with friends, or make new friends, or work out social complexities in a virtual environment.
* Some games can have significant educational content. When I was a kid, playing games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon gave me a decent sense of what it was like to run a business. Playing Civilization gave me a much better intuition for the broad sweep of history.
>Video games are just taking energy and time meant for improving one's life and self and having adventures and investing it in a fake version for zero value.
Video games are a relaxation activity. They renew energy rather than drain it. It's not healthy to spend every waking hour trying to improve one's life or have adventures or whatever. You'll burn yourself out that way. Sometimes the best way to disconnect is to immerse yourself and get totally lost in something different.
>it's hard to think of a female equivalent but maybe it'd be if she spent 3 hours a day pushing buttons to watch a fake avatar of herself working out and becoming beautiful, while the real life version just got fatter and fatter.
I'm beginning to suspect that your real objection is to RPGs in particular.
For me, a good game is not good just because a number on a screen is going up. A good game is good because it consistently generates interesting and diverse mental challenges. I enjoyed RPGs as a kid, but I've struggled to get into them as an adult. I just can't suspend my disbelief that way anymore, which is actually a bit of a tragedy if I'm being honest. There has to be some sort of interesting puzzle to draw me in to the story.
So yeah, hopefully we can develop a more fine-grained notion of cultural cachet which differentiates between different genres of computer game.
I spent several years of my life where basically all my leisure time was spent on video games, and I got very, very good and beat basically anyone I played against (though that means IRL, this was before people played multi-player online). I used to use exactly the same argument against my parents, that it built problem solving skills and hand eye coordination. Which is bullshit bc it doesn't build those things in a way that's useful for anything else. Yes it made my thumbs highly trained at operating the controller, but that didn't cross over to making me good at handwriting or sewing or playing a musical instrument. I also don't think that figuring out how to find the treasure or weapon or beat the next boss has any cross-over to real world problem solving skills.
The fact that parents have almost universally discouraged excessive video game playing by their kids is illustrative here...they don't like it for exactly the same reason women don't, which is that it's not a use of leisure time that will accrue any increase in personal/social capital in the real world. These same parents generally DO want their kids to participate in real world leisure activities like sports or music, and in fact spend good money on trying to get their kids into them. Sports and music can help get a scholarship and are generally social activities that involve interacting with people and an element of competition which build social reflexes and skills useful for life. The socializing that occurs with disembodied strangers you play online with doesn't.
I get it that all hobbies are somewhat a poor use of time. I've developed an obsession with landscaping/gardening that I somewhat really regret. It has degraded my social relationships and wasted my money. But at least it's physical activity and gets me outside. So while I think it's been more bad than good, it's not as bad as video games which I think are uniquely bad. Even just reading novels, while escapism, will likely make you a proficient reader and writer, which is a skill that's useful with broader application. Video games do not create any improvement or skill useful outside the video game.
But yes, anything involving an avatar does have a particularly gross flavor to it, whether that's video games or online role playing/second life/sims, etc, because it directly means the person is taking energies and drives meant to improve their own life and wasting them on an easier and more enjoyable fantasy version, which seems uniquely perverse and bad for them individually. Other hobbies have some measure of the same aspect, but it's not as smack you in the face obvious and there's usually at least one social or physical benefit.
>that didn't cross over to making me good at handwriting or sewing or playing a musical instrument.
None of those involve an element of reflexes / fast communication between brain hemispheres / etc. (And none of them are particularly useful either, nor do they significantly cross-train each other?) It's plausible to me that gaming made you better at e.g. catching something you dropped. And having good reflexes can be a matter of life and death in certain circumstances.
>I also don't think that figuring out how to find the treasure or weapon or beat the next boss has any cross-over to real world problem solving skills.
I mean, kids complain in math/science class that they're never going to use any of this stuff. I think the amount of crossover is typically similar for most people, between gaming vs science class. Unless your job makes use of the specific science you're learning, studying science just boosts general problem-solving skills, which gaming does too. And typical people are going to be bored in science class and not engage very deeply, but games can be very engaging in a way that actually helps internalize the problem-solving boost.
When I was a kid, my dad would buy books of brainteasers and puzzles for us to solve, as an enrichment activity. Gaming feels quite similar to those books of brainteasers in a lot of ways.
>Sports and music can help get a scholarship
I think universities have e-sports teams now? In any case, I'm not about to apply for any scholarships. Also, if we're prioritizing money, I'll bet your EV of dollars-per-hour earned is better by just working at a job. (That's the sort of insight you get from gaming btw.)
>The socializing that occurs with disembodied strangers you play online with doesn't.
I play with people in my family online. Also, I think socializing with disembodied strangers is not a terrible use of time. It's a safer environment that lets you experiment more, vs hanging out with people you'll see again IRL.
>Even just reading novels, while escapism, will likely make you a proficient reader and writer, which is a skill that's useful with broader application.
I agree reading novels is good for kids. I think if you're already a proficient reader, it's not an especially good use of time. I'd go so far as to say that the underlying assumptions promulgated by novels, that you're a storybook protagonist and everything will be a nice morality tale with a happily ever after, are pretty harmful. That sort of thinking has been pretty harmful to me. I think the underlying assumptions of gaming (that it's generally safe to experiment/explore and try new things; that losing is very possible and depends on skill and risk-taking, but usually won't do long-term harm; that you can think about systems and identify ways to leverage them) are a much better fit for the real world.
>it directly means the person is taking energies and drives meant to improve their own life and wasting them on an easier and more enjoyable fantasy version
I actually disagree. I find that the energy and drive I spend in gaming actually *encourages* me to spend more energy and drive IRL. Imagine a sort of 2nd life career type of game where over the course of a few hours, you get to see the consequence of good and bad life decisions on winning or losing. That can be powerful motivation, to help you internalize that living your life in a deliberate and strategic way can bring major rewards. It can take years and years to learn that lesson if you never play games.
That said, I agree that not everyone engages with computer games this way. For me, there was a moment when I was a teenager where I was like: "I'm so strategic and achievement-oriented when playing games. Why can't I be that way IRL?" And I managed to internalize that insight, and it helped motivate me to live more strategically. But not everyone does that.
>The fact that parents have almost universally discouraged excessive video game playing by their kids is illustrative here
The "excessive" part is key. I think the best argument against gaming is that games can be very addictive, and problem gaming is common. Really, I've found this to be very game-specific. Some games cause me to stay up late. Others don't. The trick is just to pick the right games and apply a little self-discipline. (Specifically, the most dangerous games seem to have a sort of "multithreaded" nature where there's no good stopping point. Civilization would be the classic example.)
Well, that's funny because my husband plays Civilization. 😂😂 Which I don't have a problem with and am not grossed out by. But importantly, he only plays it early in the morning, before he starts his "real" day. Which I think helps quite a bit with both not becoming excessive or addictive. If he played at night or during the day, then 1. I would see it more, 2. It would more obviously be taking time away from other things he could be doing that would arguably be a much better use of time. And it's not like we're being productive lately at night, usually we're just watching TV together, but at least that's together and a joint activity.
I don't think women find a guy who plays video games in a limited way gross. It's that there are tons of guys who do it all the time, and clearly their actual life, physical health, social relationships, etc are suffering for it. Probably the only thing worse would be if their hobby was online gambling or OnlyFans.
I take your point about some of this maybe about social prestige and what hobbies are deemed classy or not. But that's just a layer on top. And I gotta tell you some of these arguments just sound a bit like an addict trying really hard to justify their beloved drug. 😉
So my advice to men who love video games and don't want to revolt women is that they should allocate the early morning for their gaming time.
>It's that there are tons of guys who do it all the time, and clearly their actual life, physical health, social relationships, etc are suffering for it. Probably the only thing worse would be if their hobby was online gambling or OnlyFans.
That's fair
>I gotta tell you some of these arguments just sound a bit like an addict trying really hard to justify their beloved drug. 😉
I went cold turkey on gaming in my early 20s, and did barely any for perhaps 5 or 10 years. I tried again in my 30s, found it less addictive, and I do think it adds something valuable to my life that I don't get from just browsing the internet (or at least, it's about as good as browsing the internet). In fact, at my age I'm more often trying to get myself addicted to some game rather than trying to de-addict myself. Recently I suggested to my roommate that he play a game instead of doomscrolling, and he said something like "that felt like curing a vitamin deficiency I didn't know I had". My brother is the same as me, he says he always tries to move away from social media and do gaming instead because it's a better way to relax.
I'm not trying to present a totally balanced case here. If you asked me for the case *against* gaming, maybe I'd be able to come up with some good arguments in the other direction too. It's just far from obvious to me that it's a bad hobby, as hobbies go. Or even that we should put serious effort into optimizing our hobbies, beyond ensuring that they aren't self-destructive. And I don't like feeling judged when I'm trying to decompress.
>So my advice to men who love video games and don't want to revolt women is that they should allocate the early morning for their gaming time.
Eh, IMO it's better to use the early morning to be productive. Once you fall off the wagon it can be hard to get back on. Morning is for dopamine detox.
I think the simplest explanation unfortunately is that a LOT of human activity is different ways to more or less intentionally waste each other's attention, and one can get overpowered results by simply not getting trolled by this in some important domain.
If we swap video games out for chess, do you feel the same way? If not, I feel like that's a strong indication that cultural cachet plays a bigger role in this than most people want to admit. Personally, I find the view that every hobby has to be for something "productive" to be kinda off-putting, especially since most hobbies are quite dumb if you break them down with a cost-benefit analysis. The point is your own enjoyment and growth, not what your hobby can do for you. Otherwise, why have a hobby at all? You could just do more work, which would be way more productive
How many people spend 20+ hours a week playing online chess with complete strangers? Far fewer than play video games for that long. Chess is not a dopamine trap like video games, and generally those who play it don't spend endless hours doing so, unless they are doing it professionally.
I'm really not a good person to ask about my general opinion of hobbies, because I'm somewhat of a hobby disrespecter in general, even though I have them now. Most of my life, my only real "hobbies" were just 1. Hanging out with friends, and 2. Reading, which were not simply for sheer enjoyment and looking back I think they were good uses of time, though I somewhat wish I did a sport. But it entirely disgusted and upset my parents, and often boyfriends, that I had no hobbies. It was deemed slackerly and loser-y. Now I have hobbies, which other people respect for some reason, and I kind of regret them bc actually they are huge wastes of time and money and erode my social relationships. AND are not even enjoyable...more like a compulsion or addiction...I feel like I have to do them, I get upset if I can't do them, yet they do not actually bring me joy.
All that is to say that yes there's an aspect that's about prestige or social status and ideas of worth. But also for me I kind of think most hobbies that aren't either physically active or very social are probably mostly wastes of time/money. I would include music and many of the arts in the social category btw. And many of them are more addictive or have an OCD compulsive aspect than even necessarily being enjoyable.
