Game drain: why some young men choose

video games over jobs

When job prospects are bad, some ditch the
workforce for the virtual world
David Mullings was always a self-starter. Born
in Jamaica, he moved to Florida to go to
university, and founded his first company – a
digital media firm that helped Caribbean
content find a wider audience – before finishing
business school at the University of Miami. In
2011 he opened a private-equity firm with his
brother. In 2013 the two made their first big
deal, acquiring an 80% stake in a Tampa-based
producer of mobile apps. A year later it blew up
in their faces, sinking their firm and their hopes.
Mullings struggled to recover from the blow.
The odd consulting gig provided a distraction
and some income. Yet depression set in as he
found himself asking whether he had anything
useful to contribute to the wider world.
Then Destiny called.
Like millions of people of a certain age, the
Nintendo Entertainment System (nes) had
occupied a crucial place in Mullings’s
childhood. It introduced him to video gaming,
gave him a taste for it, made him aware of the
fact that he was good at it: a “born gamer”, in
his words. Yet the pixelated worlds of the Mario
brothers, for all their delights, were nothing like
the experiences available to gamers today.

Mullings’s friends invited him to join them in

playing Destiny, a “massively multiplayer
online game” (meaning that lots of different
people around the world simultaneously play
within the Destiny universe) and a “first-person
shooter” (meaning that most of the gameplay
involves the player looking out through a
character’s eyes and shooting stuff). The world
surrounding the players is vast, filled with great,
sweeping vistas rendered in extraordinary and
realistic detail. It is a world of its own. Within
that world, players, often in teams, take on
quests and square off repeatedly in matches
against opponents.

Before long Mullings was hooked, playing up to

eight hours of Destiny each day. To all
appearances, he had fallen into a familiar trap –
increasingly common and difficult to escape in
the eyes of some scholars studying the
phenomenon – in which work gives way to, and
is ultimately replaced by, the entrancing power
of video games.

Since their earliest days video games have had

their critics. Like countless others, I was told to
turn off that brain-rotting device and get outside
before I ruined my eyes and wits. At various
times games have been blamed for contributing
to obesity, to violence (including mass
shootings), and to misogynistic behaviour –
with young men often thought the most at-risk
demographic.

Since those days when I would try to sneak in

an extra half-hour of forbidden thrill, games
have got immeasurably better. They are often
beautiful, narratively interesting, enriching and
social. Indeed, it is possible that they are too
good. Today’s games seem to be displacing
careers, friendships and families, and thus
stopping young people (particularly men) from
starting real, adult lives.

Over the last 15 years there has been a steady

and disconcerting leak of young people away
from the labour force in America. Between 2000
and 2015, the employment rate for men in their
20s without a college education dropped ten
percentage points, from 82% to 72%. In 2015,
remarkably, 22% of men in this group – a cohort
of people in the most consequential years of
their working lives – reported to surveyors that
they had not worked at all in the prior 12
months. That was in 2015: when the
unemployment rate nationwide fell to 5%, and
the American economy added 2.7m new jobs.
Back in 2000, less than 10% of such men were in
similar circumstances.
What these individuals are not doing is clear
enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the
University of Chicago, who has been studying
the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in
2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close
relative. Neither are they getting married. What
they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video
games. As the hours young men spent in work
dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure
activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in
leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video
games. It looks as though some small but
meaningful share of the young-adult population
is delaying employment or cutting back hours in
order to spend more time with their video game
of choice.
Unemployment sits differently with Chris than
with David. It is, to some extent, an opportunity.
“Work is a means to an end,” he says. The end is
enjoying the finer things life offers: travelling
when finances permit, gaming and reading
when they don’t.
Chris, who is 30, lives in Ipswich, England,
where he grew up. He is an it contractor in the
health-care sector, working when he gets a
contract. The last one expired in July 2016.
Thanks to government-imposed spending cuts
the pickings have since been rather slim, and
Chris has moved back in with his family to save
money. He follows the typical job-seeking
strategies. He’s on LinkedIn and in touch with
recruiting agencies. But the jobs tend to go to
others: “better candidates”, Chris notes
philosophically. Investments in training are not
on the agenda at the moment.

Games are. Chris is something of a connoisseur;

he likes to sample the new wares from high-
quality production companies in the way a
cinephile might anticipate the latest title from a
favourite director. Grand strategy games – like
Crusader Kings II, in which players manage a
ruling dynasty over the course of centuries – are
a particular favourite. Another – Hearts of Iron
4, in which the player controls a nation at war –
has absorbed more than 100 hours over the last
year. He will play for a few hours, then spend
time reading. Old friends, many of whom
stayed in Ipswich after leaving school, will join
him for a few rounds of a multiplayer game on
occasion.

