cormack12
Gold Member
Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/games/a...real-reason-teens-are-addicted-to-video-games
If we want to know why many teens choose of their own free will to spend 10 or 20 hours a week playing games, rather than pathologising them, we ought to look around us.
Gen Z are the most closely monitored generation ever to be born. We criticise children and teenagers for not going outside – but at the same time we’re curtailing their freedoms and closing their spaces. Parents will reminisce about how they spent whole days outside, cycling the neighbourhood, but at the same time they’re treating their children’s smartphones like tracking devices, demanding regular check-ins, infiltrating their social media feeds and databasing their activities and friend groups. The pandemic may have abated, but it wasn’t just lockdowns that were keeping kids indoors.
The nightclub industry is in freefall. Teenagers can’t hang around in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided these rare recreational spaces belong to their toddlers alone; city squares and skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, monitored via CCTV and policed by private security guards.
No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures – the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control. You can spend all day with your friends in Red Dead Redemption or Minecraft or Fortnite doing whatever you like, without being moved on or complained about, or having to spend £5 on a latte every 30 minutes. If you can’t access therapy, at least you can relax with comforting games such as Stardew Valley, Unpacking or Coffee Talk, or chat things through with your friends in-game. You can travel freely, and for free, in Elden Ring or Legend of Zelda; no elderly relatives can suddenly vote to restrict your access to the continent in Euro Truck Simulator.
.....end article
I guess we just ignore the obese, lazy bastards and the fact that so many online spaces are becoming over moderated/sanitised unless you share the common values. Hence the histrionics over twitter.
If we want to know why many teens choose of their own free will to spend 10 or 20 hours a week playing games, rather than pathologising them, we ought to look around us.
Gen Z are the most closely monitored generation ever to be born. We criticise children and teenagers for not going outside – but at the same time we’re curtailing their freedoms and closing their spaces. Parents will reminisce about how they spent whole days outside, cycling the neighbourhood, but at the same time they’re treating their children’s smartphones like tracking devices, demanding regular check-ins, infiltrating their social media feeds and databasing their activities and friend groups. The pandemic may have abated, but it wasn’t just lockdowns that were keeping kids indoors.
The nightclub industry is in freefall. Teenagers can’t hang around in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided these rare recreational spaces belong to their toddlers alone; city squares and skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, monitored via CCTV and policed by private security guards.
No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures – the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control. You can spend all day with your friends in Red Dead Redemption or Minecraft or Fortnite doing whatever you like, without being moved on or complained about, or having to spend £5 on a latte every 30 minutes. If you can’t access therapy, at least you can relax with comforting games such as Stardew Valley, Unpacking or Coffee Talk, or chat things through with your friends in-game. You can travel freely, and for free, in Elden Ring or Legend of Zelda; no elderly relatives can suddenly vote to restrict your access to the continent in Euro Truck Simulator.
.....end article
I guess we just ignore the obese, lazy bastards and the fact that so many online spaces are becoming over moderated/sanitised unless you share the common values. Hence the histrionics over twitter.