I suppose my brother's family and friends making fun of him for his video game addiction is not really much different than the way they make fun of my dad for his Facebook addiction, though my dad is an old man who can't do much, so who's going to tell him he shouldn't enjoy himself.
Chess isn't a good example for me bc I associate it with very snotty and probably egotistical men who are not very nice people. So no I'm not impressed by chess. If I think of the hobbies that seem the most attractive in a man they are probably going to be things that involve an element of physical activity and hopefully a social element as well.
I agree there are big differences in quality between different games and types of games. I haven't played Roller Coaster Tycoon but broadly my impression is that it's in a category of simulator games that provide a simplified template for deliberative reasoning within some domain, which rewards some investment with insights and skills that can be applied out of game. Seeking mastery at such games, however, starts to become about exploiting the simplified game mechanics in ways that might improve some sorts of formal reasoning but don't benefit from the simulation aspect of the game. Some physical tasks like tai chi or carpentry don't have this problem, I think. Games like Kerbal Space Program, Minecraft, and Factorio are supposed to be munchkined so they might not suffer from this problem either.
Can you give examples of out-of-game situations you navigated better due to playing Roller Coaster Tycoon or Civilization? I feel as though I learned some things about semilegal fealty relations by playing Crusader Kings II for a bit, which are an important thing to understand, but couldn't give a clear example where it helped me in practice.
The social aspect of games can be very good - I vaguely recall something by Patrick McKenzie about cofounders finding each other through games, but can't find it at the moment - but most people don't seem to extent their in-game connections to out-of-game applications.
I don't think video games in general are a best-in-class relaxation practice, as they tend to help relax one by distraction instead of clearer deescalation, so they're more like doomscrolling than like a hot bath. There might be many games that require full attention and can flush crud out of short-term memory that way, though, but if you tolerate skilled exercise well it seems almost strictly better for that, and if not, meditation seems better if tolerated, and if you don't tolerate either, something's direly wrong with your health which might justify disgust if you're not trying to fix the problem.
Likewise, "ward off dementia" is such a ridiculously low bar for how one spends one's time that while it may actually be better than the alternatives, this says something very bad about the situation in which the alternatives fail to even ward off dementia, rather than something very good about video games.
On the other hand I think you're underrating the potential of playing an instrument. Friends can bond by playing together, you can bond better with children if you make your own music to soothe or excite them, and it's a natural way to start them learning some of the physics of sound, the origins of the materials involved in producing the instrument, etc, in a way that playing a recording isn't, especially a digital one.
I agree with all this. Also, I don't think someone who plays candy crush all day rather than a complex problem solving game are less perverse, I just think they're probably kind of dumb and easily entertained. There's a sense in which spending a lot of time on the more complex games is actually WORSE and more grotesque because it implies someone who is probably smart, and this they are wasting more talent by driving their energies towards entertainment than a dumb person.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with the Zelda games and spent a lot of time playing them and would've argued how that made me superior to someone who liked simple games that don't include problem solving. As an adult I became obsessed with climbing because it was a physical activity that also involves problem solving. Then gardening for the same reason...it's figuring out how each plant works and what it needs that interests me. The difference is that my parents very much looked down on the video game playing, while they're happy about the climbing and landscaping. Because the latter two make me physically healthy and the last at least beautifies the world, and both get me out of the house and interacting with people in real life. The first one just involves sitting there like a sedentary lump and literally twiddling your thumbs.
Funny, I knew someone in the SF Bay Area who'd previously held down a software engineer job at Amazon and done some well-regarded public writing, who played Candy Crush as a palliative for their anxiety. They also played more complex computer games.
If I had a local friend into gardening I'd try to get them interested in showing my children what they're doing, which would be both a way to help my children befriend a competent adult, and a way to teach them some things about plants and work, which are important features of the world. I'd also ask for their advice for my tiny window herb garden in my one south-facing window, and getting advice from someone is also a way to build a higher-trust relationship.
When I lived in circumstances that let me maintain a bigger balcony herb garden and forage some edible flowers growing on a tree overhanging my balcony, I worked out a labor-minimizing drip irrigation system partly as a way to practice building physical systems of production, and in addition to affording me cheap fresh herbs for cooking, this let me give some gifts that were relatively hard to reproduce by others.
I certainly fiddle endlessly with improving and perfecting my drip system! 😊
And you're right, that was rude of my to call Candy Crush lovers dumb. My husband likes to play dumb phone games to relax. And I don't really get it bc they don't interest me, but he also does not particularly like my Substack addiction, so I shouldn't talk shit.
"Can you give examples of out-of-game situations you navigated better due to playing Roller Coaster Tycoon or Civilization?"
Probably not. But if you asked me about a random book I read or class I took, I don't think I could tell you much about what I learned or how it was useful. Yet playing games, reading books, and taking classes have changed me a lot in the aggregate.
"I don't think video games in general are a best-in-class relaxation practice, as they tend to help relax one by distraction instead of clearer deescalation, so they're more like doomscrolling than like a hot bath."
Doomscrolling is bad because it gets you thinking about stressful real life stuff. Even in a hot bath, there's a good chance you'll keep thinking about your problems. I used to go on walks a lot to relax, and I'd always end up thinking about my life on the walk. Playing a game actually gave me a break from thinking about things that were stressing me out. Doomscrolling / hot bath is not as good for that.
I don't tolerate either meditation or exercise, but I'm putting a ton of effort into fixing my health. Also those aren't activities that you can do for more than an hour or so per day each. And I personally suspect the risks of meditation are underrated.
I put hundreds of hours into playing music and never got any of the benefits you describe.
I could tell you dozens upon dozens of valuable lessons and insights I've gotten out of a book. I can't recall a single significant moment from playing video games. You can justify it all you want, but it's empty calories.
Maybe you played the wrong games? I can think of several examples. For example, playing business simulators as a child helped me understand the basics of how a business works but also more importantly the meta lesson that's running a business is in fact really hard, and manually managing or micromanaging resources doesn't scale. This later had an impact on my political views, versus people who I think did not have that experience such as those on the left who frequently seem to imagine that running a business or creating one is extremely easy and basically just a sinecure.
One could also argue that the knowledge gain from games is tacit / hard to verbalize. It’s not a verbal format, after all. Would you expect solving a book of logic puzzles to produce dozens of valuable lessons? Could it nonetheless be valuable?
I think if you never got any of the benefits I describe from music, then the interaction of your social context and social aptitudes is one where music is just not that beneficial, so it was reasonable of you to give it up. However, that also seems like a bad sign about your situation rather than about music per se. In my experience (and the experience of my friends) in the US, Latin Americans are more likely to make music together outside a formal professional or educational context.
Yeah now that I think about it, I guess I did play music with friends on a few occasions. Usually it just sounded like a cacaphony though.
I think there's a philosophical difference between you and I. I tend to view spending time in terms of the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your time spent (the "critical few" activities) delivers 80% of the value. So for me, the focus is on improving my ability to work on those "critical few" items (in my case, improving my health) rather than upgrade a break activity from e.g. "useless" to "a tiny bit useful". I've tried to optimize the usefulness of my breaks in the past, and I'll probably try again in the future, but it seems like doing that tends to turn them into work, and makes them more energy-depleting. The most important thing, in my view, is for a break activity to be energy-restorative, so it buys me a little bit of additional time to do whatever work is most important to me. Generally, trying to pursue beneficial side effects when I take breaks hasn't worked out super well.
Actually one thing I've been doing which has worked OK is to have a "weekend projects" list, of non-urgent projects that aren't much like my usual "work". When the weekend comes, I look over the list, low/zero pressure, and if anything stands out as appealing, do that, otherwise do whatever I feel like doing. So basically a really gentle nudge to do something useful with my break time.
Seems very inconvenient not to be able to tolerate meditation OR exercise, I wish you good fortune fixing your health!
I suspect very gentle alignment-based practices like Feldenkrais, Tai Chi, or *some* very specific sorts of yoga could help you there IF you can find a skilled enough teacher (or in the case of Feldenkrais have good enough reading comprehension and patience to learn from his books), though obviously I don't know the details of your situation, which limits the precision of this unsolicited advice.
Apparently some women watch YouTube channels about families doing really normal family stuff. As a man I find that to be a very unattractive for some reason. I’m not totally sure why but it seems to be similar.
I guess I find it unappealing when women do something that is satisfying their desire to socialize and build community, but in a totally parasocial way.
I agree that video games present a meaningless fake world. Where we probably disagree is the relative meaningfulness and realness of the rest of modern life.
The thought experiment that proves this is - if men watched TV alone for 10 hours/week, I think women would see this as just as lame. Watching too much sports is viewed suspiciously for this reason. Women who used to watch soaps or whatever for 10 hours/week were also see as lame by men.
Other hobbies, or even just going out with friends, involve some about of get-up-and-go, and make someone more useful, skilled or interesting. Video games generally don't
Gaming has its issues, but I don’t think this is accurate. Video games often exercise planning, grit, learning, and various other positive skills. There are numerous anecdotes about World of Warcraft parties being good experience for work situations. Watching sports is definitely less useful. Reading can also be more escapist than educational. Don’t even get me started on TV. So this seems off target to me.
> [competency] being channeled into status systems that women consider illegitimate
Wow, flip that around and it describes my main gripe with women remarkably well. Could this be the root of the gender wars? Men and women both viewing each others’ status systems as illegitimate.
This is it. Closest equivalent for men is maybe astrology or other woo woo shit women tend to get into? Men love to mock it and it’s channeling their effort and mental capital into things that a lot of men consider wholesale nonsense.
Multi-level marketing schemes is another. And probably reality TV, which has replaced soap operas as the stupid thing women consume that straight men cannot understand. Though I have been told reality TV is just background noise or filler for the girls to babble about while drinking wine. Which leads to another negative about gaming: it is almost always done alone. It requires too much focus to be done with others. LAN parties haven't been a thing for like 20 years. If you want to play with others you have to put on a headset, further tuning out the world around you.
That’s absolutely it. You’ve nailed it. For instance, I love to watch my husband building a model rocket for sheer enjoyment. Or play the piano. Or any number of things that he really enjoys doing. I love to see him enjoying himself and relaxing.
Thank God he takes no interest in gaming, because gaming actually does repulse me.
The things he does in leisure, though, genuinely have value. The rocket stuff hones all kinds of mathematical skills and he delights in getting kids interested in model rocketry which helps them learn valuable things in a fun way. Likewise with the piano. There’s great value in those things.
That's funny, because I think many could argue that neither hobby has any value versus gaming which does at least have the potential to teach various useful lessons. After all, model rocketry does not actually teach you anything about mathematics that you could not learn just by reading about rockets in a book.
I think the counterpart might be the "crazy cat lady" stereotype. After all, cats aren't kids, so this is a misalignment of nurturing instincts, and it's definitely viewed negatively.
