Are Video Games Bad For You?

This came across my RSS today and I though you might be interested.  It is kind of off the beaten path of the RS Economist Blog, but the subject matter is interesting.  The original blog post that brought this to my attention is here and it is about a story from today’s Journal of Youth and Adolescence about how video games are bad for you.

The basic premise is that:

• the more the students play video games, the worse their relationships are with friends and parents (although this effect is modest)
• those who play video games daily smoke pot twice as much as other players and three times more than those who never play
• young women who play often have lower self-esteem

Now I don’t know about you, but I think they got it backwards.  We can all agree that there is a positive correlation between each of the points listed above.  Where I have the problem is, I don’t see a causal relationship there.  I, infact, venture that the opposite is true.

If you don’t like your parents (16 year olds have hated their parents since well before James Dean), then the chances if you playing scrabble with the family are slim and none.  What else does that leave for social activities at home?  Clan chat.

Doing drugs and gaming?  This is a big one with lots of heavy opinions.  I will leave it alone except to day that there is a reason they call social drugs social drugs.

The last one here is a kicker.  How many female players do you know?  How many of them look like Cindy Crawford in your imagination?  My guess is that pretty much all of them do, the imagination is a good thing.  Women are in the minority in gaming and if you are a guy MMORPGing 20 hours a week, some female contact is great.  If in the default world a girl isn’t at the center of the popular clique (and rally who is, it is all a matter of perception), then you probably have a bit of a self esteem problem anyway, heck who in high school doesn’t have some self doublt once in a while.

In conclusion, there sure is a correlation here, but they did not establish causality at all.