How Might Video Games Be Good for Us?
How Might Video Games Be Good for Us?
Is gameplay good for us? It’s a question I hear daily from gamers - as well as from their parents, teachers, doctors, therapists, and pastors.
There’s certainly good reason to ask this question. Collectively, as a planet, we now spend more than one billion hours every single day playing videogames - a total that’s up more than 50% from just three years ago. Meanwhile, the average young person racks up 10,000 hours playing videogames by the age of twenty-one. (By comparison, they will spend just 10,084 hours in the classroom throughout all of middle school and high school combined.)
The more we play, the more we reasonably want to know: Are we spending our time wisely, or are we wasting it? Are games a “good” use of our lives?
Let me propose three different ways of looking for the “good” of games - three questions that define “good for us” in substantially different ways.