I kind of have the intuition myself. If a man I was dating was really into computer games- I mean 20+ per week on average over the year- I would find that offputting. There's a synthesis between concern about childishness and concern about ambition sinks. The child displaces their ambition to the world of imaginal play but the adult doesn't. The man who wants to play as a superhero too much is unattractive for exactly the opposite reason that a real superhero would be attractive. A little play shows imagination. Too much play as a hero is an abdication of the attempt to actually be a superhero - even if we can only manage a very limited version of that.
I considered something like this, but never fully resolved my thoughts about it. The analogy that springs to mind for me is fantasy novels, which are similarly escapist/imaginary. I think fantasy novels were considered unserious/YA for a long time, so that aligns with your theory, but would reading fantasy novels be icky and juvenile now or repulsive in the same way video games are? Are more fantastical video games more icky than realistic FPS games? Or, similarly, is playing tabletop RPGs even grosser than video games because they're more openly vicarious/imaginative? Maybe you're right and the ickiness simultaneously varies with the time investment as well.
It’s a reasonable enough thought experiment, but you’d have to word surveys pretty carefully to get at the real differences. My unproven (yet, until that survey exists) hunch is that if you say “man who plays video games” the mental image the listener gets is somebody playing CoD for 20+ hours/week yelling into a headset (which is even approximately the image you painted in your article here), not somebody spending a somewhat smaller amount of time on a quieter or less competitive variation on this.
But “a man who reads” might be distinct from “a man who reads mostly speculative fiction [scifi/fantasy]” which is also distinct from “a man who spends 20+ hours per week, on average, reading various things as a hobby.” How is this sort of hobby typically portrayed in questionnaires that illustrate a preference against men who play video games?
(Given that the most popular fantasy novelists each publish maybe 60 hours’ worth of reading material per year, is it even plausible that someone who’s not a professional literary critic would do this?)
There are 168 hours in a week. Suppose you sleep 8 hours a night, that's 56 hours of sleep. And you work 40 hours. That leaves 168-56-40 = 72 hours for leisure. You want your man to spend 52+ hours per week on additional work to prove how ambitious he is to you, working 90+ hour weeks, and keep his leisure gaming below 20 hours a week?
I don't see why computer gaming should be seen as different from other hobbies like playing an instrument, playing pool, playing chess, painting, woodworking, etc. It's inexpensive, it's safe, it provides an escape, and it's actually optimized to be fun, which makes it more rejuvenating on a per-minute basis. Faster, more efficient rejuvenation means more energy for the stuff that matters.
My happiness is notably better when I play games instead of argue on Substack. I'm always trying to drag myself away from social media and get myself to play games instead. It also helps me stay in touch with my relatives, since we can game together remotely, therebye enriching my social life.
I think children do this because their options for exploration are limited, partly because of their limited capacity and experience (often thinking about how you might do something high-stakes is a good idea before you start doing it for real), but partly because adults coordinate to limit their options. This problem seems to be getting worse over time as our richer society can afford more of it, and leaves learned-helplessness scars on the souls of the adults it eventually produces. The scarring is often unattractive. On the other hand, if you have too *little* learned helplessness you can scare and offend a lot of people just by existing around them.
I think one under-discussed reason may be beliefs about guys that play video games. It’s not actually the video games that are bad…but it’s the association with lack of hygiene, poorly dressed, weird guy from high school that was unattractive for a bunch of reasons. AND if your only interactions with video games were guys like that, it’s more natural you can find it repulsive.
Here’s a more concrete example to drive this home: anime. Is anime bad? Uninteresting? Boring? Not really. But if you’re a girl and the only people you knew in high school that watched anime were….those guys, you will probably find the behavior repulsive. Even if the guy you’re dating is a chiseled Adonis, you’d find the fact that the only thing he watches is anime to be an extremely off putting fact.
This is a sensible theory, but it's surprising to me that video games would still be perceived like that given how mainstream they are. Something like anime is much more niche still, I think.
So, as a woman who married a man who not only plays games but actually models game characters for a living, I can’t shed much light on ‘why women despise gaming’, since I personally don’t. I don’t even think that ‘games don’t improve anything’, there is definitely a sort of reflex/ strategy/ problem solving that might get enhanced by games. But beyond that, I don’t think all our hobbies need to be bettering us as people.
One thing I will say is - games take for-fucking-ever. Not just when men play them. It is an incredibly moreish activity, they’re created in such a way as to be psychologically difficult to put down, and thus it is extremely easy to sink inordinate amounts of time into that.
In our family it’s me rather than my husband who is given to overindulgence in gaming, but if roles were reversed I do understand how it might be frustrating to have a partner who is willing to pour 11 hours into replaying one boss fight (and probably getting increasingly irritated too, with each subsequent failure), but is probably not willing to invest equivalent amounts of time and effort into…. probably pretty much anything?
That’s why the author struck gold when he said that the feminine equivalent is social media
They’re basically the same thing, men play war games, women play status games. We are both stuck in time sink simulacra, and both of our real lives suffer for that poor replacement of the real thing
I have two anecdotal examples that I think might help. I play a lot of video games in my free time, and I've only dated one woman who expressed unhappiness about it. She never understood video games and considered them a waste of time, but treated them basically the same way I treated her reality tv shows. Just a dumb time waster. But when our relationship started falling apart (due to unrelated reasons) I became more and more depressed, and spent more time on video games. The more I shut down and pulled away, the more she hated seeing me playing video games.
A good friend of mine has complained to me repeatedly about dating men who play video games, and seems to viscerally dislike them. But when we discussed why she hated them, turns out it had nothing to do with video games themselves but was all about how the men she dated valued their video game time higher than their time with her. Men would invite her over to hang out, only when she arrived they would be playing an online game and wouldn't stop it for her. Boyfriends would get upset or mad if she asked them to turn down the volume so she could study for exams, or if she asked them to spend time with her.
I think the commonality for both of the above women is not that video games were inherently bad, but they were an obvious behavior masking a more important insecurity. For my ex, the issue was not me playing video games but the fact I was emotionally shutting down. She was losing the man she loved in real time, and had no idea how to stop it. The video games weren't the root issue, but since we were in our 20s in our first real relationship and didn't know how to communicate, she didn't know how to break through to me. So she lashed out at the thing I was spending my time doing instead of fixing our relationship.
For my friend, the issue is that these men she dated consistently valued their own time more than they valued hers. She went to their houses to spend time with them, she liked them and wanted to enjoy their company. That's the whole point of dating someone right? Theoretically they're a person you love/want/desire/enjoy enough to sign up for a relationship. However when she would go over to spend time with them, they would rather play video games. That was the part she hated, that these men who would claim to care for her would be happy to ignore her and her needs for what she saw as a literal waste of time.
I think there's merit to the argument that women don't respect video games as a productive activity, whether its because there's no real status achievement or because the trained skills are invisible or whatever is besides the point. But that's not the real issue, there's tons of male dominated hobbies out there that cause women to roll their eyes (model trains, larping, anything frat boys thought was fun in college). The issue is that video games are ubiquitous, think of women back in the day complaining about their husbands sitting on the couch watching football for hours. Its not that football is the problem, its that men would prefer to watch football/play video games then spend time with the woman they're with. The problem is not video games, the problem is that men often do not pull their weight in the relationship in terms of making their partner feel appreciated. Anecdotally most of my friends are gamers, several of whom with long term, serious romantic partners who don't mind the video games. What I've noticed about their relationships is that their partner always comes first; video games for them are the thing they do after they've helped around the house, spent time with their partner, and generally acted like a good boyfriend/husband. Hatred of video games is really a hatred of feeling ignored or minimized by your partner, video games are just the ubiquitous activity a lot of bad partners spend their free time doing instead.
This is 100% it. I used to work with some women who called themselves “golf widows”, because their husbands spent most of their non-work time golfing. They just couldn’t count on these guys to be around while the sun was up.
The only thing unique about video games as a hobby is that you can do it without leaving the house and without getting a group of friends together. So you’re still PHYSICALLY there with your partner/spouse/kids, but it’s still obvious to everyone that you care more about the game than about them.
My GenX hindbrain says 'duh, it's nerdy, and women hate nerds', but maybe that's obsolete.
It does make sense there's no real parallel on the other side. Women are acutely sensitive to mate character; men are heavily driven by looks, particularly for short-term flings. If she's cute enough, most of us don't care what she's into.
One female interest you didn't mention is 'woo' or alternative spirituality. Men are pretty contemptuous of that quite often.
I wonder how much it depends on if the women play video games. My wife spends about 3 times as many hours playing video games a week as I do, and the time I spend I’m usually playing at the same time as her or with her.
Agree: I would expect the woman playing video games to indicate either a muted gaming-ickiness reflex or the ability to override it. It'd be pretty crumby if your wife plays more and still judges you unfavorably. Maybe she will think you suck at video games and makes fun of you for that, but that's probably fine.
Generally speaking, I've never been with a woman who has ever been 100% satisfied with how I spend my "leisure" time. And I'm not sure I would want to be. From my days of excess and drugs and alcohol and music playing and record collecting to my extreme workaholic 70 hour work weeks punctuated by large social gatherings and staying out until 4AM, I feel that there were always legit gripes to my behaviors. Some of them were more valuable than others, of course. And I weighed them against how much I valued those relationships. As I've grown older I've considered their validity and taken critique onboard where possible. But even now as a domesticated male who cooks 7 nights a week and cleans and does the dishes and generally everything else considered "womans work" my woman still criticizes me. And a lot of the time, she's right.
Playing video games is probably viewed as a cheeto-dusted dried cum sock, incel fatso activity because even if you are the Bobby Fisher of Helldivers nobody outside of your immediate lost boys teamchat is remotely impressed. It's a leisure activity that encourages a sort of anonymous mediocrity that looks worse against the less money you make at your job and are able to actually contribute to a real life partnership. Because the time you have away from whatever you do during the work week can and should be spent doing actual activities like maybe having sex, or even just laying around in bed and talking with your woman, or taking a walk or maybe doing something around the house or the yard, going to church if you go. Spend your time working on yourself so you can give a better version of yourself to your partner, the community, your peers, this country, the world. You probably get it by now.
I feel like the missing link here is just that video games are stigmatized in general (at least when adults are playing them). It's not something specific to women or mate selection - it's just that many people who don't play video games find it offputting if someone does. Women are just following the cues of broader society when they feel repulsed by men playing video games. If you want to talk about it in more strategy-based terms (though I'm not sure this revulsion is a rational strategy, rather than just a by-product of heuristics useful in other situations), they could also be selecting for men with higher social status because video games, due to the stigma, confer lower status.
