Link to my recent Substack article, if you want pictures and links. Reposting the full text here.
When I was five years old, I got a GameBoy Color for Christmas. I started with only one game: Pokémon Red.
I proceeded to train Pokémon so much over the next week and withdraw so much from the world that my mom had to take my GameBoy back a few days after Christmas. That ended up being the first of hundreds of similar fights over my time spent gaming that we had throughout my childhood.
Video games are a controversial topic in the modern world. Nowadays, most parents are at least aware of the dangers of screen time and letting children spend too much time in front of a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. Not that every parent cares, or has the time/attention/energy/discipline to keep their kids away from screens.
But for those of us growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, this cultural awareness wasn’t there yet. During my own childhood, I spent many thousands of hours in front of a screen, mostly playing video games. Someone in my corner of Twitter, , recently posted about this phenomenon. Here’s a quoted excerpt, but I’d recommend reading the full tweet (really a short article) if you’re curious:
so, just objectively - without any ethical judgement at all, our parents (speaking generally) just had us in front of screens for literally thousands of hours. many thousands. if i expanded the range here (down into age 7 and up into 14) and really squeezed it, its possible we could get close to 10,000 hours.
For especially young male millennials, this amount of screentime was quite common. Owen even admits later in the tweet that he is probably on the low end of the spectrum, since he was mostly playing games like Harvest Moon and never got into TV or movies.
Growing Up with Games
After I graduated high school and went off to college, I gradually accepted that I had a bit of a problem when it came to time spent gaming, and decided to quit playing video games entirely. I felt a lot of shame about the fact that I had, as I saw it, “wasted” so much of my life sitting in front of a screen.
However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to change my mind on video games to some degree. I’ve slowly picked the controller (or mouse and keyboard, as it were) back up. The natural constraints of working a full-time job, living with my girlfriend (and now fiancé), being involved in my church community, as well as working out and staying physically fit, have helped me balance video games with the rest of my life.
I’ve found that gaming just fills something in my soul that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. There’s a sort of instant camaraderie you get when you join a community of gamers and start playing together. I recently had one of the most wholesome nights of my life gaming with a group of guys I had only met a couple weeks prior.
So, we were gaming as per usual. I played pretty badly, and lost hard. I rage quit the game, left the Discord voice chat. Checked 10 minutes later and they were all pinging me, sending GIFs of dudes kissing saying “this could be us.”
I replied by posting some stupid copypasta calling them all degen retarded apes. Then they brought me back, had me play again, gave me a bunch of buffs so I easily steamrolled everybody as they gassed me up.
It’s hard to describe how wholesome it felt… I was so ashamed at losing so badly and then rage quitting, only to see 10+ guys all immediately coming out in support. Keep in mind these dudes also constantly flame each other and call each other retards and other things I won’t repeat here on the daily.
And yet when I had a bad time, they all immediately came together and spent over an hour of their night building me back up. It actually brought tears to my eyes when I thought about it.
Gaming gets a lot of flak from all corners, and there are obviously many problems with gaming addiction, escapism, etc. But where else in today’s world can a young man experience this sort of instant camaraderie with other young men, doing a shared activity he actually gives a shit about? The opportunities in the “real world” seem vanishingly rare, for one reason or another.
I was addicted to gaming growing up and felt a lot of shame around it for a long time. But I’m getting more into it recently and I’m glad I am. I love gaming and all the beautiful, absurd, ridiculous moments it can lead to. I hope if I have kids I can teach them to game from a place of joy and balance so they can enjoy it too, and maybe we can even game together.
I’ve done a lot of emotional work and somatic meditation around shame, and as anyone who has done this work knows, it can be hard to make progress. You can get stuck at the same spot for months, or years.
Reflecting on how it felt to get support from this random community of gamers, I felt a huge knot release deep in my stomach and lower back. It’s hard to explain how strongly it impacted me, to experience a community come together to support me when I felt such deep shame. When I thought for sure I’d be rejected.
Striving, Competition, Aggression
Another benefit of coming back to gaming from a more mature space is learning to strive and compete in a healthy way. If you can’t tell from the story above, I’ve struggle with a tendency to be a sore loser. Video games provide me a somewhat low-stakes environment to practice failing at something and resolving to get better instead of just sinking into negative and unproductive emotions, venting rage, or other destructive reactions.
Perhaps most importantly, video games allow us to connect with an unfettered and childlike joy! It can be so hard to find a place where joy, excitement, and silliness are not just allowed, but shared by a whole group. Gaming, at its best, is all about fun and connecting with that childlike sense of joy. And while there can definitely be a lot of toxicity in the gaming world, some communities are able to bring that joy to the forefront quite often.
