Somewhat snarkily....
Smyers is apparently going to have to change her sexual orientation.

I generally, hold to the Aristotilean ideal, that most things are good in moderation, so I doubt video games are in themselves the problem.

To some degree the problem is that while video games now exist, school has gotten a lot less interesting and become much greater drudgery. Additionally, where C's used to be no big deal, now they are, so being the slacker who gets by, just isn't acceptable anymore.

Generally, most problems (I think) can be attributed to a lack of balance.

Yeah, and I played Euchre and drank beer until 3, 4, 5 in the morning....

Here here, Palooza. I'm a college student and I play Euchre and video games until 2 or 3 in the morning usually, but I'm doing quite well in school. It's all time management, I think.

Video games are designed *not* to be played in moderation.

Remember the lab rat that pushes the bar that jolts its pleasure center, until it dies because it won't do anything else, even eat or drink?

Some people's brains evidently are susceptible to video-game addiction. The interesting question is whether or not they'd just be addicted to something else if not for video games.

This is part of my jig saw puzzle theory of social problems. There are many pieces (causal factors)to this problem. Some pieces are rather obvious and some aren't. Some pieces, when solved, lead immediately to other solutions. Others, not so much.

A generation ago, fewer males needed to fit in to academia. There were other outlets. Now, nearly all hs students are pushed to "higher education" whether they want to (or have the sills and maturity to) or not.

Video games are a nefarious plot by the military to both cultivate the skills necessary for high-tech warfare and destroy career paths alternative to it.

:)

Bob

Ah, nothing like dubiously selected anecdotal evidence to establish a thesis. What sloppy thinking...

No evidence is presented that boys who play video games always and inevitably do poorly in school. As a father of 2 teen-age boys, it's been my impression that all teenage boys play video gams and some do excellent work at school and some do not.

Yes, in the past we had Great Men like George W Bush running around Harvard. We know longer have such fine studetns.

While I don't like the "disease paradigm" of video game compulsion
(I'm sure another 12-Step group is forming as I type), I *do* see a
causal connection between a society already given to overstimulation
in the name of creating needs for consumer products (going on at least
since motivation research in advertising) and the quantum leap in
delivering that stimulation through technology.

There are probably as many men unhealthily obsessed with internet porn
as video games, and for the same underlying dynamic.

Males tend to be more suceptible to this, because men are both more
stimulus driven and have to be socialized harder into accepting
deferred gratification.

Just an intuitive guess. Dispute to taste.

Bob

Hmm I play story games, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasies, Prince of Persia, or fun games like Katamari Damacy etc. I hardly ever play sports games and as for military types I play Halo 1,2 and thats about it--and while I do enjoy the online matches, nothing beats trash talking the guy next to you. Plus I play Halo for the story.

I think there's also an important distinction between COMPUTER games and CONSOLE games. Are you playing WoW 20 hours a day? Or Dragon Quest 8?

Which still doesn't go any way toward explaining why boys are choosing to allocate their time so poorly whilst girls are choosing more effectively, assuming girls aren't wasting their time on similarly frivolous endeavors.

Call me when the Women's movement becomes the Children's movement. Until then, boys be damned.

Forget school, vidgamers seem to be self selecting themselves out of the species;>

The phenomena of men withdrawing from the world to play video games or watch cartoons or surf the net is well known in Japan. So many of my friends in the US have fallen into the same lifestyle, if you can call it that, that I'd guess there are millions more throughout the country.

I don't think the games are a cause, but an enabling device. These guys want to withdraw from society. Games give their mind an occupation while they do that. Perhaps before games, they would have read books, or built model ships or something.

Keith G. A generation ago, fewer males needed to fit in to academia. There were other outlets. Now, nearly all hs students are pushed to "higher education" whether they want to (or have the sills and maturity to) or not.

Mmmmhmmmm. This is a problem we have not even begun to address. We barely even talk about it.

Just as marijuana smokers become heroin addicts, so the vidgamers will become bloggers.

*snicker*

I just had to say that.

Gateway addictions . . .

I'm glad you did, jcricket. This blog is as much of a sinkhole as a video game when you get right down to it.

I also have to mention that in the quoted paragraphs, it's women complaining about men. That might go a long way toward explaining it.

More "dubiously selected anecdotal evidence"...

I'm on the bandwagon. I'll go so far as to give the video game mentality partial credit for the puplic's current political polarization.

Today's voter is simply out to win, almost completely regardless of any merits to the opposition's position.

(whatever a 'puplic' is...)

Well, if ou actually have 4 hours a day to play thos egame,s then either you're mighty bad at self-control, or you came so late to the comouter game trend that they still seem really original to you.

Me, I've been playing since 3rd grade, and I'm slowing down if anything. But I will say that in college I knew 3 guys who got in academic trouble on account of playing too much Command & Conquer.

Things were so much better when we were smoking fatties and reading porn.

As others barely mentioned, clicking on Atrios, Political Animal and TPM all day is a bigger problem for older males.

It's not a problem, nut ... I can stop whenever I want...

Keith G:

That's what happens when you let your heavy industrial base go overseas and become a service-sector economy.

In Robert Reich's "The Work of Nations" he calls the key player in the new global economy the Symbolic Analyst. A Symbolic Analyst is the guy/gal who either dreams up a new concept, or facilitates the networking together (often across national borders) of all the different kinds of players it takes to bring that concept to market. These sorts of folks add the most value to a given product, and are thus paid the most handsomely.

Reich contends (perhaps wishfully) that the people engaged in that activity will be the hardest to outsource. East and South Asia are still taking products and business models that America has innovated, and the trick of staying ahead is to keep innovating.

Another common attribute of the Symbolic Analyst is that s/he is a highly educated brainworker. No way around that at all.

Former Labor Secretary Reich is a neoliberal with a good heart and a guilty conscience about being pro free market. What this "optimistic" vision of the American economy leaves out is the fact that an industrial economy employed vast amounts of men without need of the verbal and quantitative skills required for an upwardly mobile future by a service-sector economy. Unionized steel hunkies used to have a vacation cottage and bought new cars every two years.

The other career alternative for these "excess males" -- tragically enough -- is a field where good video game skills is a plus on the resume.

The US military.

Bob

Forget where I read it but there was a rather large study done in the UK on gaming about a year ago and it was about a 53%/47% male/female gamer breakdown. I have two teenage boys who play games daily and they interact with people all day long, boys and girls, playing online games. I might add, quite proudly, they're both straight A students as well.