So the real question, I think, is not, "Why are women repulsed by video games?", but, "Why are video games socially stigmatized?" I don't know the exact reasons, but I can think of a few:
- Video games are a newer hobby relative to most others. New hobbies tend to be more stigmatized, but the stigma lessens over time. The mystery novels example you gave illustrates this: Reading them was once seen as suspect, but is now perfectly socially acceptable and probably even seen as a positive. Also, keep in mind that society's views on what is and isn't acceptable are still influenced by older generations, and even younger generations are not immune from this influence. Gaming is definitely not mainstream among older generations (that's a big difference between gaming and social media, which has been adopted by many older adults), so it makes sense that they would see it as weird, and they could influence younger people to see it as weird too.
- Video games are not as mainstream as a lot of other hobbies. Yes, they are popular and getting more popular over time, but they are still thought of as a niche thing by most people, and the wider culture isn't as aware them as it is of other forms of entertainment like movies and TV shows. Also, a lot of the data that shows that video games are becoming more mainstream is at least partially due to things like playing puzzle games on your phone becoming more common. But those aren't the types of games that are stigmatized, and they're not the prototype that comes up in someone's mind when they think of a guy playing video games, so this doesn't do anything to reduce stigma against the latter.
- Video games are usually played alone (even when you're playing with online friends, people still don't think of that the same way as being together in person), so they are seen as antisocial.
- There are a lot of stereotypes about people who play video games, and they're all negative. They're fat, unhygenic, lazy, antisocial, live in their mother's basement, creepy, and maybe even racist incels. How did all these stereotypes develop? A lot of these are just general nerd stereotypes that have been around for a long time and used to be applied to other pop-cultural phenomena that have since become too mainstream for the stereotypes to stick. And gamers surely are disproportionately nerdy, even if not all of them are. This was even more true in the earlier days of gaming when the stereotypes developed. The racist incels one is because of actual events like Gamergate. The antisocial one, in addition to being a general nerd stereotype, is explained by the above bullet point. Many of these stereotypes are also connected to laziness, and someone spending all their time on a leisure activity that doesn't accomplish anything in the real world is seen as lazy. And of course, all of these stereotypes really do apply to some gamers, which allows them to stick.
- Hobbies like sports and craftsmanship are seen as traditionally masculine things. And they at least have the appearance of being connected to useful things - sports are related to physical fitness, and craftmanship to being able to fix or make things. Even if a man's interest in them isn't actually being put towards a useful purpose (e.g., a man watching sports all day isn't doing anything useful), the fact that they are at least connected to something obviously practical (and attractive to women, as fitness and craftsmanship are), makes them more acceptable.
Another possibility: Everyone is attracted to people with similar interests as them. Therefore, any hobby that is more common among men than women is going to be unattractive to women, all else being equal, unless there is something specific about the hobby that makes it attractive to women anyway. Sports and handiwork have such features (see the last bullet point above), so they don't count as counterexamples. But video games don't.
Any time a taken man is doing something that isn’t immediately beneficial to his spouse, he must immediately cease this thing and instead start doing something to her benefit.
This is the baseline assumption in a relationship. The bargain is that she is “always doing something that benefits us.” That “us” is of course really just “her” recapitulated to sound less selfish, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Nothing is more obviously of no benefit to her than playing video games. It both accomplishes nothing tangible and has the terrible side benefit of increasing HIS happiness instead of hers. That 1-2 combo is completely unacceptable in a modern context. At least in times past when he went hunting with the boys, there was the potential he’d return with meat.
This is a perfect example of someone who should shift some time from writing to reading. Women may or may not agree with men on the appropriate amount of leisure time. But much more salient to the discussion is how much leisure time men and women actually have, on average. But this author would need to read to know there's a difference which might be salient.
Agreed. Where are the easily available stats on time use?
The long-winded run down of explanations was unnecessary. I think you're right that it's differences wrt leisure time, and the obvious fact that it yields nothing productive or pro-social.
I came here for a takedown of video games, and was not expecting the gender war spin. Am I girlyman because I don't like soft men in soft pants sitting on soft furniture staring at screens all the time?
Isn't commenting on Substack also an example of sitting on soft furniture staring at screens? (Most gamers don't play games "all the time"...that's just a stereotype. And social media or arguing online can be equally as addictive as gaming, so gaming is not unique in that way.) I think it's weird that those who publicly decry male gamers for being "soft" and for staring at screens are usually sharing their opinion through social media...while staring at a screen. They seem to have the attitude that "it's okay when *I* stare at a screen, but it's not okay when YOU do it, because I've predetermined that you're a loser."
I don't think gamers are losers, I am just kind of sad that they have won. As for Substack being the same thing, I don't see it that way. I am talking to Kyle as if we were in the same room together, I am a human interacting with another human. A dude playing a video game is interacting with software, it's a closed loop. Yeah I know gamers now wear headsets and bark at each other, but still, it's social interaction where everyone is paying attention to programmed entertainment. Maybe my position is more, "I don't like this" rather than "this is objectively bad," but either way, the image of a young man sitting on a couch for hours with a controller in his hands on a sunny day fills me with contempt...especially if that means he is ignoring his girlfriend. Maybe I'm just a sore loser, that's entirely possible. Now I will return my attention to a book and a dog : )
One could make the argument that people talking to each other on Substack is also social interaction where everyone is paying attention to programmed entertainment. (And plenty of people bark at each other on social media and get unearned feelings of achievement, just like they do in video games.) You could also make the argument that gaming with your buddies is more akin to playing a board game or playing poker with a group of friends. It all depends on how you look at it. Books are also a closed loop, just like solitary video games are. Instead of interacting with software, you're interacting with text. My point is that I think the way people choose to interpret these things usually has more to do with their preexisting emotional biases than it does with a dispassionate, objective appraisal of facts.
Observing my kid playing online with his friends I am constantly weirdly surprised at how wholesome a lot of their interactions are. And it has objectively become way harder for kids to just go outside and hang out - this is the society we have kinda made for them.
I’m on the millennial/zoomer cusp, born in ‘98. I’m a woman, and I find video games incredibly unattractive. In my case, I think it’s because I instinctively associate video games with neglect. They’re basically a solitary activity. Or, if you’re playing with other people, the focus isn’t on building relationships with those people, it’s just on winning the game. My father fairly frequently gave the impression that various things were more important than his children, and two notable examples were television and video games.
If a man was foregoing spending time with me in order to play video games, I would assume that I’m absolutely worthless to him.
I also remember being made fun of as an early teenager for being bad at video games (I was in some pretty nerdy circles for a time) so they just don’t register as being a fun activity to me. Unless it’s a simple arcade game like tetris, which I might play to pass time occasionally. So another issue with a partner playing video games would be that I don’t really want to play together, because I just don’t have positive associations with them in social settings.
So, if a partner was spending huge amounts of time playing video games, it would be an issue for me. But none of the categories listed here quite fit my experience
My bet is on the jealousy theory. Not sure if jealousy is the right way to describe it. It's just that male attention is critical for most women in relationships. But video games make it impossible to provide attention on demand.
Most popular games are based on some real time action, and it's hard to quit or pause if you're deeply focused in the middle of it, even if it's an offline game. And if it's an online game, you can't quit or pause at all - if you do, you lose or your character dies.
There might be an evolutionary reason for this. As noted, before the invention of video games, there was hardly anything as captivating for a man as the female body. So, this might be a revolutionary jealousy reflex: "He can't give me attention on demand, because he probably gives it to another woman".
This is neatly captured by the popular "He's probably thinking of other women" meme, where the guy is actually thinking of some nerdy stuff.
For me, it was the hypocrisy. My ex and I used to spend entire weekends playing Civ, and then he'd play first-person shooters all week, but then he would make fun of the cat for chasing a laser for five minutes. i was like dude, we have been chasing a laser for 48 hours without sleep, at least the cat got bored.
By extension, men will make fun of useless pursuits by women which they consider a waste of time, like fashion and makeup. But dude you have been chasing a laser all night, who are you to talk?
How exhausting.. no wonder fertility rates are collapsing. Men and women have never been more misaligned, and there’s plenty of pathetic behavior to go around, to blame it on. Pick your pet cause of the social decay, pick your pet scapegoat gender, there are like hundreds of plausible unique combinations of those two categories to go around. But I know I’d rather die alone than be henpecked like this, and I don’t even play video games. The transactional nature of modern dating is just.. death.
Also, I found this funny
“ 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.”
Evolutionary misfire? Once they marry you they’ve got a free meal ticket for life, especially if you put a baby in them, that’s a big check that never ends. I think a big part of the problem is that there seems to be no evolutionary pressure on women, at least not even remotely comparable to the one on men. They only stand to gain, and men will shop across and down, women only shop up.
The problem could be solved with some patriarchy, but it would hurt everyone’s feelings. You could probably solve it in other ways, but that would involve a lot more moving parts.
THE SILENT INSTRUMENT
Consider two scenarios:
Scenario A: Your partner spends 20 hours a week practicing an instrument that doesn't make sound, but demonstrates increasing technical mastery through a complex ranking system visible only to other silent-instrument enthusiasts.
Scenario B: Your partner spends 20 hours a week on an activity that could theoretically lead them to leave you, but currently just wastes time.
Which bothers you more?
If you're like most people, A feels uniquely maddening in a way B doesn't. This might explain the asymmetric reactions to gaming versus social media use between genders. As the article notes, even a professional athlete's wife - someone with essentially unlimited resources to outsource any neglected tasks - still hectors her husband about gaming. This suggests something deeper than mere opportunity cost or time waste is at play.
The "addiction" theory falls short - other addictive hobbies don't generate the same visceral disgust. The "jealousy over attention" theory seems plausible but doesn't explain why women don't react similarly to other absorbing male hobbies like fantasy football or car restoration. And while many write it off as just being "childish," this doesn't explain why women react more negatively to gaming than to other supposedly immature male pursuits.
What makes gaming special is that it demonstrates male capability for sustained, competitive, hierarchical achievement... being channeled into status systems that women consider illegitimate. It's not just time wasted, but visible proof of ambition misallocated. The Wodehouse reference illuminates this - his characters' leisure pursuits were socially embedded and status-generating within systems women valued. Even "wasteful" male hobbies like golf or social drinking historically served to build business relationships and social capital. They might trigger resentment over time spent, but not disgust, because they at least theoretically improved the man's career prospects or social standing in ways that could benefit his partner.
Modern gaming represents a pure sink of male achievement drive - effort poured into hierarchies that generate neither resources nor social capital that could serve the partnership. It's not just useless, but actively demonstrates a willingness to excel at something with zero partnership payoff.
This is why social media, while similarly "wasteful," doesn't trigger parallel male revulsion - it represents a potential threat of relationship defection, though not a betrayal of potential. A man might feel threatened by his partner posting thirst traps or maintaining a network of admiring followers, though expressing such concerns gets quickly labeled as controlling or abusive.
