Why video games slash young men’s workweeks
If innovations in housework helped free women to enter the labor force in the 1960s and 1970s, could innovations in leisure — like League of Legends — be taking men out of the labor force today?
That’s the logic behind a working paper released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper — by economists Erik Hurst, Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils and Kerwin Charles — argues that video games help explain why younger men are working fewer hours.
That claim got a lot of attention last year when the University of Chicago published a graduation speech given by Hurst. He says the paper is now ready to be read by the public.
By 2015, American men 31 to 55 were working about 163 fewer hours a year than that same age group did in 2000. Men 21 to 30 were working 203 fewer hours a year. One puzzle is why the working hours for young men fell so much more than those of their older counterparts. The gap between the two groups grew by about 40 hours a year, or a full workweek on average.
They don’t want jobs?
Other experts have pointed to a host of reasons — globalization, technological change, the shift to service work — that employers may not be hiring young men. Instead of looking at why employers don’t want young men, this group of economists considered a different question: Why don’t young men want to work?
Hurst and his colleagues estimate that, since 2004, video games have been responsible for reducing the amount of work that young men do by 15 to 30 hours over the course of a year. Using the recession as a natural experiment, they studied how people who found themselves with extra time spent their leisure hours, then estimated how increases in video game time affected work.
Between 2004 and 2015, young men’s leisure time grew by 2.3 hours a week. A majority of that increase — 60 percent — was spent playing video games, according to government surveys. In contrast, young women’s leisure time grew by 1.4 hours a week. A negligible amount of that extra time was spent on video games. Likewise for older men and older women: Neither group reported having spent any meaningful extra free time playing video games.
The analysis excluded full-time students, and showed that the amount of time young men spent on household chores or child care was not going up.
Lasting for days
In some ways, the increase in video game time for men makes sense: Median wages for men have been stagnant, and the quality of video games has grown significantly. In the 1990s, games like Mario Bros. were little more than eight-bit virtual toys. Today, you and your buddies can go on quests in games like “World of Warcraft” that last for days.
Large social video games did not become hugely popular until the release of “World of Warcraft” in late 2004.
Experts say that the social aspect is particularly important.
“Games provide a sense of waking in the morning with one goal: I’m trying to improve this skill, teammates are counting on me, and my online community is relying on me,” said Jane McGonigal, a video game scholar and game designer. “There is a routine and daily progress that does a good job at replacing traditional work.”
Adam Alter, a professor of marketing and psychology at New York University, highlighted the fact that, unlike TV shows or concerts, today’s video games don’t end.
Most forms of entertainment have some form of a stopping cue — signals that remind you that an act or episode is ending, like a commercial or a timer.
“Many video games don’t have them,” Alter said. “They’re built to be endless or have long-range goals that we don’t like to abandon.”
No increase for women
These characteristics make video games attractive to many people, and 41 percent of the American game-playing population are women, according to the video gaming advocacy group Entertainment Software Association. But this data showed no rise in video game time for women.
Some economists are skeptical of the conclusions, pointing out that the labor force participation rates for young men in other countries where video games are popular, like Japan, have not fallen in similar fashion.