Video games are a peak form of entertainment. Anyone telling you otherwise is either lying or lazy. They’re a shockingly refined form of escapism: visual, tactile, and endlessly replayable. The medium is absurdly broad, and the barriers to entry are basically non-existent. If you’ve got a screen and a few hours, you’re in.
There’s a specific rush games can give you that’s hard to find elsewhere. It’s a clean, chemical sense of triumph. You pull off a tight manoeuvre, solo a squad, land a full clip, and for a moment you you get a hit of being definitively, unconditionally, and categorically better. Then the swing comes back. Four hours later you’re staring at a rank-down screen, eyes fried by the monitor’s glow, wondering what happened to the evening.
At some point as I watched the number of hours I was accumulating on various games soar ever-upwards, (over 2000 hours in one alone) it crossed my mind that this expense demanded introspection. Was the rush justifiable? After all, there’s a bunch of stuff I could do with my spare time time. But then, how should I approach choosing?
Well why not start at the end? Excuse the sudden philosophical morbidity, but mortality is the great defining feature of life, and so helps to bring everything else into focus. At the moment life ends (be it bus, bullet, bronchitis, or in bed) there is the ultimate moment of self-reflection: Did I make the right decisions? Heavy stuff, sure, but a useful lens through which to view the large chunk of our life over which we exert the most influence — our free time.
Obviously it’s hard to know what the right decisions might be at any given point, but it seems reasonably obvious that by trying to be a better person I stand a better chance of making the correct decisions when presented with life’s choices. So it seems I ought to be doing things that make me a little better with my spare time.
Now, not all activities are created equal. Most of the activities we choose to fill our spare-time with are obviously multi-faceted. They might all be fun, but they are fun and other things as well. Good books, films, and TV provide fun as well as knowledge, alternative perspectives and moral questions. Playing sport is fun! It also involves entertainment and physical betterment, teamwork and strategy. Even just watching sport is obviously a social and bonding activity as well as being fun. This stands in contrast to certain video games, which lack these additional facets.
The question isn’t whether to enjoy yourself (of course you should!) but whether your enjoyment contributes something beyond the moment, toward making you a better person.
I don’t want to argue that you should spend all your free time reading great works or volunteering at soup kitchens. I’m just pointing out a useful heuristic to help you identify activities that contribute nothing toward your betterment as a person and a liver of life, beyond their entertainment value.
To illustrate this, I want you to imagine that a friend of yours had been gifted The Chair. The Chair is a piece of furniture that, when you sit in it, makes you experience fun. Not fun-because-of-something. Not fun-as-a-side-effect-of-an-interesting-activity. Just: fun. Your friend sits down, enters a sort of fugue state, and for however long they remain seated they experience a continuous unbroken stream of undifferentiated enjoyment. Then they stand up and go about their day. There is nothing else to The Chair. It has no other features. It is not even particularly comfortable in the normal furniture sense.
Now, your friend isn’t having fun the way you have fun reading a good novel, where the fun is inextricable from the curiosity and the empathy and the slow accumulation of someone else’s hard-won understanding of the world. They’re just sitting in a chair. From the outside, they look like a mannequin. From the inside, they are having The Time Of Their Life, in the most content-free sense of that phrase imaginable.
Do you think your friend should keep The Chair?
Most people hesitate, even though they can’t immediately say why. After all, fun is fun. But I think the hesitation is pointing at something real. It’s the one-dimensional nature of the experience. Pure entertainment, plain and simple, is not of equal weight with entertainment of the same caliber but containing other facets (historical knowledge, philosophical insight, physical betterment, companionship, intimacy, etcetera). In fact, I think it is a bad use of your time. If you disagree, consider whether you believe scrolling TikTok is a good way to spend one’s time, and if not — why not?
Now to return to video games. Of course these are plenty that contain extra facets. The games I take umbrage with are a specific subsection that nonetheless dominate total player numbers. These are online multiplayer games (games you play against other people in the world). Overwatch, Warzone, Valorant, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Battlefront, Tarkov, Arc Raiders, and Apex Legends. They’re addictive, built around skill curves that make improvement feel obvious and rewarding. And because you’re facing other humans, every match carries a fresh edge of challenge and nuance. Unfortunately, if you scratch the surface, you’ll find nothing else but entertainment.
For example, there is no increased teamwork, and anyone who has no dedicated team and frequently plays alone knows this to be true. There is no applicable external strategy, no useful physical development, no knowledge gained except that which is pertinent to the game. It is a gaudy abyss, a bottomless siphon for the precious time that constitutes your one and only shot at life. These games are The Chair.
As above, this is not to say that all video games fall into this basket of disrepute. Starcraft or Civilization 6 are immersive strategy games, incredibly complex and requiring a high level of abstract and strategic thinking, imparting an understanding of sacrifice, game theory and economy. Single-player story driven games such as Detroit: Become Human, Red Dead Redemption II or The Last of Us present the player with an immersive tapestry of characters, moral decisions and gorgeous aesthetics. You become as attached to the characters as you would through any book or film. They are just as able to provoke in the player philosophical and introspective questions. Alternatively, It Takes Two is a cooperative bonding experience that offers intricately thought out puzzles while telling the story of a failing marriage through two small cloth dolls. Video games can be beneficial, cerebral activities. However you need to be able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.
Parents, more than most, are forced to have an opinion on this. Adults can waste their own time in private and chalk it up as a personal vice. This is a luxury parents are not afforded. They see the hours pile up, the irritability after a loss, the way a “quick match” eats an evening, and they suspect something is wrong. But most of them don’t know games from the inside. They lack the vocabulary to separate the worthwhile from the time-sink. So they reach for the umbrella claim: “video games are a waste of time.” How many kitchens and living rooms has that sentence been uttered in, in how many languages, and with how little effect?
That vagueness is exactly why the critique fails to bite. If the label “bad” is applied to everything, it ends up meaning nothing, and there is nothing a child is more allergic to than a poor argument from an authority figure. Worse, it gives the worst games camouflage: genuinely worthwhile examples become ready-made rebuttal, and the multiplayer grind slips through unchallenged. I’d happily let my kid spend hours a week playing video games with their friends. I would not let them spend hours a week grinding the Apex Legends ranked ladder. Yet millions of children and adults alike are burning their single shot at life on exactly that kind of game, and as long as the main cultural response remains “it’s uhhh bad,” we won’t develop the norms needed to police the habit. Good norms require good arguments!
Reaching the end, the reader may have noticed that a lot of activities that are not video games could fall into the basket I’ve made. I suppose video games are a pertinent and personal example of a broader category: solitary, frictionless activities that feel good while you’re doing them but do nothing for you beyond this. Perhaps bad literature, porn, scrolling TikTok, and watching reality TV alone also fit the bill. So I suppose this is a plank for a wider critique of leisure. But for now it’s just meant to make you think a little more about how you spend your free time.
If you want to make something of your life, you need to do something with it.