A recent article in The Economist discusses a potential correlation between playing videogames and unemployment.
Basically, the main takeaway is that a decrease in employment opportunity for young college grads combined with the ever increasing quality of more and more immersive videogames has led to an increase in young unemployed men spending more time gaming. This has the potential to become a bit of a vicious cycle if these people spend more time getting sucked into gaming activities in lieu of looking for a job.
Or, the flip side is that it provides a useful social and creative outlet for men to fill their days until they manage to get their careers off the ground.
My own personal take as a casual gamer who is a bit older than the demographic they describe is that I can see how many of these games out there can be a huge time suck if you aren’t careful. I’m gainfully employed with a wife and two kids and I barely have time to “game”. Which is unfortunate as the games I tend to enjoy take up a lot of time.
I’m not sure about the causality. It seems unlikely that most of those people are choosing unemployment to dedicate that 40 hours/week to video games. More likely is that when you’re unemployed or underemployed, cheap hobbies are attractive and gaming is, in dollars per hour, quite affordable. It has both high quantity and quality per dollar. In the recessions of the early 80s and 90s, they might have been drinking cheap beer, hanging out in the streets and watching sports and sitcoms instead.
I remember in Iraq there was a terrorist house with an original x-box turned out that was where they were storing their secret data. The fact that they didn’t have any games was a bit of a giveaway.
Agreed. Correlation does not equal causation. Even if it does, it’s not always in the direction you think.
I know that when I was unemployed, I could only spend about three hours a day looking for a job before feeling burned out. Job posts aren’t that frequent, and some of them repeat. So what are you supposed to do for the other six hours that you would normally be working?
Some people watch TV. Others read. Still others play video games. Anything with a low cost/time ratio. You have to do something while waiting for HR to process your résumé.
I miss gaming but it’s a huge time suck and I haven’t had the spare time for it since I met my wife/grad school.
I would guess that the link is the opposite that those who have more spare time are more likely to be less successful and those that have spare time can fill it with video games. Of course, family time is a huge time suck too so maybe it’s you can do only do two out of three, family, business success, time-sucking hobby.
I guess you could do all three is you gave up sleeping since you’d pick up an additional 8 hours per day. Where is that other thread about never sleeping?
I had a lot more time to play videogames when I was single and lived by myself (or between employment). The problem for me is that they are such a big time suck. So with a job, wife and kids, maybe I squeeze in a few hours here and there. But even when I had the time, after a couple of hours, I tend to feel like there is something more productive I should be doing with my time.
In Britain thanks to administrations of all colours — since all politicians are supervisor wannabes — to receive jobless benefits one would be required to do nothing but seek work for 36 hours a week. And document it.
This has the merit of being insane.
The problem becomes when you say “well, I didn’t get around to getting my resume tuned for that job today, because I was busy gaming - I’ll just send out my untuned resume.” Looking for a job takes time, and its a horrible process that it can be really easy to procrastinate on - needing to participate in a raid with your guild is about the perfect rationale to put off a job search. And since gaming often gives you the positive feedback you need - while interviewing can be endless rejection (if you even get as far as the interview), it can become really easy to choose the thing that makes you feel good in the short term.
I don’t think many people consciously choose unemployment to game, but I think gaming can become an obstacle in the search process.
Maybe not quite what you’re looking for, but I briefly dated a guy who quit his job so that he could play video games. His buddy, who only held seasonal jobs and was unemployed at the time, had gotten ahead of him in some game they were both playing. Ex-boyfriend couldn’t handle the fact that his friend was beating him, I had to hear the whole sob story/temper tantrum. Ex called in “sick” to work the next morning (not the first time he’d done this) and his boss told him to either come in that day or not bother coming back at all. Ex said “I guess I’m not coming back then.”
I broke up with him when I found out that he had quit his job. That wasn’t the whole reason but it was the last straw. Ex said his old job would take him back because they needed him. I have no idea if he got his job back or not or what he’s doing now. This wasn’t when we were teenagers either, we were both in our 30s.
I’ve been working in the video game field for over twenty years and I can attest to this. I’m currently out of work because my company went out of business (like many game companies do).
So no, not the way the OP intended. On the other hand, I am playing a lot of video games right now because I’ve got lots of free time…
I always felt like I had to explain to my parents, when they asked what I was doing this weekend, that I was staying in and playing video games because it’s worlds cheaper to run to Gamestop and buy a used copy of Skyrim and a used copy of Fallout 4, at about 40 bucks total, and play all day versus going out and spending money on a movie/shopping/gofling/drinking etc.
This is another thing I would do. I would beat myself up and feel terrible when I would game instead of job search. I felt that because I didn’t have a job, I didn’t deserve to do things I enjoyed (like playing games). I eventually had to force myself to be ok with it because of the exact reasons you specified. You literally can’t job search for 8 hours every day, there just aren’t enough jobs there and even when you’re in the interview process…it takes time.
I agree with most of what was said: Gaming is relatively inexpensive once you have a system to game on, you can only spend so many hours a day filling out applications/sending resumes (esp since there’s limited positions to apply for), leisure time spent gaming isn’t effectively different from leisure time spent watching TV, etc.
However, I do think it’s worthwhile to note that games have grown progressively more clever at hooking people and getting you to spend time. Especially games that rely on subscriptions or cash shops since they need you actively playing for them to make money. I could see where getting constant incremental gains in a game (new sword, new level, unlock new buildings, “daily” missions) can feel much more rewarding than throwing resumes down the Hole of No Return. Many games these days are actively designed around triggering the reward centers of your brain and turning you into a button-pushing rat. And, for some people, that can’t be conducive to a full-throated job search.
Not to hijack my own thread, but I have two minds on the topic of jobhunting (having done several myself over the past few years). You could spend 8 hours a day performing tasks related to job hunting. Sending out resumes and applications is but a small part of it. Networking, researching industries and companies, building your skill sets can and should occupy a large portion of your day as well.
That said, it’s still a pretty monotonous and soul-crushing task as there is often little to no feedback on your progress and the results are often intangible until you land an interview or job. So scheduling some time to unwind (such as playing videogames) is not necessarily a bad idea.
It’s not. And many of the games I play are open-ended sandbox games. So there literally is nothing to tell you “Game Over…go do something else”. So it can become very easy for an hour a day of gaming to turn into just one day a week of gaming which can turn into I didn’t send any resumes or make any calls this week.
My Dad used to spend at chess, Tron and Minesweeper between two and six hours, four to six days a week - and that was on an MSX. He was factory manager at the time. I’ve had coworkers who could spend hours on WoW, but also on chess online, specially when we were stationed away from home.
Is it possible to get sucked in so badly that you stop doing what you should? Sure, but right now I’m recalling an old book about a man whose brain got dried up by too many chivalrous tales*… the issue is not with videogames, any more than it was with tales of valiant knights.
some dude from La Mancha, although for the life of me I cannot recall the name of the village.