Recently, I sunk over 120 hours into a playthrough of Elden Ring. That comes out to an average of 2-3 hours a day. I’m a married man with college degrees and a lot of things to do, but much of my free time went into fighting monsters and exploring The Lands Between in a single-player game (I only spent a few hours in Elden Ring’s online mode).
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So Are Video Games Actually a Waste of Time?
Whenever I finish a game binge of this sort, I feel a little like when I’ve eaten too much junk food (or drank too much). Why? I ask myself. Why did I do this? That’s a lot of time! Think of all the other things I could have been
doing! At root, these questions come down to two basic worries: First, how much is too much? And second, are video games in general just a waste of time?
We’ll deal with the second, more worrisome question first. Spoiler alert: my answer is no. Video games aren’t simply a waste of time. When I was in college, I’d often come home from the million things I had going on and fire up Final Fantasy IX on the PS1 for an hour or so. While that game is now a classic, the same principle applies to more recent titles as well.
Why Games Give You Something Real Life Doesn't
Taking a break with a game, whether it’s a nostalgic favorite or something new, offers a bit of instant gratification and achievement amid life’s bigger challenges. Doing well in my courses (or later, in my job) was a long-term process. Often, it requires consistent hard work and attention for a long period of time before you really see the fruits of your labor. Sometimes you’re not in a position to see how things turn out, and you just have to hope that your work accomplished something. But video games reward your effort incrementally and reliably.
It’s nice to have an hour of that at the end of a hard day of uncertain rewards. Not just as an escape (though that’s useful, too), but also in a way as a confirmation that working at things does achieve results.
The term “gamification” describes attempts to tie the satisfaction of visible achievement in video games back into the real world, in the fields of education, training, and marketing, in particular think fitness app streaks, Duolingo’s XP and badges, or workplace productivity leaderboards. Gamification is born of the feeling that there’s something games give us that we don’t get as easily from the rest of the world.
When Gaming Becomes Too Much
Getting that from games is not a waste of time. Sure, you can go too far. I call my Elden Ring binge a binge for a reason because it was too much of a good thing. But I don’t do that all the time, and every once in a while it’s nice just to splurge, whether it’s on gaming, junk food, shopping, or whatever.
The fact that you can overdo something does not make that thing innately bad. You can do too much exercise, too, or spend an unhealthy amount of time with a particular person, or pour yourself too much into your work. Whether or not you have a healthy balance of activities in your life is a separate question.
Games Are No Different Than Other Entertainment
Some might argue that video games are not inherently as valuable as work, spending time with a person, or exercise. The same argument could be made against movies, or novels, or music, or paying attention to (as opposed to playing) sports. Much of the value of any of these activities is intangible.
What Games Give You That Books, Sports, and Music Do Too
What do you get from a novel? Maybe you think a little differently about things after having considered a character’s perspective for a few hours. Games can do this, too (and put you in that character’s shoes or let you
make their tough decisions). Maybe you just let your imagination run free in a fun fantasy world. Imagination is good. Games do this, too.
What do you get from watching sports? The joy of watching people at the top of their game perform with consummate skill and talent, for one. Esports show how this applies to video games, too. But something else we get from watching sports or playing video games (or having pets, or having a couple of drinks) is a social lubricant.
If I’m at a party or work function, standing around looking for a social ice breaker, both sports and video games can be really helpful (so can movies, books, TV, etc.). If you find out that both you and a person you’re chatting with like Elden Ring (or the Cubs), suddenly you have a lot to talk about.
Often, someone halfway across the room will overhear a snippet of that conversation and come join you (“Are you talking about The Lands Between? Did you choose to take on Malenia or go for all the endings?”). If you’re playing a multiplayer game, game-based socialization is even more immediate.
What do you get from music? Music, more than other forms of art and entertainment, is perceived to be a less intellectual, more emotional experience. This doesn’t have to be the case, of course, but it certainly reflects what many people use music for to get in a certain mood, whether it’s to wind down or amp up. (It’s why athletes have a certain song play when they appear and not a certain quotation from a poem or movie.)
Games as a Mood Adjuster
Games can serve as mood adjusters, too. I’m not a violent person, nor do I see violence as a great solution to the vast majority of personal, community, or national problems. But I like a lot of violent video games. As someone in my mid-forties, I think I can safely say that over 30 years of playing violent video games has not warped me terribly as a human being. But they do serve as a nice outlet for the frustrations of the day.
When I play God of War, for example, it’s not like I think of particular people or events of the day that frustrated me. I’m not imagining pulling a headshot on someone I know. Rather, I’m adjusting my mood – letting out some tension and worry in a silly, immediately gratifying way. Sometimes that means a hack-and-slash like God of War to release stress, or a relaxing game like Stardew Valley, Spiritfarer, or Gris, the gaming equivalent of music to wind down to.
Stop Dismissing Video Games
There are many, many more reasons to play games than the ones I’ve discussed here, of course. But I think these are enough to make the point that simply dismissing games as a waste of time is ignorant. Popular media have been dismissed in this way for centuries. A couple of hundred years ago, it was the novel that was destroying high culture, then film, and now video games.
Certainly, there is a lot of silliness and escapism going on in gaming, along with hate and ignorance and childishness (often from children), as anyone who’s played in an online multiplayer session is painfully aware. Games can be venues for bad social impulses as well as good ones.
But the games are just that venues more than sources for these behaviors. They're also venues for positive solo and interpersonal experiences. 120 hours in Elden Ring might not be the sort of thing I want to do year-round, but every once in a while, it’s kind of nice.