Chris seems content. He has a girlfriend in

California, whom he met while on holiday and
sees a few times a year. I ask him if he would be
bothered if his life were the same in ten years.
Not really, he reckons. Not so long as contracts
turn up often enough to allow him to buy the
games he wants (which don’t cost much) and to
travel occasionally.
People work for many reasons – to occupy their
time, to find purpose in life and to contribute to
society, among other things – but the need to
earn money typically comes top of the list.
Money puts food on the table, clothes in the
wardrobe and a roof overhead. Yet these days,
satisfying those needs in the most basic way
does not take an especially large income,
particularly for those with the option of
depending on family members for assistance.
The reason to work harder and earn more than
the minimum needed to survive is, in part, the
desire to have something more than the bare
necessities – nice meals, rather than the cheapest
calories available, a car, holidays abroad, a home
full of books and art. Much of the work we do is
intended to earn the money to afford a few
luxuries to add to our comfort and enrich our
lives.
Yet we face a trade-off. The harder we work, the
less time we have to enjoy the luxuries our
labour affords us. The more lavish the luxuries
we seek, the more we must earn to acquire
them, and the longer and harder we find
ourselves working.
Not all luxuries are tangible. In the autumn of
2016, Hurst released a paper, co-authored with
Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils and Kerwin Charles.
They define a class of activities they call “leisure
luxuries”. Economists typically (and reasonably)
assume that people tend to buy more things as
they earn more money. But as they grow richer,
they buy proportionately more of some things
and less of others. Spending on necessities, as a
share of all consumption, declines as incomes
rise. Economists label “luxuries” the things that
account for an increased share of spending as
income goes up. There is a similar logic to
leisure luxuries. As the amount of time people
spend at leisure (as opposed to work) rises,
some activities (like bathing or sleep) account
for a shrinking share of total leisure time. Others
– the leisure luxuries – account for more.
Not everyone takes their luxuries in the same
way. Tastes differ. Some people might much
rather have an excellent meal lasting one hour
than a pretty good one lasting two; or a fancy
car rather than a year of lazy Saturdays. For
those who prefer tangible luxuries, or for whom
the quality of an experience is more important
than the quantity of it, some additional time off
is not especially attractive. Better to work that
extra hour and earn a bit more. Those who revel
in the leisure luxuries – in the pursuit of a
hobby, for instance, or time at gaming – do not
need to spend much time on the job each week
before the income gain from another hour at
work starts to look a poor trade-off for an
additional hour away from it.
As games improve, the terms of this trade-off
change. Among those predisposed to the
leisure-luxury life, better games mean people
are quicker to swap working hours for gaming
hours; given nes-era gaming technology, a
twenty-something might decline an opportunity
for overtime work to have a little longer with
Mario and Luigi. Now, a part-time job might be
all they are willing to do, so good are the worlds
and characters waiting at home. For those with
the means, any hour on the job is an hour too
much.
For 26-year-old Guillaume, the trade-off is all
too easy to understand. In May 2016 he finished
his graduate-school training in business law. A
few months later, he decided he didn’t want to
work in law after all; he wanted to play video
games. Guillaume likes adventure games, which
allow players to immerse themselves in fantastic
and foreign worlds. During his studies, he could
only spare a couple of hours each day for his
habit. Now he can slip into his video-game
worlds for five or six hours at a time. A law
career would have meant more money. Yet it
would also have meant much more time spent at
law.
For now, financial concerns are not too pressing,
as Guillaume’s parents support him. He
recognises that a lack of financial independence
could prove stifling in future. It bothers him
enough that he has not given up on the idea of
work. But he has never met a lawyer who made
him enthusiastic about the career, so he is
planning to work in the games industry. He will
earn less, but he will be gaming – which is what
he has always wanted to do with his time
anyway. When the only luxury one desires is the
time to enjoy games, working long hours
suddenly looks much less sensible.
Many gamers (Guillaume among them) report
that they are happy with the decision to work
less and game more. Yet economists like Hurst
fret about the long-run consequences. Although
digital-entertainment experiences are both
amazingly enjoyable and relatively cheap, other
important consumer goods – like houses and
medical care, furniture and food – still cost
money, sometimes quite a lot of it. People’s
tastes change as they age. Young men content to
remain outside the labour force and play video
games – while their parents provide food,
shelter and health insurance – may begin to
desire something else as the years pass. But,
having been out of employment during a crucial
period of life – early adulthood, when
friendships and contacts are made, experience
and skills cultivated – such gamers may find
themselves unable to build the lives they come
to realise they want.

One hears this regret in talking to older gamers.