"I don't think the games are a cause, but an enabling device. These guys want to withdraw from society. Games give their mind an occupation while they do that."

Not just an occupation, they get a false sense of achievment through competition and attaining in-game goals. This is much faster gratification than you get from schooling.

Reading is a way to occupy your time, but there's no competitive aspect, and it lacks the periodic reward aspect of games (which is probably more like gambling.)

Also, games with a networked component offer a kind of social interaction, especially if there is support for voice communication or IM-like chat.

Fred writes:"Forget where I read it but there was a rather large study done in the UK on gaming about a year ago and it was about a 53%/47% male/female gamer breakdown."

Ah, but that's probably just the percentages of who plays games at all. But how much time in a week do the females spend playing games, compared to the males?

"To some degree the problem is that while video games now exist, school has gotten a lot less interesting and become much greater drudgery."

I think that's bunk. School has always been boring drudgery. Conjugating verbs is not fun.

Jon H: I think that's bunk. School has always been boring drudgery. Conjugating verbs is not fun.

That rather depends on with whom one is conjugating.

I'm guessing, from the nature of most of these posts, that there's a dearth of females in this thread. Birke posts "Which still doesn't go any way toward explaining why boys are choosing to allocate their time so poorly whilst girls are choosing more effectively, assuming girls aren't wasting their time on similarly frivolous endeavors." Few have chimed in yet to comment on what girls are doing right.

I can't speak with any great authority as to what today's girls are doing, but in my day, girls would sit for hours messing with their hair, their makeup, their fingernails, their clothes, and talking with other girls about these things, and about boys. There were also magazines to obsess over, which further detailed current fashion trends in these things, and condemned everyone who didn't conform to the norms. Diet was another big thing.

It seemed to work pretty well, taking most girls out of the intellectual pool for competition with men. Things changed somewhat in the 60s, with the Women's Movement, which came just as I was reaching adolescence, and I've hated Robert Heinlein ever since. (His juveniles still read pretty well, though.)

I'm guessing that girls spend less time on the old classic frivolities than they used to. Not that makeup, hair, nails, clothing and boys aren't still a big deal - they're no longer the only deal. Girls have more options for their futures, and appear to be preparing for them. They're also more aware of good nutrition and exercise than we were, and apparently, than boys and men are.

This, combined with the brain-dead video game obsession of so many boys, like my son, would be enough to put girls out ahead.

Sometimes I worry that civilization is something that happened between the invention of writing and the invention of the X-Box.

As video games get better and better, won't it become more reasonable to spend more time playing them? If you had a holodeck at your disposal, would it really be so crazy to spend several hours per day in it? If you spend 2 hours per day wathing tv or playing Doom, and if the holodeck is 1000 times cooler than current computer games... I mean, is it completely mad to think that it'd be way cooler than most of what happens in most lives on most days?

Why hasn't SETI found evidence of ETI? Because about 50 years after a civilization develops powerful radio/tv transmission, it will develop video games that are too cool to resist. After that, it's more or less back to the stone age...

I teach high school English. If I made a list of my highest performing boys and a list of the boys who are video game freaks, the lists would be about 80% the same.

If there is a 'problem' with the video game thing, it's that it is sedentary. But I am not sure that gamers are more sedentary then their non-gamer peers; they may watch less television, listen to music less, etc.

Yeah, most of the new video games are based upon time investment - the more time you put into them, the more you get out.

But at the same time, is this any different than the card games or drinking or other stupid passtimes of previous generations?

As someone moderately in the games industry, maybe I'm biased, but I won't date anyone who isn't creative enough to play games.

It's just not worth it to even consider interacting with someone who can't put up the interest to at least play D&D.

My college life included lots and lots of chess, poker, bridge and board games. The games control our afternoons and early evenings right up to the time we went drinking. I don't think things have changed, except that when we played chess or bridge, we played with faculty members and graduate assistants. The faculty members didn't drink a lot of beer while we were around, but we sure learned a lot talking to them while playing chess, playing cards and drinking coffee.

I guess my point is college kids have always spent a lot of their time engaged in frivolous entertainment. The difference is that now the faculty members don't take advantage of the opportunity to teach. Of course I went to a smaller college and size does matter when it comes to really getting to know faculty.

High school was mostly drudgery. The Army was mostly drudgery. College was rarely drudgery. (Who ever conjugated verbs in college, except for a foreign language?) I'm sure college would be more interesting now than when I went, in the 1950s, because so much more is known, so much more is being explored. Shit, I loved college. If you're bored, it ain't the subject matter, it's you. Get a tattoo: "Born To Be Bored."

Games? Fuck games. Life and knowledge are the real things. Jump at them.

That rather depends on with whom one is conjugating.

And whether the conjugatee is transitive or not.

Excused me, I meant the past tense - "controlled."

CRISSA: I won't date anyone who isn't creative enough to play games. It's just not worth it to even consider interacting with someone who can't put up the interest to at least play D&D.

One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that the problem, if there is one, is going to start in high school, not college.

For every boy whose gaming leads to dropping out of college, there's at least one boy whose high-school gaming led to dropping out of high school, not being able to get into college, or not even trying to get into college.

Personally, my nephew is one of these. He made it out of high school a couple years ago, but since he's just played video games and worked at a game store. He hasn't even advanced at the store. He's also put on a significant amount of weight.

James E. Powell:

From my own experience with a bunch of local highschool AP students I met online a decade ago (arguing over politics on a BBS, what else) and have corresponded with since, there's certainly no correlation in either their brains and academic achievement, and their appetite for digitalia. They not only spent mondo time playing the games, they're also pornophiles as well. Hasn't seemed to hurt them.

I think there *may* (and I really have nothing but intuition) be a losse parallel with drinking. Most people drink but a few become alcoholics. Why? Nobody knows exactly for sure why some people can face certain stress without turning to substances, while others can't.

I agree with the person above who called video games an enabling device. It might be harmless for the vast amount of people. It might also trigger unhealthily obsessive behavior in others.

In any case, there apparently *does* seem to be bifurcation going on between boys and girls in academic achievement. Something, somwhere in the culture seems to be driving this.

Video games may be more a symptom than a cause -- but I do think they play a role somewhere ...

Bob

> Video games are a nefarious plot by the
> military to both cultivate the skills
> necessary for high-tech warfare and
> destroy career paths alternative to it.