Now, would it be ideal to find this sort of wholesome support and community in the physical world, wrapped up in a set of deeper and more grounded relationships? Absolutely. I don’t doubt that for a second.
Unfortunately though, the opportunity for this sort of connection, especially for young men, has become harder to find than perhaps ever. The most common similar social group would be a sports team, but for myself (and I know for many, many other young men in my generation) sports and the culture around it is so alien as to be almost impossible to get into.
But even with sports teams, it’s difficult to find a group where you can have an experience like the one I described above. Especially when it comes to… innapropriate behavior like everyone calling me a retard and making gay jokes. As a friend put it to me when I shared the story, the type of bonding and community I described above is pretty uniquely male.
The ability to turn on a dime from giving someone shit and calling them all sorts of offensive names to supporting them and building them up isn’t something you often see in groups where women are involved. There have been endless online screeds about the problem of incels and otherwise disaffected young men becoming a lot more common, and I think a huge reason for this is that it’s very difficult for young men to access male-only spaces. You can’t really have the same level of offensive behavior when women are around, even if the women are totally down. Socially, it just isn’t the same.
In fact, gaming is one of the last places men can congregate together in at least somewhat private groups and break social norms, say offensive things, and not be scolded or censored for it.
While the dopamine induced from the flashing lights and compelling music that video games provide does explain part of video game addiction, I think the greater part here is actually the fact that many young men find real community and a real chance to be themselves and connect in a way that feels right from a masculine perspective. Again, something that is increasingly hard to find in the physical world.
Overall I still have a complicated relationship with gaming. I often wonder whether my life would feel more complete and satisfying if I were able to put the same energy into different pursuits. Many people I respect, like Simon Sarris, have claimed that once you find more meaningful activities to passionately engage with, gaming no longer attracts you.
Video games lost their appeal coinciding with starting to date my wife. I think I can credit desire with a major change in perspective. Realizing that I wanted more/other things. My (then) gf of course but a trajectory for life generally…
Having an opportunity to make a house and gardens made it very easy to give up something like video games. I used to make beautiful structures in minecraft, but its a bore compared to physicality. I feel like I am shaping my own little national park. For my family, for the town.
I’ve related more and less to the quote above at various times in my life. Unfortunately, whatever I tend to put my energy and effort in ends up disappointing somehow, or perhaps I simply lose my zeal for it.
Either way, for the moment at least, I’m happy to continue gaming. While it may not be ‘productive’ in a certain sense, I’m learning to strive and connect with others in a healthier way. Plus I’m just having fun.
I don’t know what God has in store for my life, but I do hope that even as I get older, I at least dust off my gaming PC or console or VR headset (or whatever people use to game in the future) once or twice every year or two.
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Notes -
FWIW, I also played a ton of videogames growing up. I lived in the middle of nowhere and "other kids to play with" weren't a thing that existed. I enjoyed the PS2 era, grew up on Grand Theft Auto, Madden, and Max Payne. My username is a reference to Ace Combat: The Belkan War.
Unlike you, I mostly played single player. LAN parties were a thing in boarding school such that I briefly became competent (but not good!) at Counter Strike: Source and had built a modest gaming PC, but I didn't get into the likes of WOW and wasn't very good at RTS games. Around 18 I mostly lost interest. PS3 games were slow to appear and Madden in particular was godawful after the switch. I never got into multiplayer online aside from Battlefield 3. That, and GTA 4 and the DLCs were the highlight of my time with the PS3.
I've occasionally had games reel me back in, but rarely. Far Cry 4 and 5 were fun but I wasn't impressed with Far Cry 6. Metro 2033 and and Ace Combat 7 were fun, but didn't keep me reeled in long term. My PS4 mostly collects dust these days and if anything I wish it could play the old PS2 games so I could give B7R another go.
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If the brain is a prediction machine, tricking it into playing video games is a fantastic way to get reps in. With tradeoffs, natch.
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According to my parents I learned how to read from playing Pokemon Blue. I had like 10 words when my parents gave me the gameboy on some early Christmas and used to bug them constantly to read out the screen, yet after 3 months I'd become essentially literate.
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What proportion of men do you think are comfortable with this kind of bonding, and how do you detect if someone is going to be receptive to it? Is it perhaps less common among people on the autistic spectrum?
Personally I rarely experienced the kind of teasing you mentioned, and never in a group setting. If someone called me a retard because I did something stupid, I would just feel bad, and I’d try to appease or avoid the person somehow. My thought is that it’s related to autism making it difficult not to take sentences literally.
