
The Economist and Reason Magazine recently wrote about a disturbing phenomenon that probably deserves national crisis-level attention: A significant percentage of young men seem to be giving up on the real world to live in a virtual one. Trouble is, we don't know how many, but the numbers seem to be in the millions:
Over the last 15 years there has been a steady and disconcerting leak of young people away from the labour force in America. Between 2000 and 2015, the employment rate for men in their 20s without a college education dropped ten percentage points, from 82% to 72%. In 2015, remarkably, 22% of men in this group – a cohort of people in the most consequential years of their working lives – reported to surveyors that they had not worked at all in the prior 12 months. That was in 2015: when the unemployment rate nationwide fell to 5%, and the American economy added 2.7m new jobs. Back in 2000, less than 10% of such men were in similar circumstances.
What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games.
We don't know how many of these men are giving up on real life for virtual worlds in a meaningful sense -- as opposed to, say, obsessively (but temporarily) playing Skyrim to get over a recent breakup, or simply because Skyrim or another particular game happens to be awesome. The challenge, top games and sociology researcher Nick Yee tells me, is finding the right data to measure this phenomenon:
"The most representative gaming data we have tends to be transactional/sales data," Nick tells me. "Academics have trouble getting representative samples. And industry research isn't going to ask this question." (For obvious reasons.) Then there's a structural challenge: