Video Games as Being Detrimental to Society

Speaking as a young man unemployed for a long time and someone who grew up in the 'videogame' generation of this island, I think I better postulate that there is actually a lot more going on here than just the degenerative effects of videogames on culture and society and why it affects young men disproportionately.

Going beyond the obvious appeals of games to the male of the species (which is a well known fact as old as the medium itself) the simple fact of the matter is this: Young men have absolutely no hope of starting a career, they have no hope of owning a home of their own and, I am going to need a female perspective to confirm this for me but, I sincerely suspect much like whats happening with the MGTOW movement in America (as much as I dislike it) getting up off the couch, finding a young woman to marry and start a family is simply increasingly not worth it. These men have no hope of a good career, are crushed under debt, both personal and national, and with the destruction of the family and the liberalisation and sexualization of the culture, why bother going through the risk of getting married if, as is the trend elsewhere in the west, they are increasingly likely to be divorced and lose most of whats theirs, including children? Videogames, even if we accept all the ill effects they are purported to cause as true are a symptom, not a cause.

Had we existed in a world without them, these young men would all be on drugs instead. Or would already be on the streets causing a revolution as angry young men without hope are wont to do. They have run the gamet of life from cradle to University and have less to show for it than their fathers did who dragged bags of coal for a living. Heckling them to get up off their arses and fight won't do any good and will only cause them to sink further into their couches in spite. You need to give them something to fight for, and that, I feel, is the real problem. We have nothing to offer them.

Quickly - glad to see this thread and can't say much, as I know virtually nothing at all about video games! So I definitely need to be educated and was grateful for your link seangladium.

Your comments servantofthechief were also very helpful to me - I am woefully out of touch with your generation. So hard to keep up with everything!





This is intriguing. Yes, these things aren't going away - so the question should become, I think, can they be lifted up into a more artistic and aesthetic experience?

Or might there even be a possibility of Catholic and Christian games coming into existence one day . . .?

The problem here is exactly what you describe: All the opportunities are in Dublin, and virtually nowhere else on the island, except occasional jobs in the other cities in Ireland, Northern Ireland has the same problem but all the centralisation is focused on Belfast. Globalisation has effectively made these two cities the only cities that matter economically on the island.

This wouldn't be a problem... If most people could actually afford to move to these cities in the first place for work. They simply can't the majority of the time unless they are already living in Dublin or near it (which I will grant, is about half the population of the island at present), to take an example from my own life, my last job was in Belfast, paying a wage of 9-10 pounds sterling per hour. I had to travel between one to one and a half hours to and again from work and home where I lived, simply because getting somewhere in Belfast that was affordable for someone making my wages was just nearly impossible, as was getting anywhere cheap enough from any of the towns and cities on the way to Belfast that were affordable, so I was forced to become a 'super commuter' as to what they are called now, so anything between 2-4 hours of my job was simply travelling to make ends meet. It was an entry level job too, so unless you won the Post Code Lottery, you were essentially screwed if you wanted a job that can give you an actual career path. Dublin, I would imagine, is far worse for this kind of effect for anyone who was not living within easy travel distance of Cork, Galway or Wexford, which are also job hubs but nothing on par with Dublin. Its even worse in England with the Behemoth that is London sitting on the Thames like a vampire sucking the life out of England.

And as bad as all this is, its only bad news for those who sucked it up and got a degree, its worse in some ways (though better in others) for actual tradesmen, but it depends on how much of a demand there is for those trades at any given time. I am seriously considering reskilling as a welder so I actually have a trade to work with thirty years from now, because I am seriously seeing nothing on the horizon that's workable for people like me, but even that is merely a stopgap measure to keep my head above water. I know its not as bleak and devastating as it was for Middle America, because Ireland was always an agrarian country (although Dublin and especially Northern Ireland was more industrial focused, the North especially and most of those jobs were dominated by the Protestants for obvious reasons) but that just means we had less of a height to fall from when the Celtic Tiger crashed and the enervating effects of globalisation kicked in. I could also go into detail about how all of this is only going to get so much worse when Automation finally kills off 60-90% of the white collar work of the professionals before cutting their way down and making a lot of labour workers obsolete, but thats another topic and its still 5-10 years away before it gets really bad and noticeable, so I won't go into detail here. Suffice it to say, the majority of people with my skills and degree will simply not be needed and become more or less unemployable. It also doesn't help a great many of the jobs floating about are increasingly temporary in nature, so much so its actually a rarity I see a job with Permenant-full time in its description rather than permenant-temporary full time.

I am not going to excuse the men of my generation, but its very easy to see why quite a few are simply saying to hell with it all, especially in larger countries like the US and the UK.