Watching a capable man spend his energy on purely virtual achievements feels like watching someone with the strength to hunt spending all day practicing spear-throwing at illusory deer. The visceral disgust might be an adaptive response saying "this person is demonstrating high capability but zero actual investment in things that matter."
This is it right here. There is no other activity that improves literally nothing about a man and instead wastes every achievement driven on a meaningless fake world. Almost everything else improves *something* for the investment of time ... his physical health, social relationships, musical ability or practical skills, character, knowledge, something. Video games are just taking energy and time meant for improving one's life and self and having adventures and investing it in a fake version for zero value. it's hard to think of a female equivalent but maybe it'd be if she spent 3 hours a day pushing buttons to watch a fake avatar of herself working out and becoming beautiful, while the real life version just got fatter and fatter.
I used to play an instrument (got some rave reviews on youtube even), but eventually I quit, in part because I realized that it just wasn't useful. I was never going to be a pro, and getting better was too much like work.
I don't think playing an instrument is useful. It just has cultural cachet. I think women tend to care about cultural cachet a lot, and come up with rationalizations for why it's important.
I think it really depends on the game re: whether it builds useful skill.
* Lots of games build hand-eye coordination or reflexes. (Would you object to pool or ping-pong as useless hobbies? There's that cultural cachet again...) Super Mario 64 has been shown to ward off dementia.
* Lots of games reward strategic thinking or ability to solve puzzles, training your ability to predict in advance how some formal or semi-formal system will work out, and identify creative strategies. There are games that have explicit or implicit themes around scientific discovery and engineering; see for example https://store.steampowered.com/app/367450/Poly_Bridge/
* Some games are very story-driven, so insofar as reading fiction improves intuition about people or what have you, those games would be expected to do the same.
* Other games are very social, giving you the opportunity to stay in touch with friends, or make new friends, or work out social complexities in a virtual environment.
* Some games can have significant educational content. When I was a kid, playing games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon gave me a decent sense of what it was like to run a business. Playing Civilization gave me a much better intuition for the broad sweep of history.
>Video games are just taking energy and time meant for improving one's life and self and having adventures and investing it in a fake version for zero value.
Video games are a relaxation activity. They renew energy rather than drain it. It's not healthy to spend every waking hour trying to improve one's life or have adventures or whatever. You'll burn yourself out that way. Sometimes the best way to disconnect is to immerse yourself and get totally lost in something different.
>it's hard to think of a female equivalent but maybe it'd be if she spent 3 hours a day pushing buttons to watch a fake avatar of herself working out and becoming beautiful, while the real life version just got fatter and fatter.
I'm beginning to suspect that your real objection is to RPGs in particular.
For me, a good game is not good just because a number on a screen is going up. A good game is good because it consistently generates interesting and diverse mental challenges. I enjoyed RPGs as a kid, but I've struggled to get into them as an adult. I just can't suspend my disbelief that way anymore, which is actually a bit of a tragedy if I'm being honest. There has to be some sort of interesting puzzle to draw me in to the story.
So yeah, hopefully we can develop a more fine-grained notion of cultural cachet which differentiates between different genres of computer game.
I spent several years of my life where basically all my leisure time was spent on video games, and I got very, very good and beat basically anyone I played against (though that means IRL, this was before people played multi-player online). I used to use exactly the same argument against my parents, that it built problem solving skills and hand eye coordination. Which is bullshit bc it doesn't build those things in a way that's useful for anything else. Yes it made my thumbs highly trained at operating the controller, but that didn't cross over to making me good at handwriting or sewing or playing a musical instrument. I also don't think that figuring out how to find the treasure or weapon or beat the next boss has any cross-over to real world problem solving skills.
The fact that parents have almost universally discouraged excessive video game playing by their kids is illustrative here...they don't like it for exactly the same reason women don't, which is that it's not a use of leisure time that will accrue any increase in personal/social capital in the real world. These same parents generally DO want their kids to participate in real world leisure activities like sports or music, and in fact spend good money on trying to get their kids into them. Sports and music can help get a scholarship and are generally social activities that involve interacting with people and an element of competition which build social reflexes and skills useful for life. The socializing that occurs with disembodied strangers you play online with doesn't.
I get it that all hobbies are somewhat a poor use of time. I've developed an obsession with landscaping/gardening that I somewhat really regret. It has degraded my social relationships and wasted my money. But at least it's physical activity and gets me outside. So while I think it's been more bad than good, it's not as bad as video games which I think are uniquely bad. Even just reading novels, while escapism, will likely make you a proficient reader and writer, which is a skill that's useful with broader application. Video games do not create any improvement or skill useful outside the video game.
But yes, anything involving an avatar does have a particularly gross flavor to it, whether that's video games or online role playing/second life/sims, etc, because it directly means the person is taking energies and drives meant to improve their own life and wasting them on an easier and more enjoyable fantasy version, which seems uniquely perverse and bad for them individually. Other hobbies have some measure of the same aspect, but it's not as smack you in the face obvious and there's usually at least one social or physical benefit.
>that didn't cross over to making me good at handwriting or sewing or playing a musical instrument.
None of those involve an element of reflexes / fast communication between brain hemispheres / etc. (And none of them are particularly useful either, nor do they significantly cross-train each other?) It's plausible to me that gaming made you better at e.g. catching something you dropped. And having good reflexes can be a matter of life and death in certain circumstances.
>I also don't think that figuring out how to find the treasure or weapon or beat the next boss has any cross-over to real world problem solving skills.
I mean, kids complain in math/science class that they're never going to use any of this stuff. I think the amount of crossover is typically similar for most people, between gaming vs science class. Unless your job makes use of the specific science you're learning, studying science just boosts general problem-solving skills, which gaming does too. And typical people are going to be bored in science class and not engage very deeply, but games can be very engaging in a way that actually helps internalize the problem-solving boost.
When I was a kid, my dad would buy books of brainteasers and puzzles for us to solve, as an enrichment activity. Gaming feels quite similar to those books of brainteasers in a lot of ways.
>Sports and music can help get a scholarship
I think universities have e-sports teams now? In any case, I'm not about to apply for any scholarships. Also, if we're prioritizing money, I'll bet your EV of dollars-per-hour earned is better by just working at a job. (That's the sort of insight you get from gaming btw.)
>The socializing that occurs with disembodied strangers you play online with doesn't.
I play with people in my family online. Also, I think socializing with disembodied strangers is not a terrible use of time. It's a safer environment that lets you experiment more, vs hanging out with people you'll see again IRL.
>Even just reading novels, while escapism, will likely make you a proficient reader and writer, which is a skill that's useful with broader application.
I agree reading novels is good for kids. I think if you're already a proficient reader, it's not an especially good use of time. I'd go so far as to say that the underlying assumptions promulgated by novels, that you're a storybook protagonist and everything will be a nice morality tale with a happily ever after, are pretty harmful. That sort of thinking has been pretty harmful to me. I think the underlying assumptions of gaming (that it's generally safe to experiment/explore and try new things; that losing is very possible and depends on skill and risk-taking, but usually won't do long-term harm; that you can think about systems and identify ways to leverage them) are a much better fit for the real world.
>it directly means the person is taking energies and drives meant to improve their own life and wasting them on an easier and more enjoyable fantasy version
I actually disagree. I find that the energy and drive I spend in gaming actually *encourages* me to spend more energy and drive IRL. Imagine a sort of 2nd life career type of game where over the course of a few hours, you get to see the consequence of good and bad life decisions on winning or losing. That can be powerful motivation, to help you internalize that living your life in a deliberate and strategic way can bring major rewards. It can take years and years to learn that lesson if you never play games.
That said, I agree that not everyone engages with computer games this way. For me, there was a moment when I was a teenager where I was like: "I'm so strategic and achievement-oriented when playing games. Why can't I be that way IRL?" And I managed to internalize that insight, and it helped motivate me to live more strategically. But not everyone does that.
>The fact that parents have almost universally discouraged excessive video game playing by their kids is illustrative here
The "excessive" part is key. I think the best argument against gaming is that games can be very addictive, and problem gaming is common. Really, I've found this to be very game-specific. Some games cause me to stay up late. Others don't. The trick is just to pick the right games and apply a little self-discipline. (Specifically, the most dangerous games seem to have a sort of "multithreaded" nature where there's no good stopping point. Civilization would be the classic example.)
Well, that's funny because my husband plays Civilization. 😂😂 Which I don't have a problem with and am not grossed out by. But importantly, he only plays it early in the morning, before he starts his "real" day. Which I think helps quite a bit with both not becoming excessive or addictive. If he played at night or during the day, then 1. I would see it more, 2. It would more obviously be taking time away from other things he could be doing that would arguably be a much better use of time. And it's not like we're being productive lately at night, usually we're just watching TV together, but at least that's together and a joint activity.
I don't think women find a guy who plays video games in a limited way gross. It's that there are tons of guys who do it all the time, and clearly their actual life, physical health, social relationships, etc are suffering for it. Probably the only thing worse would be if their hobby was online gambling or OnlyFans.
I take your point about some of this maybe about social prestige and what hobbies are deemed classy or not. But that's just a layer on top. And I gotta tell you some of these arguments just sound a bit like an addict trying really hard to justify their beloved drug. 😉
So my advice to men who love video games and don't want to revolt women is that they should allocate the early morning for their gaming time.
>It's that there are tons of guys who do it all the time, and clearly their actual life, physical health, social relationships, etc are suffering for it. Probably the only thing worse would be if their hobby was online gambling or OnlyFans.
That's fair
>I gotta tell you some of these arguments just sound a bit like an addict trying really hard to justify their beloved drug. 😉
I went cold turkey on gaming in my early 20s, and did barely any for perhaps 5 or 10 years. I tried again in my 30s, found it less addictive, and I do think it adds something valuable to my life that I don't get from just browsing the internet (or at least, it's about as good as browsing the internet). In fact, at my age I'm more often trying to get myself addicted to some game rather than trying to de-addict myself. Recently I suggested to my roommate that he play a game instead of doomscrolling, and he said something like "that felt like curing a vitamin deficiency I didn't know I had". My brother is the same as me, he says he always tries to move away from social media and do gaming instead because it's a better way to relax.
I'm not trying to present a totally balanced case here. If you asked me for the case *against* gaming, maybe I'd be able to come up with some good arguments in the other direction too. It's just far from obvious to me that it's a bad hobby, as hobbies go. Or even that we should put serious effort into optimizing our hobbies, beyond ensuring that they aren't self-destructive. And I don't like feeling judged when I'm trying to decompress.
>So my advice to men who love video games and don't want to revolt women is that they should allocate the early morning for their gaming time.
Eh, IMO it's better to use the early morning to be productive. Once you fall off the wagon it can be hard to get back on. Morning is for dopamine detox.
I think the simplest explanation unfortunately is that a LOT of human activity is different ways to more or less intentionally waste each other's attention, and one can get overpowered results by simply not getting trolled by this in some important domain.
