In the last decade and a half, boys and young men aged 15 to 24 more than doubled their average time spent gaming, to about 10 hours a week, according to a major survey.
Some economists have linked it to the decline in young men’s work hours.
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 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. 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, US. “They are living a virtual life instead of real outside play and chores, which develop social skills and responsibility.”
Yet researchers, and teenagers themselves, said these virtual worlds were also a place to make and build real friendships.
“The nuance on boys and gaming is completely overlooked,” said Annie Maheux, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, who studies adolescents and digital media. “There’s this social outlet for gaming that much of the research has missed,” she added.
Most teenagers play games with others, according to a nationwide survey of 1,500 teenagers published last year by the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, US. Boys — who researchers say tend to prefer activities while they’re spending time with friends more than 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 their community and feel connected to others,” said Zhiying Yue, a scientist at the Digital Wellness Lab who is also a gamer.
The hobby is nearly universal: 97 per cent of teenage boys play online games, according to a Pew Research Center survey of teenagers last year, as do 73 per cent 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.
Yue said young people play video games to satisfy core developmental needs: competence, by developing mastery; autonomy, by creating avatars and exploring worlds; and relatedness, by connecting with peers. These are things all adolescents crave. 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 the Tech and Society Lab at New York University, US.
The major change, he said, came in the 2010s when many games became free to play, versus purchased upfront. This shifted companies’ business models — the goal became to maximise the time people spent and incentivise 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. Many of the top games played by young people, measured by Morning Consult, a survey firm, are cross-device and multiplayer, and have free-to-play versions, including Roblox, Fortnite and Call of Duty.
While the Digital Wellness Lab survey found that lonelier adolescents gamed more, gaming didn’t alleviate their loneliness. This could be because those with weak social skills were more comfortable making friends online but then got less practice interacting offline, researchers said.
The pandemic supercharged the time spent gaming: males aged 15 to 24 spent 13 hours a week gaming in 2022, up from seven-and-a-half in 2019. Many described it as a welcome way to connect during the lockdown, and evidence suggests it mitigated stress and depression. Since then, time playing games has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“It was really, really helpful to me,” said Julian Minkoff, 19, of playing Fortnite and Minecraft with friends during the pandemic. He still sometimes turns to video games as a way to hang out with friends in his college’s dorms: “It’s really good at creating memories.”
NYTNS