“Of course gaming has interfered with any
attempt to look for or do any serious work,”
says Arturo, 29, who reckons he has spent 600
hours playing Kerbal Space Program, a space-
flight simulator, and possibly more at Starcraft
II, a strategy game. He doesn’t just miss the
forgone income and opportunities; he could
have been reading, he laments. But those hours
are gone for ever. Between the game reviews
and player tips, online forums for gamers are
thick with discussions among those who worry
their lives are passing them by but cannot find
the will to put down their controllers.
Stand back, however, and the implications are
far more substantial than this. One can just
about spot the vision of a distant, near-workless
future in the habits of young gamers. If good
things in life can be had for very little money,
then working hard to have more than very little
money looks less attractive. The history of the
industrial era has been one in which technology
has reduced the proportion of income devoted
to necessities like food while providing vast new
possibilities for consumption. As this happened,
the hours worked by the typical person
declined.
Our instinct, trained to see work as a critical
component of adulthood and an obligation of
healthy members of society, recoils at the
thought of people spending their lives buried in
alternate realities. How could society ever value
time spent at games as it does time spent on
“real” pursuits, on holidays with families or
working in the back garden, to say nothing of
time on the job? Yet it is possible that just as past
generations did not simply normalise the ideal
of time off but imbued it with virtue –
barbecuing in the garden on weekends or piling
the family into the car for a holiday – future
generations might make hours spent each day
on games something of an institution: an
appropriate use of time that is the reward for
society’s technological wizardry and productive
power.
That view hinges, however, on a crucial
distinction: are those dropping out to tune in to
video-game worlds jumping, lured by the
attraction of the games they play, or have they
been pushed?
Emily lives in a small town not far from
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2013 she graduated
from university and took a job at a marketing
firm – a miserable one which she left after a few
months. She applied for entry-level tech jobs but
found that even those positions tended to go to
people with some experience. As weeks without
work turned to months, her mood sank. “I
pretty much felt like a piece of shit,” she tells
me.
Finances were not an immediate worry. She
lived with her family while looking for work,
but her mother was not happy with the
situation: “[she] absolutely made it known that
she thought I was lazy and a disappointment,”
Emily says – not that she needed any help
feeling down.
The games were an escape from reality. Emily is
a fan of the Fallout franchise: a series of role-
playing games set in the future, after a nuclear
apocalypse. Gaming lifted her mood, she tells
me; achievements within them allowed her to
feel that she was getting something right at a
time when most things were going wrong. She
knew it was only tricking her brain. She would
beat herself up sometimes after playing for
hours, rueing the potentially productive time
lost to games. Now, in hindsight, she says she is
glad she had the ability to escape for a while.
After months of unhappy unemployment, Emily
found work: as a cashier in a local shop, a
position for which she was vastly overqualified.
She stayed there for more than a year, earning
promotions, but nonetheless stuck in a career
very different from what she had expected. In
early 2016, her fortunes turned; piles of
applications and rounds of interviews finally
yielded a job in marketing. She hopes it will
work out better than the last one.
For Emily, and for many others, games were not
the luxury luring her away from career. They
were a comfort blanket and distraction,
providing some solace when the working world
offered only bitter disappointment.
However one cuts the economic data of the last
few decades, the labour market has become
harder for the young. The Great Recession and
its aftermath were somewhat worse for young
workers than the population as a whole. Yet the
struggles of younger workers pre-date the crisis.
Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have
stagnated for young college graduates since the
1990s (that is, young graduates now earn
roughly the same wage as new graduates did 20
years ago), while pay for new high-school
graduates has declined. The shares of young
high-school and college graduates not in work
or education has risen; in 2014, about 11% of
college graduates were apparently idle,
compared with 9% in 2004 and 8% in 1994.
“Underemployment” – work in a position for
which one is overqualified – has risen steadily
since the beginning of the millennium; the share
of recent college graduates working in jobs
which did not require a college degree rose from
just over 30% in the early 2000s to nearly 45% a
decade later. As frustrated college students take
jobs for which they are overqualified, young
people with less education often find themselves
competing for still less demanding work, which
pays lower wages and offers less security and
room for advancement.
One of the most important variables to consider
in designing a video game is its difficulty. If a
game is too simple, players will quickly get
bored and the game will flop. If it is too difficult,
gamers will grow frustrated, and the game will
likewise prove a failure. Life, for many people,
is a big game: the ultimate place to accumulate
points and work one’s way up the leaderboard.
The economists who worry about the seductive
power of gaming fear that gamers who miss the
scheduled step away from virtual play and into
a proper adulthood will never “level up” to that
truly immersive competitive experience.
Instead, they become stuck at a phase of the
game which no longer satisfies, yet which they
cannot move beyond.

