If you're more than 40 years old, you almost certainly feel that I'm a lazy punk who should stop being a parasite and get a job so that I can contribute to society instead of wasting my life shooting zombies. In my defense, it wasn't my generation that ruined the economy while I was in college, and while I could be sending job applications to every McDonald's restaurant within a 50-mile radius (which doesn't even guarantee me a position), I can afford to hold out a bit longer for a job that won't make me suicidal; my fingers are crossed.
But I think there's a valid argument on the other end, too. It's not that I should "get a job" — calm down, I'm looking for one — but that I've spent too much of my life shooting zombies instead of building lasting relationships with living people... or something. The same goes for anyone who self-identifies as a "gamer" or any synonym thereof. Are we all wasting our lives on video games? Unless your job is directly related to developing, playing, selling, or writing about them, playing them really accomplishes nothing... I mean, aside from fun. And fun is worth something, right?
Television is commonly cited in response as being just as much of a time waster, if not more, but I'm not going to use this as any kind of counter-argument, because everyone already knows it. What's interesting is that excessive TV use isn't seen as an epidemic. It's hardly even seen as a waste of time. We just accept it, most likely because so many of us are guilty of it that it seems normal, whereas newer distractions like video games and the internet have yet to earn our collective trust. (A few times in my childhood, I was told that cartoons would rot my brain, but that was a long time ago, and I hadn't done my homework.) Why does television get a free pass? Few of the people who talk bad about video games would actually turn around and defend television in the same breath, but television is rarely the primary target of such attacks. If you have something against electronic/video/digital entertainment or the act of sitting on a couch, you turn straight to video games, because that's what all the kids are doing.
Obviously, television is a very mainstream distraction. Our parents watch TV, our grandparents watch TV... it's probably been about 80 years since anyone was considered "too old" for TV, if such a time ever existed. To be without a TV in the United States is almost taboo, and — let's be honest — the majority of home-owning people who don't have TVs are just weird. They're the kind of people who don't let their children eat candy on Halloween. Screw those people. There are also the hypocrites who claim they don't watch TV even though they're downloading entire seasons of the newest TV shows on their laptops, as if that doesn't count. Screw those people too. Almost everyone watches TV at least occasionally, so it's completely understandable that avid fans of popular television shows are almost never seen as unhealthy degenerates by society. When I watched three episodes of Breaking Bad in a row at my mother's house, she didn't tell me to get a life; she went on Netflix and started watching it from the beginning to catch up with me. If I had been playing Killing Floor that whole time, she probably would have told me go to outside.
Of course, people around my mother's age are playing video games these days, as well. They're not quite as accepted as TV, but they're getting there. What bugs me is the fact that negative attitudes about so-called "gamers" persist despite the growing acceptance of video games themselves. It doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, but there's still some undying belief in our culture that the typical video game player is an introverted outcast who lives in his mother's basement and never showers. This stereotype lives on, even as video games themselves become increasingly mainstream (and even, ironically, as the casual video game players who know nothing beyond Angry Birds try to hijack the word "gamer" in some attempt to be more "nerdy" because they want to be just like the hipsters who already hijacked the word "nerd" so they could feel different without sacrificing their popularity; I hate you guys).
So it's not really video games that are getting all the bad press, aside from the occasional accusation that they're the sole cause of school shootings. It's the people who play them — more specifically, those who play them often — who are essentially ridiculed and demonized. People like me, I suppose. But I can't pretend that I don't see an explanation for the fact that the world still loves to make fun of us. Video games as an entertainment medium are okay because they're only seen, erroneously, as casual time-wasters (for the ten-minute bus ride) and toys for children (despite the fact that the majority of popular games are allegedly too violent for children). No one cares if children waste their time on such trivial things. Any adult who plays video games for more than ten minutes at a time, on the other hand, is going against society's misinformed view of what video games are — he's playing with children's toys — so he must be a friendless, sexless, jobless man-child who never grew up. Have I mentioned the whole thing about mom's basement?
"You think you can get to level ten?"
"Detective... I'm thirty years old, I live with my mother, and I have a Captain Kirk costume in my closet."
After all, only children and losers would spend time on something that isn't a job, a car, or a vagina.
In all seriousness, what you see in the video above is completely bogus and stupidly offensive, but it's the norm. It's the typical television portrayal of a person who consumes interactive media. The average person assumes that you must be good at video games if you're a hopeless loser, and vice versa. (Okay, so the guy in the video above actually wasn't very good at the game — he's bested by a girl, which is supposed to be surprising or something — but what's happening there is still harmful enough.) Most people, even many of those who play video games casually, tend to have a low opinion of those who make a real hobby out of it. This is why it's so easy to say that video games, more than any other trivial and meaningless form of entertainment, are trivial and meaningless.
But I'm not going to war over this. I'm writing this because I think it's an interesting topic, but I don't really feel the need to justify what I do or why I do it. I shouldn't need to. Furthermore, it's not really my intention to sit here defending video games as if I'm being paid to do so, even though I might have done this inadvertently. Playing video games is just a hobby, for me, not a way of life.
Maybe we should really be talking about hobbies of all kinds. Any sufficiently enjoyable hobby is almost always a terrible time sink, even the wholesome ones like fishing and reading books. If video games had never been invented, I'm sure I would be using some other kind of entertainment to distract myself from the economy, my student loans, and the fact that every good job I can find requires an engineering or business degree that I don't have. (They were lying when they said I could be anything I wanted. I've decided that I'm forcing my future children into whatever career is most economically viable at the time, regardless of how they feel about it. You want to be an artist? You're moving out early. Happy fifth birthday, have a suitcase.)
For me (and, presumably, for many others), the act of playing video games is, in part, escapism. This alone makes video games a waste of time, in a way, but it doesn't make them unique. What makes video games unique, if they are unique, is that they're so damn good at entertaining us, which is why it's easy to get "addicted" (and, yes, that might be a legitimate problem for many). Video games are not, in fact, some esoteric "nerd thing" that only "nerds" can enjoy. Of course, everyone probably recognizes this, by now, except for the older generations who have gotten to the point of hating all the new things that they don't understand, like cell phones and the internet. But they'll be dead soon anyway, so I don't have to it to them.
Games, in general, are timeless. Games are something that humans have been using for millennia to escape from the horrors of everyday life. I'd even argue that playing games is a part of being human, and I'd like to see you try to prove me wrong. Any game, by the strictest standards, is a complete and utter waste of precious time, but that's exactly why we play them. A game whose rules are enforced by a computer really isn't so different.
