OhOn Sunday, the Observer magazine published a sensitive article about video game addiction, speaking to therapists working in the sector and to a family affected by it. Genuine, compulsive and life-altering addiction, whether to video games or anything else, is of course devastating for those who suffer from it. WHO classified gaming addiction as a specific disorder in 2018 (as opposed to technology addiction), the National Centre for Gaming Disorders, set up in the UK, has treated just over 1,000 patients. Fortunately, the figures indicate that it is a rare condition, affecting less than 1% of the 88% of teenagers who play video games.
The article asked why so many young people are addicted to video games, which certainly struck a chord with many parents who despair at the amount of time their children spend in front of computers and consoles. However, as a video games editor and correspondent for the Guardian, we believe that many of us who worry about the time our teenagers spend gaming do not have an addiction or compulsive behaviour problem. If we want to know why many teenagers voluntarily choose to spend 10 or 20 hours a week gaming, rather than pathologising it, we should look around us.
Gen Z is the most monitored generation in history. We criticise children and teenagers for not going out, but at the same time we are restricting their freedoms and closing off their spaces. Parents will remember spending entire days outdoors, cycling around the neighbourhood, but at the same time they treat their children’s smartphones as tracking devices, demanding regular check-ins, infiltrating their social networks and storing their activities and friend groups in databases. The pandemic may have subsided, but it wasn’t just lockdowns that kept children at home.
And even without the anxiety of parents cornering them: where are teenagers going to go? In the last decade, YMCA Facts shows that more than 4,500 jobs in the youth sector have been cut and 750 youth centres have been closed. According to the Music Venue TrustEvery week two grassroots music venues close down. The nightclub industry is in free fall. Teenagers can’t stroll through parks without arousing the suspicions of overprotective adults who have decided that these rare recreational spaces belong only to their young children. City squares, skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, watched over by video surveillance cameras and policed by private security guards.
It’s no surprise, then, that teenagers are taking refuge in the worlds of online gaming, the last spaces left to them without the mediation of parents or other authority figures, the last places where they are, for the most part, beyond the reach of adult control. You can spend all day with your friends in Red Dead Redemption, Minecraft or Fortnite doing whatever you want, without being hassled or moaned at, or having to spend £5 on a latte every 30 minutes. If you can’t access therapy, you can at least relax with comforting games like Stardew Valley, Unpacking or Coffee Talk, or chat to your friends in-game. You can travel freely – and for free – in Elden Ring or Legend of Zelda; no elderly relative can suddenly vote to restrict your access to the mainland in Euro Truck Simulator.
There is no doubt that spending all day in the bedroom is unhealthy and alienating, but can this generation be blamed for being more anxious and withdrawn? They were recently locked in their homes for over a year. There is mass despair and disillusionment in a world where home ownership is a fantasy, where stable lifelong careers are increasingly rare and where young people are accused of being lazy and complacent. The minimum wage for an 18-year-old in this country is £8.60, meaning that an hour’s work could buy them a pint in a London pub – that is if they can find work.
Outside of gaming, the media landscape is dominated by news sources that mock and vilify young people as soft liberals, while criminalizing them. The Conservatives’ last desperate attempt to drum up support before the election was to reinstate military service for 18-year-olds, to teach them respect and civic spirit. This is the generation that simply put their lives, friendships, loves, and education on hold to save their grandparents. We shouldn’t be surprised that they want to escape into virtual worlds. We should be surprised that they ever want to return to the one we’ve built for them.
Meanwhile, genuine action on the climate emergency is hampered by ineffectual politicians who cosy up to polluting corporations and right-wing conspiracists who deny there is a problem at all. Pundits bemoan the extent to which we should allow protesters to shut down roads, while water companies fill the sea with human excrement. These people will all be dead when the time comes to reap what we have sown, but Gen Z will not be: it is the only job for life they are likely to have.
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Today’s teens are gaming more than any previous generation. They’re also suffering from a mental health crisis: One in three suffers from mental health issues, from anxiety and depression to, yes, addiction. If there is a relationship between these things, it’s not causal. We’re willing to blame anything, from smartphones to social media to video games, for the problems our kids are experiencing — anything, that is, except ourselves.