If we swap video games out for chess, do you feel the same way? If not, I feel like that's a strong indication that cultural cachet plays a bigger role in this than most people want to admit. Personally, I find the view that every hobby has to be for something "productive" to be kinda off-putting, especially since most hobbies are quite dumb if you break them down with a cost-benefit analysis. The point is your own enjoyment and growth, not what your hobby can do for you. Otherwise, why have a hobby at all? You could just do more work, which would be way more productive
How many people spend 20+ hours a week playing online chess with complete strangers? Far fewer than play video games for that long. Chess is not a dopamine trap like video games, and generally those who play it don't spend endless hours doing so, unless they are doing it professionally.
I'm really not a good person to ask about my general opinion of hobbies, because I'm somewhat of a hobby disrespecter in general, even though I have them now. Most of my life, my only real "hobbies" were just 1. Hanging out with friends, and 2. Reading, which were not simply for sheer enjoyment and looking back I think they were good uses of time, though I somewhat wish I did a sport. But it entirely disgusted and upset my parents, and often boyfriends, that I had no hobbies. It was deemed slackerly and loser-y. Now I have hobbies, which other people respect for some reason, and I kind of regret them bc actually they are huge wastes of time and money and erode my social relationships. AND are not even enjoyable...more like a compulsion or addiction...I feel like I have to do them, I get upset if I can't do them, yet they do not actually bring me joy.
All that is to say that yes there's an aspect that's about prestige or social status and ideas of worth. But also for me I kind of think most hobbies that aren't either physically active or very social are probably mostly wastes of time/money. I would include music and many of the arts in the social category btw. And many of them are more addictive or have an OCD compulsive aspect than even necessarily being enjoyable.
I suppose my brother's family and friends making fun of him for his video game addiction is not really much different than the way they make fun of my dad for his Facebook addiction, though my dad is an old man who can't do much, so who's going to tell him he shouldn't enjoy himself.
Chess isn't a good example for me bc I associate it with very snotty and probably egotistical men who are not very nice people. So no I'm not impressed by chess. If I think of the hobbies that seem the most attractive in a man they are probably going to be things that involve an element of physical activity and hopefully a social element as well.
I agree there are big differences in quality between different games and types of games. I haven't played Roller Coaster Tycoon but broadly my impression is that it's in a category of simulator games that provide a simplified template for deliberative reasoning within some domain, which rewards some investment with insights and skills that can be applied out of game. Seeking mastery at such games, however, starts to become about exploiting the simplified game mechanics in ways that might improve some sorts of formal reasoning but don't benefit from the simulation aspect of the game. Some physical tasks like tai chi or carpentry don't have this problem, I think. Games like Kerbal Space Program, Minecraft, and Factorio are supposed to be munchkined so they might not suffer from this problem either.
Can you give examples of out-of-game situations you navigated better due to playing Roller Coaster Tycoon or Civilization? I feel as though I learned some things about semilegal fealty relations by playing Crusader Kings II for a bit, which are an important thing to understand, but couldn't give a clear example where it helped me in practice.
The social aspect of games can be very good - I vaguely recall something by Patrick McKenzie about cofounders finding each other through games, but can't find it at the moment - but most people don't seem to extent their in-game connections to out-of-game applications.
I don't think video games in general are a best-in-class relaxation practice, as they tend to help relax one by distraction instead of clearer deescalation, so they're more like doomscrolling than like a hot bath. There might be many games that require full attention and can flush crud out of short-term memory that way, though, but if you tolerate skilled exercise well it seems almost strictly better for that, and if not, meditation seems better if tolerated, and if you don't tolerate either, something's direly wrong with your health which might justify disgust if you're not trying to fix the problem.
Likewise, "ward off dementia" is such a ridiculously low bar for how one spends one's time that while it may actually be better than the alternatives, this says something very bad about the situation in which the alternatives fail to even ward off dementia, rather than something very good about video games.
On the other hand I think you're underrating the potential of playing an instrument. Friends can bond by playing together, you can bond better with children if you make your own music to soothe or excite them, and it's a natural way to start them learning some of the physics of sound, the origins of the materials involved in producing the instrument, etc, in a way that playing a recording isn't, especially a digital one.
I agree with all this. Also, I don't think someone who plays candy crush all day rather than a complex problem solving game are less perverse, I just think they're probably kind of dumb and easily entertained. There's a sense in which spending a lot of time on the more complex games is actually WORSE and more grotesque because it implies someone who is probably smart, and this they are wasting more talent by driving their energies towards entertainment than a dumb person.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with the Zelda games and spent a lot of time playing them and would've argued how that made me superior to someone who liked simple games that don't include problem solving. As an adult I became obsessed with climbing because it was a physical activity that also involves problem solving. Then gardening for the same reason...it's figuring out how each plant works and what it needs that interests me. The difference is that my parents very much looked down on the video game playing, while they're happy about the climbing and landscaping. Because the latter two make me physically healthy and the last at least beautifies the world, and both get me out of the house and interacting with people in real life. The first one just involves sitting there like a sedentary lump and literally twiddling your thumbs.
Funny, I knew someone in the SF Bay Area who'd previously held down a software engineer job at Amazon and done some well-regarded public writing, who played Candy Crush as a palliative for their anxiety. They also played more complex computer games.
If I had a local friend into gardening I'd try to get them interested in showing my children what they're doing, which would be both a way to help my children befriend a competent adult, and a way to teach them some things about plants and work, which are important features of the world. I'd also ask for their advice for my tiny window herb garden in my one south-facing window, and getting advice from someone is also a way to build a higher-trust relationship.
When I lived in circumstances that let me maintain a bigger balcony herb garden and forage some edible flowers growing on a tree overhanging my balcony, I worked out a labor-minimizing drip irrigation system partly as a way to practice building physical systems of production, and in addition to affording me cheap fresh herbs for cooking, this let me give some gifts that were relatively hard to reproduce by others.
I certainly fiddle endlessly with improving and perfecting my drip system! 😊
And you're right, that was rude of my to call Candy Crush lovers dumb. My husband likes to play dumb phone games to relax. And I don't really get it bc they don't interest me, but he also does not particularly like my Substack addiction, so I shouldn't talk shit.
"Can you give examples of out-of-game situations you navigated better due to playing Roller Coaster Tycoon or Civilization?"
Probably not. But if you asked me about a random book I read or class I took, I don't think I could tell you much about what I learned or how it was useful. Yet playing games, reading books, and taking classes have changed me a lot in the aggregate.
"I don't think video games in general are a best-in-class relaxation practice, as they tend to help relax one by distraction instead of clearer deescalation, so they're more like doomscrolling than like a hot bath."
Doomscrolling is bad because it gets you thinking about stressful real life stuff. Even in a hot bath, there's a good chance you'll keep thinking about your problems. I used to go on walks a lot to relax, and I'd always end up thinking about my life on the walk. Playing a game actually gave me a break from thinking about things that were stressing me out. Doomscrolling / hot bath is not as good for that.
I don't tolerate either meditation or exercise, but I'm putting a ton of effort into fixing my health. Also those aren't activities that you can do for more than an hour or so per day each. And I personally suspect the risks of meditation are underrated.
I put hundreds of hours into playing music and never got any of the benefits you describe.
I could tell you dozens upon dozens of valuable lessons and insights I've gotten out of a book. I can't recall a single significant moment from playing video games. You can justify it all you want, but it's empty calories.
Maybe you played the wrong games? I can think of several examples. For example, playing business simulators as a child helped me understand the basics of how a business works but also more importantly the meta lesson that's running a business is in fact really hard, and manually managing or micromanaging resources doesn't scale. This later had an impact on my political views, versus people who I think did not have that experience such as those on the left who frequently seem to imagine that running a business or creating one is extremely easy and basically just a sinecure.
One could also argue that the knowledge gain from games is tacit / hard to verbalize. It’s not a verbal format, after all. Would you expect solving a book of logic puzzles to produce dozens of valuable lessons? Could it nonetheless be valuable?
I think if you never got any of the benefits I describe from music, then the interaction of your social context and social aptitudes is one where music is just not that beneficial, so it was reasonable of you to give it up. However, that also seems like a bad sign about your situation rather than about music per se. In my experience (and the experience of my friends) in the US, Latin Americans are more likely to make music together outside a formal professional or educational context.
Yeah now that I think about it, I guess I did play music with friends on a few occasions. Usually it just sounded like a cacaphony though.
I think there's a philosophical difference between you and I. I tend to view spending time in terms of the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your time spent (the "critical few" activities) delivers 80% of the value. So for me, the focus is on improving my ability to work on those "critical few" items (in my case, improving my health) rather than upgrade a break activity from e.g. "useless" to "a tiny bit useful". I've tried to optimize the usefulness of my breaks in the past, and I'll probably try again in the future, but it seems like doing that tends to turn them into work, and makes them more energy-depleting. The most important thing, in my view, is for a break activity to be energy-restorative, so it buys me a little bit of additional time to do whatever work is most important to me. Generally, trying to pursue beneficial side effects when I take breaks hasn't worked out super well.
Actually one thing I've been doing which has worked OK is to have a "weekend projects" list, of non-urgent projects that aren't much like my usual "work". When the weekend comes, I look over the list, low/zero pressure, and if anything stands out as appealing, do that, otherwise do whatever I feel like doing. So basically a really gentle nudge to do something useful with my break time.
Seems very inconvenient not to be able to tolerate meditation OR exercise, I wish you good fortune fixing your health!
I suspect very gentle alignment-based practices like Feldenkrais, Tai Chi, or *some* very specific sorts of yoga could help you there IF you can find a skilled enough teacher (or in the case of Feldenkrais have good enough reading comprehension and patience to learn from his books), though obviously I don't know the details of your situation, which limits the precision of this unsolicited advice.
Apparently some women watch YouTube channels about families doing really normal family stuff. As a man I find that to be a very unattractive for some reason. I’m not totally sure why but it seems to be similar.
I guess I find it unappealing when women do something that is satisfying their desire to socialize and build community, but in a totally parasocial way.
“Meaningless fake world”
I agree that video games present a meaningless fake world. Where we probably disagree is the relative meaningfulness and realness of the rest of modern life.
Well, I hope you can see why that attitude wouldn't be that attractive to most women, at least when they're looking for a life partner.
Well said.
The thought experiment that proves this is - if men watched TV alone for 10 hours/week, I think women would see this as just as lame. Watching too much sports is viewed suspiciously for this reason. Women who used to watch soaps or whatever for 10 hours/week were also see as lame by men.
Other hobbies, or even just going out with friends, involve some about of get-up-and-go, and make someone more useful, skilled or interesting. Video games generally don't
Gaming has its issues, but I don’t think this is accurate. Video games often exercise planning, grit, learning, and various other positive skills. There are numerous anecdotes about World of Warcraft parties being good experience for work situations. Watching sports is definitely less useful. Reading can also be more escapist than educational. Don’t even get me started on TV. So this seems off target to me.