Well, I don't know about the second part of your assertion, but given that the Army not only pushes video games heavily at its PXs but has actually commissioned one first-person shooter and assisted the programmers in making it more realistic, I don't think they would disagree with your first part.

Cranky

nut: And whether the conjugatee is transitive or not.

Oh, well done.

Crissa:

Please tell me you were being ironic about restricting your dating habits to video gamers ...

Creative? Sheesh, what about musicians or artists?

Bob

nut:

Droll.

Cranky:

I was being facetious, of course. But I don't think there *isn't* a connection somewhere.

At the very least, the military does gain from the state of affairs. What's an expert vidiot going to do with his life after he gets bounced from college?

Well, I'm sure he *could* talk to a campus recruiter ...

Bob

In any case, there apparently *does* seem to be bifurcation going on between boys and girls in academic achievement. Something, somwhere in the culture seems to be driving this.

If you do well in school, your dick will fall off.

All my 9th grade boys know that.

The bifurcation may have less to do with quantity of time spent playing video games, more to do with what that specific activity does to brain function.

One interesting difference in brain function between human males and human females is that men seem to be better at focusing and women seem to be better at multitasking. So men have a predisposition to become obsessively focused on one activity, while women have a predisposition to change their focus frequently.

This seems to be innate in the brain structure itself. IIRC, women have a slightly larger corpus callusom (sp?) than men, the corpus collusom being the bundle of tissue that connects the two hemispheres (without it, we'd literally have two brains in our skulls).

Spending oodles of hours on video games overdevelops the predisposition men already have to focus on one activity. Add to that the known neuro-physical effects of staring at a screen too long (quasi-trance), and you get even more reinforcement of the innate emphasis on focus, as well as a shortened attention span.

Note that even the things women/girls stereotypically fuss over - personal grooming, emotional issues, shopping - are still variegated activities, and social activities.

We pay too little attention to the effect our pastimes have on our brains' structural chemical functions. A few years ago, there was an outbreak of epilepsy among people who weren't and never had been epileptics. Turns out the strobing light in arcade video games - a stimulus unique to that time and place - was rapid enough to trip seizure thresholds even in people with normal brains.

It seems clear to me that we all have these hidden triggers in our brains. All we need is sufficient exposure to the "right" stimulus (something not found in nature, and therefore something we have no evolved defense against) and we go haywire, subtlely or profoundly.

I'm 46 years old and when I was in grade school the girls almost always did better then the boys.

We couldn't settle down as long as the girls did. Almost all the boys I knew hated school, because they just wanted to play sports. Almost all the girls I knew loved school.

Given the head start they had in grade school, In my mind, its a wonder that they aren't running everything.

And given the state of things, it might be better if they had.

Anyone remember the first half of the nineties when Generation X were all called slackers because they didnt go out into the corporate world nd a lot held off from getting real jobs. Then about half way through the decade they pioneered the dot com era, which in turn helped bring the internet into the mainstream and is the reason why alot of non tech people actually are aware of email, google, amazon oh and online news. Our education systems is so broken in this country. Kids are encouraged from day one that grades are more important than actually educating themselves. Articles like this always crack me up. Videogames are to blame, but TV, drinking, partying, and general indifference doesnt seem to matter lol. Kids who want to ignore school will, period. And not that I think its a good idea, but if they're going to blow off school and be "semi-addicted" to something I'll take games over drinking, partying, drugs any day of the week.

CaseyL:

That's a very intriguing post, with frightening implications. I'd be a
little careful, though, of taking a few neurological studies and
running with them into behavioral generalizations. The brain is *way*
complex; can we really say we understand the full function of one part
independent of the whole? Not saying that your facts are wrong; just
cautioning about drawing conclusions.

For instance, guys in school seem to be having trouble *keeping*
focus, not that they're somehow less adept at multitasking than girls,
per se. It certainly requires more focus to read a book all afternoon,
for example, than it does to play a videogame (where distractions from
the objective are built-in). Channel-surfing isn't a particularly
focused activity, either. And, from my friends who dig internet porn
(I loathe the stuff; I never even had a hidden Playboy collection when
I was 13), it's all about endlessly and idly flipping through images.

I think the problem is that guys aren't focused enough.

Bob

If there's going to be addiction, I think traditional addictions are preferable to new ones, because we know them and their effects. Drinking, partying and sex, well at least that has a social component to it, and its as old as humanity and if done in something less than the extreme, might be healthy. If you don't get the piss and viniger out of your system in your youth, you'll carry it with you all the way through life. As for games, they can do that when they retire to florida.

live, damn it, live.

Bubbles & Han:

I dunno if we should get into a pissing match over which kind of addiction is worse ...

But if guy in college gets put on academic probation and confesses to his advisor that he plays video games in his dorm all night instead of studying -- then Houston, we have a problem. And I'd argue one every bit as severe as if he were drinking, smoking pot or chasing girls.

Bob

My guess is that the majority of the posters convinced that vgames are not a self-control problem are male and play a lot of vgames. Just a guess.

I am well acquainted with a large sampling of tween girls and boys. The girls just do not sink any appreciable time into games (or any other obseesive beahvior for that matter) whereas the boys uniformly spend hours a day in a video game induced trance. And this is with parental units providing all kinds of brakes on this type of behavior.

Easy to extrapolate tweens to the freedom of college and lack of parental oversight and envision video gamers gone wild. I think Kevin is on to something. He may not have the data but I would love to see the results when a sociologist really sinks her teeth into it.

Amazing. I'm a college student who plays video games and watches happytreefriends online hours a day. And I'm still managing to pull in a's or b's. They should do a story about me.

I went to a liberal arts school, so as soon as the classes closed for the day, we were off to the races. The physics department had a billiards table for the study of angular momentum, in the basement, close to the storeroom where the chemistry department stored the pure ethanol. Nice.

I wasted many hours blowing hard glass in the chem department, while my roommate synthesized DET, which is head and shoulders above DMT. Back at the dorm the guys in the common room kept a 24/7 game of Blitzkrieg going for months.

Come to think of it, video games really suck. Even for wasting time.

Regarding any long-term changes between boys and girls, there are statistics and then there are statistics.

To my mind, one can not make too many accurate analytical comments here until we know what is being measured and how the measurement is being conducted.

I have sat in on many curriculum and development meetings where a downward trend in SAT scores were being decried. What was at work there?

