How video games are shaping boys, for better or for worse

By Claire Cain Miller & Amy Fan In the last decade and a half, boys and young men ages 15-24 more than doubled their average time spent gaming, to about 10 hours a week, according to a major survey.Some teachers say gaming has disrupted focus in classrooms. Some economists have linked it to the decline in young men’s work hours. Many readers told us it was a chief reason for the recent struggles of boys and young men, when we started our series on the subject in May.Yet video games also serve an important role in young people’s lives. They’ve become a central way that young people socialise and provide them – especially boys – with a sense of belonging.The increase in time boys and young men spent playing games was the biggest of any activity measured by the American Time Use Survey, the large federal survey that each year asks a nationally representative sample of thousands of people what they did every minute of a day. (The category includes other types of games, like cards, but evidence suggests it’s mostly video games.)The rise has coincided with technological changes that made games much more engrossing. Gaming went from an activity done at home on a console or computer to one also done on phones, anywhere and anytime.While parents have always worried about video games (especially whether playing certain games causes violence, a connection that has not been proved), a pressing concern now is about time spent playing. As it has increased, the fear is that video games have displaced other activities in boys’ and young men’s lives – including physical activity, in-person socialising, homework, jobs and sleep.”Boys would rather sit in front of Minecraft or Fortnite than play outside,” said Susan Donohoe, an elementary schoolteacher in Portland, Maine. “They are living a virtual life instead of real outside play and chores, which develop social skills and responsibility.”Yet researchers, and teens themselves, said these virtual worlds were also a place to make and build real friendships.Most teenagers play games with others, even if they’re not physically with them, according to a nationwide survey of 1,500 teenagers published last year by the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital.Boys – who researchers say tend to prefer doing activities while they’re spending time with friends, more than having face-to-face conversations – are more likely than girls to game with others, the survey found. They are more likely to talk with friends while playing, like on FaceTime or Discord. And there is a social cost to abstaining.”It’s an opportunity for boys to build up their community and feel connected to others,” said Zhiying Yue, a scientist at the Digital Wellness Lab who is also a gamer.Beckoning BoysThe hobby is nearly universal: 97% of teenage boys play online games, according to a Pew Research Center survey of teenagers last year, as do 73% of girls. But boys spend much more time doing it, the time use survey showed – 10 hours a week in 2024, compared with two for girls.Young people play video games to satisfy core developmental needs, said Yue: competence, by developing mastery; autonomy, by creating avatars and exploring worlds; and relatedness, by connecting with peers. These are things all adolescents crave, research shows. But boys and young men might seek them in the online world at a time when many say they’re feeling adrift in the offline one.The risk is that new technology has made games much more immersive and addictive, said Zach Rausch, chief researcher at Tech and Society Lab at New York University.The major change, he said, came in the 2010s when many games became free to start playing, versus purchased upfront. This shifted companies’ business models – the goal became to maximize the time people spent and incentivize small, in-game purchases.Online games update constantly, reward daily check-ins, sell limited-edition virtual goods and make real-time tweaks to keep players hooked. Many never end, making them hard to put down.By 2015, these changes had reshaped gaming – and the hours boys and young men spent playing had pulled ahead of the hours they spent on sports or hanging out with friends or family, the data shows. Males are more susceptible to video game addiction than females, who are more likely to become addicted to social media, research has shown. One reason is that males tend to be drawn to competition and risk-taking, said Dr. Marc Potenza, who studies addiction at the Yale School of Medicine. Brain scans show that when males play video games, they have stronger activation than females in the brain region involved in reward processing.A Social Outlet, to a PointWhile the Digital Wellness Lab survey found that lonelier adolescents gamed more, gaming didn’t alleviate their loneliness – a pattern that was more pronounced for boys. This could be because those with weak social skills were more comfortable making friends online, but then got less practice interacting offline, researchers said.None of the researchers suggested parents ban video games. Games are important to how children bond today, they said, and there are also benefits for cognitive and problem-solving skills, mood and self-esteem. Instead, they recommended parents play alongside children, monitor the time they spend, and have conversations about risks. Go to Source