Are Video Games Keeping You Unemployed: My Reaction

In my reaction to the article, ‘Are video games keeping you unemployed?’ I will, of course, state that I am biased toward video games being a positive influence. I have believed this most of my life, thanks to my own experience which I will go into. I also believe that video games are a force for good because of evidence that neurologically, video games are believed to cause improvements in various cognitive tasks. A simple Google search for ‘effect of video games on cognitive abilities’ will give you all the evidence you need to know. Here is a good article that summarises the current knowledge.

My first counter to the article is based on the previously-mentioned evidence; video games, if anything improve skills rather than damage them. My second, however, is anecdotal evidence. My third argument is that there are different, perhaps more explanatory factors at play than just video games.

The anecdotal evidence is this; video games helped me get a job. While I am not a ‘less educated young man’, quite simply, video games are expensive. At over £40 a title, as well as online subscription fees, hardware purchases and DLC, it is impossible to maintain any kind of gaming habit like what the article describes without a large investment of cash. We need jobs to get this kind of money. The economic research behind this article tries to combat this by stating the average cost of a video game as $0.55, and while this is supposed to be based on data, many gamers will laugh in derision at this kind of information. The kind of gaming that the economic research is trying to draw conclusions from is different from the kind of gaming that it is trying to criticise, it seems. To be closer to the real cost of games as a ‘luxury leisure item’, then the research could be better served by looking at the average cost of the mainstream, AAA retail title that comes out on a modern console, not smartphone apps.

My personal experience of video games helping me to get a job was around the time Grand Theft Auto V came out for the Xbox 360. I was a cash-strapped student at the time, despite living responsibly and not being a big drinker, I was in heaps of debt and had no money to fund any kind of serious gaming. The release and hype around GTA V, however, got me fed up with not having the money to fund my gaming. I really was looking forward to the game, and it made me get a job so that I could afford to buy it near to its release. If other gamers are like me, then they would find the expense of video games a pressure to find employment, not something that keeps you out of it.

Of course, there is the fact that many of the points in the article show that there is a bigger problem than ‘those pesky videogames’. It cites evidence on people who are not in education or employment: “Essentially, a lot of young, non-college educated men are living in their parents’ basement playing video games all day.”

The issue here is correlational and my problem with the article is that it is citing the most emotionally-charged of the factors at play in order to draw interest; video games. It does this despite there being an important factor described just a few words into the sentence. ‘Non-college educated men’. I think that this in itself shows that there are a lot more issues at play here than video games.

There are a lot of factors, economic, psychological and social, that go into the phenomena of individuals not in education or employment. Not only is the world economy still in dire straits, but businesses are not willing to employ young people. This is a wide systemic problem that is far more damaging than video games could be toward employment prospects. 

Everybody knows the old catch-22 of ‘we won’t hire you without experience but you cannot get experience because we won’t hire you’, but this is actually a serious and widespread issue that is not getting any easier. As many of ‘those pesky millenials’ are now coming into their thirties, the rampant ageism of big business is going to lead to a major financial issue soon. 

Not only that, but there are an incredible amount of psychological and social issues at play in this phenomena that is a lot harder to wrap one’s head around, that it does the underlying problem a disservice to simply ask “are video games keeping you out of a job?” I actually think that the consumption of video games, as enabled by the poor parenting strategies being described in the article, is actually a symptom rather than a cause.

That is not to say there aren’t issues with gaming that could contribute; over-consumption of video games and addiction is a real problem, as are those ‘video game apps’ as described by the research underlying the article, which are mostly designed to be as addictive as possible and are made unethically to siphon money from players in nasty, cynical ways. 

But I think that the article is being awfully reductionist in its portrayal of the problem, and ignoring the wide array of issues that underlie the social phenomena being described. By doing so, the article gives off the impression of being no better than the big news scares that happened over video game violence in recent memory; such media sensationalism is not helpful to anyone, gamers or not.