A key ingredient was the fact that many more students were taking that test than ever before. Twenty years ago most of the students taking the SAT were more than likely highly motivated students who have been in one way or in other preparing for this event for quite some time.

Now part of our state’s measurement system for local districts includes categories of SAT test takers with an emphasis on the level of economically disadvantaged and minority students who take the test. My district covers the test fee for many such students. This has had an impact on overall scores.

Therefore any one needs to be a wee bit careful before making any grand judgment based on SAT stats alone.

What you're seeing when someone spends hours each day playing video games is depression.

Video games do seem to be a bigger distraction for kids than anything available when I was a kid. Back then when we got bored we'd find something to do. Read a book, go for a walk and see what some other friend was doing, mess around with dad's carpentry tools, fool around with a chemistry set, or an erector set, go play baseball, go ride a bike, go exploring, look for frogs, go fishing, look for pop bottles to cash in to buy candy or comic books. Now when my kids get bored they turn on the computer and start playing games. I don't mind them playing some games but my wife and I work hard to chase them off after twenty or thirty minutes.

College boys playing video game is bad. Why?

It severely cuts into your binge drinking time.

I quit playing my latest Civ4 game to read this crap? Pfff! I'm going back to conquering Asia. See ya in 30 hours when I get my next break!

What you're seeing when someone spends hours each day playing video games is depression.

Bad age for depression

Senior year I cut classes, hid in the library stacks, and read Wodehouse. I cut so many German classes my prof made me go around the room, first day style, and introduce myself again.

Went into senior year summa cum, came out missing cum laude by a few thousanths of point.

If I hadn't been tapped by Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, they wouldn't have let me in as a senior.

You don't even need video games.

Utter poppycock. While there's something to the concern that people with addictive or slothful personalities slip more easily into ruts with the "instant-on" gratification and bottomless variety found in video games, this is argument by anecdote at its worst.

Anyone who wants to seriously argue that playing video games harms your school and career prospects will have to contend with the staggering percentage of overpaid tech industry employees who are gamers.

I was the perfect four-point student until halfway through my junior year. Then it was rum&coke & babes...and endless hours playing Wizards&Warriors (Nintendo, late 80s).

Actually flunked a midterm linear algebra exam because I stayed up all night in order to get the magic sword. Bastards!

Women, booze and video games. There should be laws.

Funny coincidence: I live in Colorado mountains, today in the grocery store I overhead two fratboy types from Boulder who were here separately. One said he didn't leave Boulder till nine o'clock last night, five hours behind schedule, cause he and his roomate got caught up playing video games. His friend replied, remember last december when X game came out? Man, nobody studied for finals!. This seemed pretty much like common sense to them.

Now I've been addicted to books since at least high school, when I used to read generally a book today through all my classes and into the night.

I don't let myself read fiction too often any more, because it eats away all of my time --- once I start a book, I am rarely able to stop until I've finished.

Things like television and gaming are much less addictive to me.

So when are we going to see an article about us poor, suffering bookaholics? Huh? Huh?

I used to have a book problem. Read yes read now read more!...but luckily there were some people cared enough about me to stop my decline. Intervention groups ROCK!

Haven't even touched a book in over three days.

And yet, I am not deaf to their siren call: 'Read me!' Tempting me with their ripe pages, and plump, juicy words that just happen to make up sentences and even worse, insight. Sluts.

4 hours a day? Heck, that's barely enough time to master Druid, nevermind Warrior.

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Video games - geez, I thought the problem was too much TV. Oops, guess my age is showing.
Men don't do as well in college because they realize that in current society they do not have to do well to be successful. Lots of guys with middling grades do great in the rest of life because the opportunities are greater (viz our president) But if a woman gets less than stellar grades, well, that's pretty much the end of the line for her, careerwise.
So for women, the stakes are higher. I guess I'm not surprised to see them do better.

I am a video game player. After a 3 year forced (threat of divorce:)leave of absence from Everquest, I recently was able to play again on the new Progression Server-- Combine.
They dont call it evercrack for nothing!
I love that game.
I am over 50 and female.
fala

(The progression severs of Combine and Sleeper are only old world content until each expansion can be unlocked by players over time. All Old accounts on EQ are opened up again free for one month. It is astounding to find Gfay and EC tunnel filled with 200-400 people even after the servers have been opened 2 weeks. Just like the old days:)

"What you're seeing when someone spends hours each day playing video games is depression.

Posted by: Jake on July 8, 2006 at 7:20 PM | PERMALINK"

BINGO! I suffer from depression and every time things seem to get real bad I dive head first into the World of Warcraft (online game). I try to explain this to my wife, when she complains about the amount of time I sometimes spend playing the game, but she is unwilling to accept my explaination which just makes me want to play even more because I get more depressed when she gives me a hard time.

Men and women respond to stress differently. Men don't like to talk about thier problems with others but women do. This could explain why more men spend so much more time playing video games than women do.

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Hooray! The evil spector of video games has raised it's ugly head. It's really hard to argue against such anecdotal evidence that's listed here. Of course, some of these same arguments would work against the jocks who spend more time in the weight room than studying math. And let's not even get started on the Dungeons & Dragons dorks...

Of course, I'd like to point out that most of the male engineers under the age of 40 in my aerospace lab are avid video game (or D&D) players. Heck, I'd even point out that my sister is a semi-professional game player and started her own succesful business this year.

Is it possible that lack of responsibility in general is bad for you, regardless of how it manifests itself? Naaaaah. Let's just blame video games and rock music. It helps the aging baby boomers sleep at night...

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I haven't seen an anthropological discussion here yet.

With plenty of overlap, males and females are different, respond to stimuli differently, learn differently and react differently. We grow up differently. Schools, by defininition, provide a one-size-fits-all education. Good teachers try to compensate, as do parents naturally. But now that schools provide the route, from pre-school to post-grad, we'd better re-examine the product we are supplying to the customer.

We don't. And most parents are disengaged. And the disparity between sexes rises with poverty, and so with ethnicity. Even the Asian "sucess" story does not include some Asian groups, such as Hmong.

The education question is not just about male/female. It's about society, culture, the whole structure of living.

Good at video games? Dropped out of college? Well, the Army has just the job for you. You get to be an E-1 (the lowest of the low) and I get to be "Recruiter of the Year."

Video games are a waste of time. For some people they're a harmful waste of time, for others, they're no harm at all. But they're always a waste of time, and adult men especially should not be playing them.

Kevin-

Are you really this ignorant?

Barbie said, "Math is hard."