The designers of the game of life, such as they

are, may have erred in structuring the game in a
way that encourages young people to seek an
alternate reality. They have spread the thrills
and valuable items too thinly and have tweaked
the settings to reward special skills that cannot
be mastered easily even by those prepared to
spend long hours doing so. Unsurprisingly,
some players are giving up, while others are
filling the time not taken up in rewarding, well-
compensated work with games painstakingly
designed to make them feel good.
It is not always clear when gaming is the refuge
of the trapped and when it is the trap. Ashley,
aged 37, is certain that gaming is not the source
of his problems. He played video games in his
youth, but not obsessively; like other teenagers
he made plenty of time for football and
skateboarding. The games took on a different
cast in his 20s, when he spent time abroad
teaching English: he played heavily as a way to
deal with the loneliness of being in a foreign
place. But he was able to let the games go when
he returned.
Then he enrolled in graduate school, to become
a therapist, in a programme that required him to
undertake his own intensive course of therapy.
He fell into a deep depression, for which he
blames the therapy. Gaming became his coping
strategy, “a way of switching off thoughts”, he
says, and a means to turn away from
responsibility. He resisted the label “addict”.
But that is what he has come to understand he
is.
The depression is the problem, Ashley says, not
the games, but the hours he spends playing at
Pro Evolution Soccer are making things worse.
They get in the way of his relationship. “She
hates it,” he says, when asked how his partner
feels about the gaming. The potent combination
of depression and gaming has also prevented
him from progressing professionally. He has
failed to complete his degree and his working
life has stalled.

David Mullings’s relationship with games is

entirely different. He just got a job working for a
hedge fund, after spending time volunteering
for the Hillary Clinton campaign (in some
games you can score more points than the
opponent and still lose). Asked whether he
regrets the time he spent as a hard-core gamer,
he admitted it has costs. His wife frequently
grew frustrated with him. She found herself
texting him things like “Can I get that back
rub?” in order to draw his attention away from
the screen. But he could have been down at the
bar with the guys, dealing with his
disappointment that way. Instead he chose to
game.
And what he got from the game was much more
than mere distraction. It was fellowship with
others. Indeed, his group of friends has become
a broader online community, calling itself Dads
of Destiny. The men bonded over shared
experiences. “Sometimes a player would say,
‘Guys, I need to change a baby,’ and the other
players would provide covering fire while he
was gone.” They helped each other. Dads would
pass around their cvs and connect with each
other on LinkedIn. One of their number, a
veteran, credits their gaming community with
helping him adjust to life after military service
and deal with post-traumatic stress. David is
pretty sure they have saved at least one
marriage.
Other gamers tell similar stories: friends made
while playing, skills they discovered or honed,
discussions that led to jobs, and hours spent
away from the troubles of a world that
occasionally needs to be blocked out. Theirs are
not the only stories. There is addiction. While
some gaming communities are welcoming to all,
others are relentlessly hostile to outsiders, and
to women in particular. And games become the
destructive vice of choice for some sets of
players, taking the place of drugs or alcohol in a
tragic but familiar narrative. But the game is a
symptom of some broader weakness, sometimes
of character, occasionally of mental health – and,
perhaps, of society too.
Game designers often deploy a technique called
“dynamic difficulty adjustment”. In many
games, the software assesses a player’s skill and
rebalances various attributes of the game
accordingly, to keep the game fun and
manageable for those of less ability. Gamers
early in their careers, or who are simply
struggling to pick up the skills necessary to
succeed, are given a helping hand; their world
might be more generously strewn with useful
power-ups, for instance. As players advance,
these helping hands are withdrawn.
There is a downside to such techniques, at least
when they are used carelessly. One of my
favourite game series has always been Mario
Kart, a Nintendo racing game featuring
characters from the Mario Brothers franchise. It
uses “rubber banding” to keep the game
interesting. That is: no matter how good a driver
you are, your ai opponents can fall only so far
behind; the software will allow them to break
the rules of the game, and go faster than their
little karts ought to be able to, in order to keep
the game interesting. When playing human
opponents, those who fall to the rear are
showered with the most useful power-ups –
such that a leader, after executing a near-perfect
race, can be pummelled with misfortunes of one
sort or another until a laggard pips him at the
post. Clumsy, difficult adjustments like these
make the game feel rigged and unfair, which
makes it just as unappealing as one that is
straightforwardly too easy, or too hard.
A life spent buried in video games, scraping by
on meagre pay from irregular work or
dependent on others, might seem empty and
sad. Whether it is emptier and sadder than one
spent buried in finance, accumulating points
during long hours at the office while neglecting
other aspects of life, is a matter of perspective.
But what does seem clear is that the choices we
make in life are shaped by the options available
to us. A society that dislikes the idea of young
men gaming their days away should perhaps
invest in more dynamic difficulty adjustment in
real life. And a society which regards such
adjustments as fundamentally unfair should be
more tolerant of those who choose to spend
their time in an alternate reality, enjoying the
distractions and the succour it provides to those
who feel that the outside world is more rigged
than the game.