But what’s the point in insulting the other person? Why not just stick to supporting them in the first place?
This scene from Gran Turino probably best embodies why guys banter in profane and seemingly-offensive ways: it's a counterintuitive means of signaling a deeper intimacy beyond the typical small talk that would take place in a conversation with a stranger or casual acquaintance. The subtext is, "I can say absolutely (well, nearly) anything to your face, because you know that I love and care about you at the end of the day". Because most men traditionally would never say that actual phrase out loud.
From personal experience, it's also an amusing way to get reactions from oblivious eavesdroppers who are like "wtf are these guys' problems with each other?"
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I'm autistic myself, and it took me a while to get this kind of banter, but I think there are a few social things it does which are closely intertwined and hard to tease apart.
It sets terms of 'what this group cares about' and thereby gives you a legible path towards improvement. If people rag on you for sucking at Starcraft micro, then probably a) getting better at Starcraft is likely to get you more approval from them and b) you now know a particular weakness of yours to work on.
It gives people motivation to improve. I don't mean this in a "making someone's life unpleasant until they shape up or leave" kind of way, I mean that a lot of people get more drive from the feeling of wanting to show up some guy who's been putting them down, and will seek out that kind of pressure.
It lets people develop reputations for being good at something, and simultaneously encodes ways to challenge those reputations to ensure that they're truthful and current. If you want to know how to do Specific Thing X, the person who is best at ragging on other people about it and gets ragged on the least is probably worth watching to learn what they know - and if you think someone's reputation is overblown, you have a group-endorsed way to show it.
It lets people express and coordinate on a limited scope of competition. Consistently being insulted within the bounds of activity X and communication related to it and consistently not being insulted outside of that means that you don't have to put up as much defensiveness and self-censorship on non-X topics. The insults happen, but they happen when you have your Game Face on, it is expected, and so it is easier to shrug off.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the contrast helps ensure the support is genuine and meaningful. Someone who is supportive, all the time, to everyone... well, that support might turn out to be very shallow. Maybe they don't like pressure or conflict, and if you lean on them much at all the support will crumble. Maybe they don't have any idea what they're being supportive about, and you can't trust anything they say to indicate whether you're doing well or poorly. Maybe they're a perennial people-pleaser and they'll support you just as much as they'll support the weirdo in the other room you don't care about, and just as much as the jerk who wants to muscle in on your turf. Maybe they really are the all-around teddy bear they look like. But it's hard to be sure. If someone has called you a dumbfuck three times today because you did something that was, in retrospect, actually wrong, and then they have your back wholeheartedly and are explaining how to do better? You know they don't need your approval. You know they can lock horns with you. You know they're not palming you off with nice-sounding platitudes, like a parent pinning a five-year-old's stick figure up next to a masterpiece. And they're helping you anyway.
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Idk if I'd say comfortable necessarily, but I think the vast majority of men throughout human history related this way. It's only recently as we have become extremely feminized as a society that it stopped. Nowadays, I'd hazard a guess but over 50% I'd imagine in the U.S. Far greater worldwide.
Not sure I can explain it to an autistic person, but it's basically something like - you're fighting for status but in a fun way? I'm sure there are better explanations out there. I'm not sure I get it myself tbh.
Is that a bad thing? Society being more feminised has led to a drastic reduction in everyday violence. I’m glad there was no serious physical bullying when I went to high school, judging by older generations and media depictions, it was rampant and traumatic.
I must be too autistic because that doesn’t seem fun to me. The last thing I’d want to do with my friends is fight for status, but hierarchies and rankings and competitive games have always made been a source of stress and I wouldn’t want to introduce that in what’s supposed to be my relaxing wind down time.
It was there. Hard to say how rampant it was. Of say, 10 guys I was close with growing up, two of us had that kind of experience and the other one basically spent middle school in the hood.
Instead, now kids get an unholy Mean Girls panopticon where cruel rumors (complete with memes, diss tracks, and AI videos) spread across entire counties in an afternoon.
Not sure that was an upgrade, overall.
What are your testosterone levels?
Banning smartphones in schools is looking like a very good idea to be honest.
Around 1 nmol/L or 29 ng/dL, but that’s not a problem let’s say :p
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Depends on your view. Personally I think it's horrifically bad for men, and bad for society overall over time. Yes everyday violence has decreased, but deaths of despair and general malaise are on the rise, lack of social cohesion, lack of plain role models and legible life paths for people to follow. Much of this is related to the dearth of the masculine.
Do you think masculinity as a whole is bad or evil?
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