Let's consider a slight change...

[Jen] Smyers, also at American, said she recently ended a relationship with another student, in part out of frustration over her applying make-up four hours a day...."That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who wears make-up It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."

...In the Dickinson cafeteria on a spring afternoon, the byplay between two men and two women could provide a text on gender differences. The men...talked about playing "Madden," a football video game, six hours a day, about how they did not spend much time on "make-up".

...each year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play "make-up" into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk out.

"SHe was playing "make-up" till 3, 4, 5 in the morning, in an almost compulsive way."

If women were still only 43% of college grads, it would be a "scandal" and proof that 'the patriarchy' is all- powerful.

But, men? "Oh, well..."!

This is too juicy to pass up. My now ex-boyfriend got the boot over a similar issue. No job, no income and when he wasn't parked in front of the TV he was parked in front of a computer spending hours a day wallowing in online porn. And he wonders why he's broke, has no girlfriend and his life is a disaster? Three words: Lack of Discipline. Discipline is what makes one kid able to play 4 hours of video games a night and still get good grades.

If you are going to waste hours a day playing a game, sign up for Second Life. Learn to make things and test your skills at being a virtual business owner....

at Harvard 55% of women and barely half the men graduated with honors,grade inflation anyone?

bob, The other career alternative for these "excess males" -- tragically enough -- is a field where good video game skills is a plus on the resume.

Reminds me of the third part of the House of Cards series where the evil prime minister has a scheme to re-invent the British economy by creating and exporting the worlds greatest mercenaries, "the British fighting man".

---
the staggering percentage of overpaid tech industry employees
---

Well, that's easy to correct; pick up a C compiler and enter the overpaid workforce.

And be prepared to put in 25 years at 60 hours/week with a pager on your hip.

What about people who spend hours and hours each day on blogs and use stupid ass nicknames like American Hawk? Now that is a friggin' waste of time!!!

arteclectic:

My now ex-boyfriend got the boot over a similar issue. No job, no income and when he wasn't parked in front of the TV he was parked in front of a computer spending hours a day wallowing in online porn.

Good move; he is obviously a loser and a dork. btw, what are the metrics for 'wallowing' in online porn? Is it dependent on bandwidth or picture count? Cuz I am prepared to negogiate in order to spend quality time bitching about my overpaying job with a honey like you.

But only if yer gonna wear elf ears and put out.

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Argh! I had this nice long post and it got swallowed by the Internet. Damn you Internet (shakes her fist at the computer screen)! Then I re-wrote the post and my cat jumped on the kb and erased it. (sigh)

Shorter post: My understanding is girls tend to have more chores and responsibilities growing up than boys, even when you take into account typical 'boy chores' such as mowing the lawn. If this is true, and I believe it is, it goes a long way to explaining why girls tend to excel in college, which requires discipline and hard work.

Girls also tend to be held to a higher standard than boys in their behavior. I've never ever heard anybody say "girls will be girls." But I still hear variations of "boys will be boys" used to dismiss everything from bad grades to goofing off.

There's also a sense of entitlement from the boys in that NYT article. Why should they work hard when, after college, they'll still make more money than women and reach higher positions of power? They don't need to work as hard.

It's a moot point to the video-game playing boys, because they know that in 30 years they'll be running the country anyway.

Somewhere among those boys videogaming six and eight hours at a stretch is your next George W. Bush. Bet on it.

Monty -

The metrics of wallowing are based on amount of time spent immersed in pictures and videos, no matter how much actual real life sex one is getting. Now, I have a solid appreciation for porn, but hours every day? Indulgences are for AFTER you've paid the bills and taken care of business :D Last I heard they still called this being a responsible adult.

Elf ears? Hmmmm...interesting. I could be talked into that. ;)

That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays politics.

That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays hard to get.

That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who drinks beer.

That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who rides motorcycles.

That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who blogs.

This girl surely doesn't have to worry about getting married anytime soon and I feel sorry for the guy that does marry this woman whom probably spends an equal amount of time puttinf on here makeup every day.

So ladies -- is putting on makeup and doing your hair every day sucking the life out of you?

why not?
ooo I see you actually enjoy looking at yourself in the mirror....BTW is their a video game in that mirror?

No!? Gad How boring you women are!
My new litmus test is to never date a woman who spends more than 30 minutes primping.

Jeex kevin i thought you was a political animal and not a housebroke and fixed mutt.

The real reasons that increasing American men have no interest in education and therefore do poorly in this field, are:

1) They think (correctly) that the bullshit liberal arts education that they receive will not help them earn a living. They would rather be car mechanics or plumbers.

Just ask any Indian what kind of course load/curriculum they have to go through in an engineering school. They don't study liberal arts, thats for sure.

Now, women have to suffer through this bullshit education too, but they do suffer through it with perseverence and try to continue with interest and enthusiasm.

Does this enthusiasm on women's part (for a diluted science and math education) translate into high employment and great salary? I have seen several news regarding this question and they all point to the same conclusion. You should know it by now.

2) Many r&d jobs and good technology jobs are slowly but surely shifting overseas due to a variety of reasons (good and bad).

How many American parents would want their sons and daughters to be computer programmers these days?

The real reasons that increasing American men have no interest in education and therefore do poorly in this field, are:

1) They think (correctly) that the bullshit liberal arts education that they receive will not help them earn a living. They would rather be car mechanics or plumbers.

Just ask any Indian what kind of course load/curriculum they have to go through in an engineering school. They don't study liberal arts, thats for sure.

Now, women have to suffer through this bullshit education too, but they do suffer through it with perseverence and try to continue with interest and enthusiasm.

Does this enthusiasm on women's part (for a diluted science and math education) translate into high employment and great salary? I have seen several news regarding this question and they all point to the same conclusion. You should know it by now.

2) Many r&d jobs and good technology jobs are slowly but surely shifting overseas due to a variety of reasons (good and bad).

How many American parents would want their sons and daughters to be computer programmers these days?

"Video games are a nefarious plot by the military to both cultivate the skills necessary for high-tech warfare and destroy career paths alternative to it.

:)

Bob"

College is a nefarious plot by the military and big Business to get young recruits indoctinated into the world of PowerPoint. Anyone in the miltary can tell you that.

Of course, some of these same arguments would work against the jocks who spend more time in the weight room than studying math.