> [competency] being channeled into status systems that women consider illegitimate
Wow, flip that around and it describes my main gripe with women remarkably well. Could this be the root of the gender wars? Men and women both viewing each others’ status systems as illegitimate.
This is it. Closest equivalent for men is maybe astrology or other woo woo shit women tend to get into? Men love to mock it and it’s channeling their effort and mental capital into things that a lot of men consider wholesale nonsense.
Multi-level marketing schemes is another. And probably reality TV, which has replaced soap operas as the stupid thing women consume that straight men cannot understand. Though I have been told reality TV is just background noise or filler for the girls to babble about while drinking wine. Which leads to another negative about gaming: it is almost always done alone. It requires too much focus to be done with others. LAN parties haven't been a thing for like 20 years. If you want to play with others you have to put on a headset, further tuning out the world around you.
That’s absolutely it. You’ve nailed it. For instance, I love to watch my husband building a model rocket for sheer enjoyment. Or play the piano. Or any number of things that he really enjoys doing. I love to see him enjoying himself and relaxing.
Thank God he takes no interest in gaming, because gaming actually does repulse me.
The things he does in leisure, though, genuinely have value. The rocket stuff hones all kinds of mathematical skills and he delights in getting kids interested in model rocketry which helps them learn valuable things in a fun way. Likewise with the piano. There’s great value in those things.
I see zero value in gaming.
That's funny, because I think many could argue that neither hobby has any value versus gaming which does at least have the potential to teach various useful lessons. After all, model rocketry does not actually teach you anything about mathematics that you could not learn just by reading about rockets in a book.
Have you run simulations to see how your rocket design might perform in the field?
Check out the video game "Kerbal Space Program".
I think the counterpart might be the "crazy cat lady" stereotype. After all, cats aren't kids, so this is a misalignment of nurturing instincts, and it's definitely viewed negatively.
I kind of have the intuition myself. If a man I was dating was really into computer games- I mean 20+ per week on average over the year- I would find that offputting. There's a synthesis between concern about childishness and concern about ambition sinks. The child displaces their ambition to the world of imaginal play but the adult doesn't. The man who wants to play as a superhero too much is unattractive for exactly the opposite reason that a real superhero would be attractive. A little play shows imagination. Too much play as a hero is an abdication of the attempt to actually be a superhero - even if we can only manage a very limited version of that.
I considered something like this, but never fully resolved my thoughts about it. The analogy that springs to mind for me is fantasy novels, which are similarly escapist/imaginary. I think fantasy novels were considered unserious/YA for a long time, so that aligns with your theory, but would reading fantasy novels be icky and juvenile now or repulsive in the same way video games are? Are more fantastical video games more icky than realistic FPS games? Or, similarly, is playing tabletop RPGs even grosser than video games because they're more openly vicarious/imaginative? Maybe you're right and the ickiness simultaneously varies with the time investment as well.
It’s a reasonable enough thought experiment, but you’d have to word surveys pretty carefully to get at the real differences. My unproven (yet, until that survey exists) hunch is that if you say “man who plays video games” the mental image the listener gets is somebody playing CoD for 20+ hours/week yelling into a headset (which is even approximately the image you painted in your article here), not somebody spending a somewhat smaller amount of time on a quieter or less competitive variation on this.
But “a man who reads” might be distinct from “a man who reads mostly speculative fiction [scifi/fantasy]” which is also distinct from “a man who spends 20+ hours per week, on average, reading various things as a hobby.” How is this sort of hobby typically portrayed in questionnaires that illustrate a preference against men who play video games?
(Given that the most popular fantasy novelists each publish maybe 60 hours’ worth of reading material per year, is it even plausible that someone who’s not a professional literary critic would do this?)
There are 168 hours in a week. Suppose you sleep 8 hours a night, that's 56 hours of sleep. And you work 40 hours. That leaves 168-56-40 = 72 hours for leisure. You want your man to spend 52+ hours per week on additional work to prove how ambitious he is to you, working 90+ hour weeks, and keep his leisure gaming below 20 hours a week?
I don't see why computer gaming should be seen as different from other hobbies like playing an instrument, playing pool, playing chess, painting, woodworking, etc. It's inexpensive, it's safe, it provides an escape, and it's actually optimized to be fun, which makes it more rejuvenating on a per-minute basis. Faster, more efficient rejuvenation means more energy for the stuff that matters.
My happiness is notably better when I play games instead of argue on Substack. I'm always trying to drag myself away from social media and get myself to play games instead. It also helps me stay in touch with my relatives, since we can game together remotely, therebye enriching my social life.
Also if you're playing 20 hours of week of video games and have a job and children, you're doing a shit job at one, or probably both, of those tasks.
I think children do this because their options for exploration are limited, partly because of their limited capacity and experience (often thinking about how you might do something high-stakes is a good idea before you start doing it for real), but partly because adults coordinate to limit their options. This problem seems to be getting worse over time as our richer society can afford more of it, and leaves learned-helplessness scars on the souls of the adults it eventually produces. The scarring is often unattractive. On the other hand, if you have too *little* learned helplessness you can scare and offend a lot of people just by existing around them.
I think one under-discussed reason may be beliefs about guys that play video games. It’s not actually the video games that are bad…but it’s the association with lack of hygiene, poorly dressed, weird guy from high school that was unattractive for a bunch of reasons. AND if your only interactions with video games were guys like that, it’s more natural you can find it repulsive.
Here’s a more concrete example to drive this home: anime. Is anime bad? Uninteresting? Boring? Not really. But if you’re a girl and the only people you knew in high school that watched anime were….those guys, you will probably find the behavior repulsive. Even if the guy you’re dating is a chiseled Adonis, you’d find the fact that the only thing he watches is anime to be an extremely off putting fact.
This is a sensible theory, but it's surprising to me that video games would still be perceived like that given how mainstream they are. Something like anime is much more niche still, I think.
So, as a woman who married a man who not only plays games but actually models game characters for a living, I can’t shed much light on ‘why women despise gaming’, since I personally don’t. I don’t even think that ‘games don’t improve anything’, there is definitely a sort of reflex/ strategy/ problem solving that might get enhanced by games. But beyond that, I don’t think all our hobbies need to be bettering us as people.
One thing I will say is - games take for-fucking-ever. Not just when men play them. It is an incredibly moreish activity, they’re created in such a way as to be psychologically difficult to put down, and thus it is extremely easy to sink inordinate amounts of time into that.
In our family it’s me rather than my husband who is given to overindulgence in gaming, but if roles were reversed I do understand how it might be frustrating to have a partner who is willing to pour 11 hours into replaying one boss fight (and probably getting increasingly irritated too, with each subsequent failure), but is probably not willing to invest equivalent amounts of time and effort into…. probably pretty much anything?
That’s why the author struck gold when he said that the feminine equivalent is social media
They’re basically the same thing, men play war games, women play status games. We are both stuck in time sink simulacra, and both of our real lives suffer for that poor replacement of the real thing
Yep agreed. Both are hamster wheels.
I have two anecdotal examples that I think might help. I play a lot of video games in my free time, and I've only dated one woman who expressed unhappiness about it. She never understood video games and considered them a waste of time, but treated them basically the same way I treated her reality tv shows. Just a dumb time waster. But when our relationship started falling apart (due to unrelated reasons) I became more and more depressed, and spent more time on video games. The more I shut down and pulled away, the more she hated seeing me playing video games.
A good friend of mine has complained to me repeatedly about dating men who play video games, and seems to viscerally dislike them. But when we discussed why she hated them, turns out it had nothing to do with video games themselves but was all about how the men she dated valued their video game time higher than their time with her. Men would invite her over to hang out, only when she arrived they would be playing an online game and wouldn't stop it for her. Boyfriends would get upset or mad if she asked them to turn down the volume so she could study for exams, or if she asked them to spend time with her.
I think the commonality for both of the above women is not that video games were inherently bad, but they were an obvious behavior masking a more important insecurity. For my ex, the issue was not me playing video games but the fact I was emotionally shutting down. She was losing the man she loved in real time, and had no idea how to stop it. The video games weren't the root issue, but since we were in our 20s in our first real relationship and didn't know how to communicate, she didn't know how to break through to me. So she lashed out at the thing I was spending my time doing instead of fixing our relationship.
For my friend, the issue is that these men she dated consistently valued their own time more than they valued hers. She went to their houses to spend time with them, she liked them and wanted to enjoy their company. That's the whole point of dating someone right? Theoretically they're a person you love/want/desire/enjoy enough to sign up for a relationship. However when she would go over to spend time with them, they would rather play video games. That was the part she hated, that these men who would claim to care for her would be happy to ignore her and her needs for what she saw as a literal waste of time.
I think there's merit to the argument that women don't respect video games as a productive activity, whether its because there's no real status achievement or because the trained skills are invisible or whatever is besides the point. But that's not the real issue, there's tons of male dominated hobbies out there that cause women to roll their eyes (model trains, larping, anything frat boys thought was fun in college). The issue is that video games are ubiquitous, think of women back in the day complaining about their husbands sitting on the couch watching football for hours. Its not that football is the problem, its that men would prefer to watch football/play video games then spend time with the woman they're with. The problem is not video games, the problem is that men often do not pull their weight in the relationship in terms of making their partner feel appreciated. Anecdotally most of my friends are gamers, several of whom with long term, serious romantic partners who don't mind the video games. What I've noticed about their relationships is that their partner always comes first; video games for them are the thing they do after they've helped around the house, spent time with their partner, and generally acted like a good boyfriend/husband. Hatred of video games is really a hatred of feeling ignored or minimized by your partner, video games are just the ubiquitous activity a lot of bad partners spend their free time doing instead.
This is 100% it. I used to work with some women who called themselves “golf widows”, because their husbands spent most of their non-work time golfing. They just couldn’t count on these guys to be around while the sun was up.
The only thing unique about video games as a hobby is that you can do it without leaving the house and without getting a group of friends together. So you’re still PHYSICALLY there with your partner/spouse/kids, but it’s still obvious to everyone that you care more about the game than about them.
This is it. Every word.
My GenX hindbrain says 'duh, it's nerdy, and women hate nerds', but maybe that's obsolete.
It does make sense there's no real parallel on the other side. Women are acutely sensitive to mate character; men are heavily driven by looks, particularly for short-term flings. If she's cute enough, most of us don't care what she's into.
One female interest you didn't mention is 'woo' or alternative spirituality. Men are pretty contemptuous of that quite often.
I wonder how much it depends on if the women play video games. My wife spends about 3 times as many hours playing video games a week as I do, and the time I spend I’m usually playing at the same time as her or with her.