Not a particularly apt example. Even the hardest-core weight trainers aren't likely to spend more than maybe 90 minutes a day, four or five days a week in the weight room. Pumping iron more extensively will lead to a condition known as "overtraining" and in many cases an actual loss of size and strength

Don't you silly liberals realise that :

When African-American boys do badly in school, it's because they come from a dysfunctional culture that scorns academic achievement .

When white boys do badly in school, it's because the feminazis have imposed their evil programs and left our poor boys emasculated.

"That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games. It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."

Good girl! I've taught college for 32 years, now in a laptop setting, and video games are as pernicious now as acid was the year I started.

I love the Darwinian attitude of young women checking out young men who play video games. This young woman is as bright as Rosalind in As You Like It.

It has taken far too long in this thread to make an obvious point. For the last 25 years, statistical differences between the academic performance of boys and girls were used to justify changes in the educational system. A lot of these changes were sensible, and the underlying logic was simple: boys and girls have equal ability, so the system had to be at fault when girls were lagging academically.

Now we're seeing very strong slippage in the performance of boys relative to girls. Boys are less likely to progress at every tier of the academic ladder, and in particular we have the new phenomenon of mass medication and labelling of boys as mentally ill (ADD). And what is the response?

Blame the boys.

Video games ARE a problem.

They make you feel like a powerful, legendary hero for sitting on your ass, saying nothing, thinking little more than "how do I place this grenade so it kills the most monsters?", for 6 straight hours.

I am a college student and I used to be addicted to them....It is EXTREMELY difficult to get out from under.

And girls ARE doing better at college, all you have to do is look around my school (Colby College).

I believe that boys need to internalize both social discipline and work habits at an early age. The end of corporal punishment in schools with heavy doses of ritalin and other meds filling the void has pretty much doomed many boys to lower-caste status for life.

Another big suspect in this is the sorry state of mathematics education in America. Trying to make math more interesting, the new textbooks only make the subject vastly more confusing. What truly hooked many students in my day on math was its dependability and simplicity. You learned a few facts, a few operations, and zingo, you could solve all sorts of problems. Once mathematics textbooks were slim and elegant, basically teaching the most useful concepts and algorithms discovered in human history with a few sample problems.

Today math books are very thick, often taking 10 or 15 pages to get to the point of a principle that can be expressed in a single sentence. The authors were trying to make the point idiot-proof so that no one could fail to learn it. Instead, they buried the beauty of simplicity.

For the reason of the basic simplicity of mathematics it once was much more popular than it is today. Math is fast becoming the most hated subject of our day among youngsters, which basically devastates our chance of producing good scientists as well.

When that "no boy crisis" propaganda-puff report came out a few weeks ago, and washingtonmonthly covered it, I said some boy-friendly researcher should review and recast that data - and of course got attacked by the uzi-girls for doing this.

Glad to see more on the problems of boys, the Boston Globe and the Post also had some good articles recently.

I've discovered a syndrome behind boys' problems - obsessive and neurotic transferral of pathology, aka ONTOP: this disorder affects parents and teachers who's first choice is to stigmatize bad boys, and reward good girls, rather than accept their own flaws as authorities.

JMHO

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College is irrelevant today, as cheap Indian and Chinese immigrants get all the jobs boys used to study for.

Female students do better because they sleep with their professors.

College is irrelevant today, as cheap Indian and Chinese immigrants get all the jobs boys used to study for.

Female students do better because they sleep with their professors.

Hmmm. Maybe it would be more efficient for us to just sleep with the Indian and Chinese boys getting all the good jobs.

I don't think video games cause social withdrawal, they merely are a good tool for people who are seeking social withdrawal. Self-medicating, you might say.

Game-playing is at its most intense for me when there is stuff going on in my life that I don't want to face up to, stuff that I'd rather forget about. Games are very good at letting me do that, and they don't involve any physical addiction, or damage to any of my bodily organs, such as my brain, heart, liver. Unlike drugs or alcohol.

But games can also be highly social and creative and challenging. A venue for honing skills that you won't get in the classroom.

Doctor Jay;
Are you the same Doctor Jay that does the LAME 60's show on WMNF?

Oh, cry me a f***ing river, are we going to retread this tired, misguided, inaccurate old path again? As an old-fashioned liberal, I've almost stopped reading the NYT anymore because of their unbelievably pathetic and sloppy critical analysis skills in their articles, and this one is no exception. Niraj has a good sense of what's going on here and I'll expound on this.

Three absolutely crucial things that the NYT neglected to mention:

1. While US colleges do have a majority of women to men these days, the men who don't go to college-- for the most part-- aren't just slacking off and goofing around playing video games or getting drunk. By and large, these men are going to vocational schools or technical colleges-- which cost a fraction of what 4-year liberal arts colleges do-- and pick up useful, marketable skills immediately, which they're able to use to quickly find lucrative jobs and earn a living. Some go straight into the work world and pick up on-the-job training. Many men also go into the army or other branches of the military, where they get marketable skills and are paid while doing so. In contrast, the vast majority of their college-bound colleagues, both men and women, screw around for 4 (or often more) years and go over $100,000 in debt to get a degree that they really can't do a whole lot with. I went to a decent public university where costs weren't that high, on a scholarship, and most of my friends there-- mostly women, I might add-- are now deeply in debt and can't get a good job.

In fact, a sociologist at my old university did a study which found that men in couples are as much or slightly more the breadwinners in relationships these days as they've been in prior decades, it's just that they're choosing alternatives to the 4-year college degree that a) don't saddle them with so much debt, b) give them useful skills and c) allow them to enter the work world earlier and start earning good money earlier than their female colleagues at the 4-year colleges and universities. In fact, if you include technical institutes and vocational schools in the mix, you'll probably find the M:F ratio to be pretty similar for "postsecondary education." Women have long been very high academic achievers in the past, and in fact in the late 1800's and 1920's for example, you also saw women disproportionately represented at many levels of educational attainment. But during those periods, there weren't formal technical institutes and vocational schools, so men had fewer alternatives to get necessary job skills. It's not that men are too lazy for college, it's just that they're making a sensible economic decision.

2. At the highest levels of education and in the toughest subjects, men are very much the majority. In her article in the NYT, Tamar Lewin notes that women at Harvard have a higher number of honors degrees than men. What Tamar neglects to mention is that a) men are a substantial majority at Harvard and other Ivy-League and top schools, and b) women in these schools overwhelmingly choose easier majors (like sociology or psychology) which have lots of grade inflation and are generally much easier with lighter grading standards in general, while men overwhelmingly choose fields like the hard sciences, which are much tougher in grading. So far more men are graduating with valuable skills (and often getting honors in the process). In fact, if you look at the number of e.g. summa cum laude graduates in the sciences and engineering, men dominate these areas entirely especially at the Ivy League schools. This is an example of how men have a wider "spread" of achievement. There may be more dumb men overall than dumb women, but the highest levels of fields especially in the sciences are male-dominated, in large part because there are more incredibly high-achieving male "outliers."

3) In terms of the male-female college gender gap, there are massive differences when you break the numbers down based on racial and ethnic subgroups. The gender gap really is awful for African-Americans, and it's genuine here-- with young black men in prison being a big problem. This does not bode well for the future of the United States if such a large group is stuck in such a chronically dysfunctional educational and work state, and it introduces a sobering take-down to the BS triumphalism you sometimes get from Ms. Magazine and NOW. The gender gap is also quite pronounced for Hispanics, though not as much as for American blacks.

OTOH, the college gender gap is much smaller for US Whites, and it's practically nonexistent for Asians, especially Northeast Asians from countries like Korea, Japan and China. (FWIW, video games are extremely popular in these countries and they even have video game tournaments, but young men in these countries by and large perform very well academically and occupationally.) Remember, too, the point I raised up in #1 above-- a very large number of men in all these groups choose technical institutes, vocational schools and military training over four-year colleges. This is definitely the case for Whites but especially for Latinos (and Blacks to a lesser extent). In fact, many of these sorts of technical-training and trade-school institutes have variations on Spanish-language training for their courses which also helps to promote Latino enrollment and the acquisition of useful skills.

There was a couple I knew in which the wife attended my old university, and they in some ways exemplify the current trend I was referring to above. The wife in the couple was a high school valedictorian who went on a full scholarship, and was a brilliant college student, getting a summa cum laude degree in women's studies and political science. She was one of the best students in the school, an outstanding writer and decorated with so many academic honors that they had to buy a new bookshelf for them.

Her husband OTOH seemed a lot less distinguished. He actually graduated in the top quarter of a high school in the state, but his SAT scores were so-so (in the 1100s or so). Rather than going to college, he went to a technical institute-- paying maybe $4-5000 overall for his postsecondary education-- did some courses in drafting, and landed a suppposedly humdrum job less than 2 years after his high school graduation. They met, oddly enough, when he was working on a contract for a building that the university wanted to add. She, despite her feminist leanings, found him to be surprisingly bright and sensitive.

So where are they now? My old college friend the wife, in that couple, is now deeply in debt-- over $100,000 with interest, and has been having tremendous trouble finding a job. She's now thinking about law school, but is hesitating since this would add perhaps $150,000 more to her debtload, and the financial prospects for lawyers really aren't what they used to be. She's basically been doing jobs with temp agencies and so, even though she's not considered "unemployed" based on the BS unemployment metrics that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics uses, in fact she's not doing a whole lot despite her sparkling credentials.

Her husband, the undistinguished high school graduate who never went to college, and supposedly trained as a "grunt draftsman" at a technical school? He has no educational debt, he already has a big retirement package built up from starting work so early after graduation, and he's now making over $150,000 and getting advanced on-the-job training which will boost his income even further. His wife even joked recently that her best economic prospects would be divorcing her husband and presumably getting over half his income at the time of the divorce-- something that I find to be absolutely bullshit, since he's earned every single penny that he has. (She wasn't being serious FWIW.)

He's the breadwinner in the couple and will be indefinitely. Why? Because, even though he didn't get a 4-year college degree, his decision on training and his selection of skills better match up with economic realities. He would be considered one of the "underachievers" in the Tamar Lewin conception of society, but in reality, he's the one who's become far more accomplished in his work and in general.

A clarification, sorry-- the full scholarship reference above was a full-tuition merit scholarship for the freshman year (a very common tool used by public universities to attract top students from high schools into their programs) but after that the scholarships were replaced by loans. Merit scholarships generally don't go past the first year, while more need-based scholarships (mine) often encompass all 4 years. She had a comparatively nice economic deal in some respects, but she *still* acquired $100,000 plus in loans (with all the accumulated interest) for the remaining years. It makes me wonder if a college diploma is really worth the cost anymore.

I'm a software engineer who has been an ardent gamer since the days of pong. I make well over six figures and by most measures am extremely successful in my career. And yes, I'm likely to spend 10-20 hours in a given week playing one game or another. Among the thirty-somethings I work with, all successful engineers, this is the norm.

Laziness is just laziness whether it's the new thing that the elders like to tut-tut about, or the traditional "sitting on the couch all Sunday screaming at the ref". Half the time I hear someone complain about the lazy bastard playing videogames for four hours every day, it's someone who sits in from of the TV from dinnertime to bedtime.

There are lots of leisure activities and personally I think that it is a very sad person who demands that every second be productive and that leisure is only for slackers.

Anon has a good point. I personally know lots of people who are into video games (although I personally am more into handball and chess), and frankly, most of them are quite successful. They'll play minimum 10 hours a week of video games, but they get their work done-- work hard, play hard. If anything, I've sensed that they've benefitted from their video games, e.g. by better hand-eye coordination and the strategy and teamwork aspects of the games they play.

FWIW I've played some games myself like the ID games (Doom 3) and of course the Half-Life series. The storyline in Doom3 is frankly one of the smartest and cleverest I've ever seen, and I'm comparing this to modern movies FWIW, while Half-Life-- what can you say? It's brilliant. These sorts of games are intellectually expanding, and while I'll play them only for a couple hours every few weeks, I feel like I get a boost in certain ways with them.

I do agree, I find it pathetic when people believe that leisure is a waste of time, and that you're only successful if you're a workaholic going 80-100 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. I've actually found that quite a few "disappointing people" (very smart individuals who nonetheless don't accomplish much), are those who work all the time, 70 or more hours a week and wind up burning out.

This seems to be a big problem with e.g. most doctors that I've met. Their training seems crazy to me-- they have to work, what, 80 hours a week during medical school for four years (after surviving bone-crushingly hard science majors in college-- I had a lot of respect for the pre-meds at my university), then do something like 5 years of tough residency after medical school where they're taking call and doing operations or obtaining blood samples at like 3 in the morning, working like 36 hours straight? All this while taking on like $300,000 in debt from college and medical school fees, starting their career at like age 36 if they're lucky? And FWIW, docs don't make as much as I think we stereotypically believe-- most of my doctor friends made mid 100,000s, not bad but not a whole lot when you consider that they're already $350,000 in debt, while having virtually nothing saved up for retirement by the time they're 35 years old, plus bearing the costs for their own kids' education. The subspecialists like the ophthalmologists, radiologists and surgeons made more of course, but they had ridiculously long residencies and their debt accumulated massive interest, plus their malpractice insurance costs were horrific, eating severely into their earnings.