Agree: I would expect the woman playing video games to indicate either a muted gaming-ickiness reflex or the ability to override it. It'd be pretty crumby if your wife plays more and still judges you unfavorably. Maybe she will think you suck at video games and makes fun of you for that, but that's probably fine.
Generally speaking, I've never been with a woman who has ever been 100% satisfied with how I spend my "leisure" time. And I'm not sure I would want to be. From my days of excess and drugs and alcohol and music playing and record collecting to my extreme workaholic 70 hour work weeks punctuated by large social gatherings and staying out until 4AM, I feel that there were always legit gripes to my behaviors. Some of them were more valuable than others, of course. And I weighed them against how much I valued those relationships. As I've grown older I've considered their validity and taken critique onboard where possible. But even now as a domesticated male who cooks 7 nights a week and cleans and does the dishes and generally everything else considered "womans work" my woman still criticizes me. And a lot of the time, she's right.
Playing video games is probably viewed as a cheeto-dusted dried cum sock, incel fatso activity because even if you are the Bobby Fisher of Helldivers nobody outside of your immediate lost boys teamchat is remotely impressed. It's a leisure activity that encourages a sort of anonymous mediocrity that looks worse against the less money you make at your job and are able to actually contribute to a real life partnership. Because the time you have away from whatever you do during the work week can and should be spent doing actual activities like maybe having sex, or even just laying around in bed and talking with your woman, or taking a walk or maybe doing something around the house or the yard, going to church if you go. Spend your time working on yourself so you can give a better version of yourself to your partner, the community, your peers, this country, the world. You probably get it by now.
You can and should do it.
I feel like the missing link here is just that video games are stigmatized in general (at least when adults are playing them). It's not something specific to women or mate selection - it's just that many people who don't play video games find it offputting if someone does. Women are just following the cues of broader society when they feel repulsed by men playing video games. If you want to talk about it in more strategy-based terms (though I'm not sure this revulsion is a rational strategy, rather than just a by-product of heuristics useful in other situations), they could also be selecting for men with higher social status because video games, due to the stigma, confer lower status.
So the real question, I think, is not, "Why are women repulsed by video games?", but, "Why are video games socially stigmatized?" I don't know the exact reasons, but I can think of a few:
- Video games are a newer hobby relative to most others. New hobbies tend to be more stigmatized, but the stigma lessens over time. The mystery novels example you gave illustrates this: Reading them was once seen as suspect, but is now perfectly socially acceptable and probably even seen as a positive. Also, keep in mind that society's views on what is and isn't acceptable are still influenced by older generations, and even younger generations are not immune from this influence. Gaming is definitely not mainstream among older generations (that's a big difference between gaming and social media, which has been adopted by many older adults), so it makes sense that they would see it as weird, and they could influence younger people to see it as weird too.
- Video games are not as mainstream as a lot of other hobbies. Yes, they are popular and getting more popular over time, but they are still thought of as a niche thing by most people, and the wider culture isn't as aware them as it is of other forms of entertainment like movies and TV shows. Also, a lot of the data that shows that video games are becoming more mainstream is at least partially due to things like playing puzzle games on your phone becoming more common. But those aren't the types of games that are stigmatized, and they're not the prototype that comes up in someone's mind when they think of a guy playing video games, so this doesn't do anything to reduce stigma against the latter.
- Video games are usually played alone (even when you're playing with online friends, people still don't think of that the same way as being together in person), so they are seen as antisocial.
- There are a lot of stereotypes about people who play video games, and they're all negative. They're fat, unhygenic, lazy, antisocial, live in their mother's basement, creepy, and maybe even racist incels. How did all these stereotypes develop? A lot of these are just general nerd stereotypes that have been around for a long time and used to be applied to other pop-cultural phenomena that have since become too mainstream for the stereotypes to stick. And gamers surely are disproportionately nerdy, even if not all of them are. This was even more true in the earlier days of gaming when the stereotypes developed. The racist incels one is because of actual events like Gamergate. The antisocial one, in addition to being a general nerd stereotype, is explained by the above bullet point. Many of these stereotypes are also connected to laziness, and someone spending all their time on a leisure activity that doesn't accomplish anything in the real world is seen as lazy. And of course, all of these stereotypes really do apply to some gamers, which allows them to stick.
- Hobbies like sports and craftsmanship are seen as traditionally masculine things. And they at least have the appearance of being connected to useful things - sports are related to physical fitness, and craftmanship to being able to fix or make things. Even if a man's interest in them isn't actually being put towards a useful purpose (e.g., a man watching sports all day isn't doing anything useful), the fact that they are at least connected to something obviously practical (and attractive to women, as fitness and craftsmanship are), makes them more acceptable.
Another possibility: Everyone is attracted to people with similar interests as them. Therefore, any hobby that is more common among men than women is going to be unattractive to women, all else being equal, unless there is something specific about the hobby that makes it attractive to women anyway. Sports and handiwork have such features (see the last bullet point above), so they don't count as counterexamples. But video games don't.
Any time a taken man is doing something that isn’t immediately beneficial to his spouse, he must immediately cease this thing and instead start doing something to her benefit.
This is the baseline assumption in a relationship. The bargain is that she is “always doing something that benefits us.” That “us” is of course really just “her” recapitulated to sound less selfish, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Nothing is more obviously of no benefit to her than playing video games. It both accomplishes nothing tangible and has the terrible side benefit of increasing HIS happiness instead of hers. That 1-2 combo is completely unacceptable in a modern context. At least in times past when he went hunting with the boys, there was the potential he’d return with meat.
This is a perfect example of someone who should shift some time from writing to reading. Women may or may not agree with men on the appropriate amount of leisure time. But much more salient to the discussion is how much leisure time men and women actually have, on average. But this author would need to read to know there's a difference which might be salient.
Agreed. Where are the easily available stats on time use?
The long-winded run down of explanations was unnecessary. I think you're right that it's differences wrt leisure time, and the obvious fact that it yields nothing productive or pro-social.
I came here for a takedown of video games, and was not expecting the gender war spin. Am I girlyman because I don't like soft men in soft pants sitting on soft furniture staring at screens all the time?
Isn't commenting on Substack also an example of sitting on soft furniture staring at screens? (Most gamers don't play games "all the time"...that's just a stereotype. And social media or arguing online can be equally as addictive as gaming, so gaming is not unique in that way.) I think it's weird that those who publicly decry male gamers for being "soft" and for staring at screens are usually sharing their opinion through social media...while staring at a screen. They seem to have the attitude that "it's okay when *I* stare at a screen, but it's not okay when YOU do it, because I've predetermined that you're a loser."
I don't think gamers are losers, I am just kind of sad that they have won. As for Substack being the same thing, I don't see it that way. I am talking to Kyle as if we were in the same room together, I am a human interacting with another human. A dude playing a video game is interacting with software, it's a closed loop. Yeah I know gamers now wear headsets and bark at each other, but still, it's social interaction where everyone is paying attention to programmed entertainment. Maybe my position is more, "I don't like this" rather than "this is objectively bad," but either way, the image of a young man sitting on a couch for hours with a controller in his hands on a sunny day fills me with contempt...especially if that means he is ignoring his girlfriend. Maybe I'm just a sore loser, that's entirely possible. Now I will return my attention to a book and a dog : )
One could make the argument that people talking to each other on Substack is also social interaction where everyone is paying attention to programmed entertainment. (And plenty of people bark at each other on social media and get unearned feelings of achievement, just like they do in video games.) You could also make the argument that gaming with your buddies is more akin to playing a board game or playing poker with a group of friends. It all depends on how you look at it. Books are also a closed loop, just like solitary video games are. Instead of interacting with software, you're interacting with text. My point is that I think the way people choose to interpret these things usually has more to do with their preexisting emotional biases than it does with a dispassionate, objective appraisal of facts.
Observing my kid playing online with his friends I am constantly weirdly surprised at how wholesome a lot of their interactions are. And it has objectively become way harder for kids to just go outside and hang out - this is the society we have kinda made for them.
I can dig that
I’m on the millennial/zoomer cusp, born in ‘98. I’m a woman, and I find video games incredibly unattractive. In my case, I think it’s because I instinctively associate video games with neglect. They’re basically a solitary activity. Or, if you’re playing with other people, the focus isn’t on building relationships with those people, it’s just on winning the game. My father fairly frequently gave the impression that various things were more important than his children, and two notable examples were television and video games.
If a man was foregoing spending time with me in order to play video games, I would assume that I’m absolutely worthless to him.
I also remember being made fun of as an early teenager for being bad at video games (I was in some pretty nerdy circles for a time) so they just don’t register as being a fun activity to me. Unless it’s a simple arcade game like tetris, which I might play to pass time occasionally. So another issue with a partner playing video games would be that I don’t really want to play together, because I just don’t have positive associations with them in social settings.
So, if a partner was spending huge amounts of time playing video games, it would be an issue for me. But none of the categories listed here quite fit my experience
Great analysis.
My bet is on the jealousy theory. Not sure if jealousy is the right way to describe it. It's just that male attention is critical for most women in relationships. But video games make it impossible to provide attention on demand.
Most popular games are based on some real time action, and it's hard to quit or pause if you're deeply focused in the middle of it, even if it's an offline game. And if it's an online game, you can't quit or pause at all - if you do, you lose or your character dies.
There might be an evolutionary reason for this. As noted, before the invention of video games, there was hardly anything as captivating for a man as the female body. So, this might be a revolutionary jealousy reflex: "He can't give me attention on demand, because he probably gives it to another woman".
This is neatly captured by the popular "He's probably thinking of other women" meme, where the guy is actually thinking of some nerdy stuff.
For me, it was the hypocrisy. My ex and I used to spend entire weekends playing Civ, and then he'd play first-person shooters all week, but then he would make fun of the cat for chasing a laser for five minutes. i was like dude, we have been chasing a laser for 48 hours without sleep, at least the cat got bored.
By extension, men will make fun of useless pursuits by women which they consider a waste of time, like fashion and makeup. But dude you have been chasing a laser all night, who are you to talk?
How exhausting.. no wonder fertility rates are collapsing. Men and women have never been more misaligned, and there’s plenty of pathetic behavior to go around, to blame it on. Pick your pet cause of the social decay, pick your pet scapegoat gender, there are like hundreds of plausible unique combinations of those two categories to go around. But I know I’d rather die alone than be henpecked like this, and I don’t even play video games. The transactional nature of modern dating is just.. death.
Also, I found this funny
“ 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.”
Evolutionary misfire? Once they marry you they’ve got a free meal ticket for life, especially if you put a baby in them, that’s a big check that never ends. I think a big part of the problem is that there seems to be no evolutionary pressure on women, at least not even remotely comparable to the one on men. They only stand to gain, and men will shop across and down, women only shop up.
The problem could be solved with some patriarchy, but it would hurt everyone’s feelings. You could probably solve it in other ways, but that would involve a lot more moving parts.