The upshot, is that most of my doctor acquaintances have been, well, very frustrated and often embittered people. I do think most of them like what they do, but they're so exhausted by the time they finish training, and so deeply in debt, that they just seem like burned out people. Seems like most docs themselves are pretty unhealthy, probably stuck with all kinds of nasty diseases from their work schedules. My nephew wanted to be a doctor, but I told him it probably isn't worth it.

The best careers have a better balance of work and leisure. I feel as though the Europeans have a better hold on this. The people there work very hard and are quite efficient and productive, but they have time off to relax, expand their minds and be creative. They seem to be not only more productive per hour, but also happier, healthier and more creative in general.

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Sergei--

I am also astounded by the strange tone that this NYT article took. The idea is that we should be alarmed that "men" as a generic group are doing slightly worse than "women" at certain academic subjects.

You are right to question the validity of this statement, but my objection is even more fundamental. Even if it were the case that men were underperforming women at school, why should this be a matter for concern? What terrible things would result from this state of affairs? I clearly understand why the racial gap in academia is alarming and should be addressed, as it tends to reinforce the low social position of a large group of marginalized people trying to overcome a truly tragic history. But how can anyone say the same about "men" as a generic group? Last time I checked, most "men" end up marrying other people called "women", who are supposedly doing just fine in academia. Even if academic honors were as important as the NYT suggest, surely these sluggish men will find themselves a clever woman and all will be well in the world, no?

My fiancee makes $10,000 more a year than I do. In almost every case of a couple, it is bound to be true that one is more financially successfull than the other. Traditionally, the man has made more money. Now we have more and more cases where the woman makes more money than the man. Is this really a problem? With all the fucked-up distribution of wealth in our nation, this is what they fret about?

Unfortunately, video games help develop skills more applicable to the real world and better help with brain development than many classes.

I stopped playing Techmo Bowl (Ronnie Lott was the shit) during college so I would have more time to drink beer, play hockey and have as much meaningless sex as possible.

Everything in moderation is a good rule of thumb. I am a recent male grad who is not a video game player. Video games seem to be a metaphor for youthful distractions that encourage poor performance in school. Other distractions that I could list would be drugs, girls, beer or sports.

nice cartoon for the insane chicks out there:

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20060705.html

deo games are a nefarious plot by the military to both cultivate the skills necessary for high-tech warfare and destroy career paths alternative to it.

I'm not convinced that The Sims does either of those all that well, despite being one of the most successful gaming franchises ever.

I think the main problem with video games is that they are sedentary in nature. If these addicts were not playing video games, they would likely be watching television. Which is worse?

Last time I checked, most "men" end up marrying other people called "women", who are supposedly doing just fine in academia.

But you've failed to consider the emergence of same-sex marriage. If it spreads, we may soon find ourselves under the collective thumb of the Lesbian Academic Elite.

I think the main problem with video games is that they are sedentary in nature.

Clearly, you are unfamiliar with Dance Dance Revolution. (Not that this unfamiliarity is a bad thing.)

I've been playing video games since junior high (I'm 24 now). "All things in moderation" is the key here, as it is for everything else. The games can get addicting... I do remember a few 12-hour playing sessions, but its entirely possible to play lots of video games and still lead a "normal" life.

An hour or two of games per day isn't too bad, so long as that's all the time you commit to it. Playing until 5 in the morning... well, maybe once in awhile, if you're on vacation. But repeatedly doing so means you have a big problem.

"Kids are encouraged from day one that grades are more important than actually educating themselves. Articles like this always crack me up. Videogames are to blame, but TV, drinking, partying, and general indifference doesnt seem to matter"

Found this way upthread, posting for truth (from my personal experience). I would emphasize the "general indifference" and "educating themselves" parts the most. I got great grades in high school and undergraduate college, but it wasn't until my Masters that I actually learned how to learn... I think our educational system completely neglects this and makes education into a form of drudgery that you do just to get by and not get in trouble from parents, teachers, and friends.

I'm gonna touch on multiple points:

First, point me towards this $150,000/yr job with advancement. I'm in.

Second, I LOVE video games, but I thank God they didn't have then when I went to college. For some people at some times they can be a problem, and this seems to affect males more than females. The "gamer" stuck in his room seems as prevalent as the "stoner" from years past.

Third, because of the physical aspect DDR is very much unusual for a video game and to be commended.

Years ago one of my first invention ideas was a game controller hooked to a stationary bike. Play pac man and your pedaling provides the speed, handle bars provide the steering. This was a great idea but it went absolutely nowhere because gamers don't want to exercise. It is too hard and too limiting. I give DDR credit for sneaking exercise into a game.

I'm glad video and computer games weren't nearly as good in the late 80's as they are now. Back then I didn't have a wife to keep me in line!

I also liked the post about giving the gamer the experience of 'saving the world.'

Imagine you had a job which was so important the fate of the world mattered. Imagine that there was a clear path to success and you were rewarded hourly for your work while being presented with greater and greater challenges which are are possible to solve and yet challenging as well.

Compare that to your real job.

American Citizen,

I'm glad video and computer games weren't nearly as good in the late 80's as they are now. Back then I didn't have a wife to keep me in line!

Amen to that brother! For me it was the late 70's. I'm just hoping that I retain enough faculties in old age to make my retirement a videogame heaven.

I'm guessing most of you haven't been invited to a mariocart night or a halo part?

A couple people said earlier all things in moderation. Totally true. A lot of my friends consider themselves "gamers." Out of that bunch, we've got a couple programmers, one PhD student in mathematics, the usual random assortment, one person who edits fantasy novels (professionally) and one who's working on video games for one of the big companies. But we also have friends who dropped out because they couldn't focus on school.

finally, I'm 25, female, and live with my boyfriend, who graduated a couple years ahead of me from the same small liberal arts college. I make almost 10k more than he does and am starting my MBA this fall. I fully expect to be the breadwinner, because I chose business and he chose to be a librarian. little bit of role reversal there.