Video games have the potential to be a good hobby, but the vast majority of times this is not the case. Honestly, I think the devastating impact that games like World of Warcraft had on the millenial generation cannot be understated. This impact is largely forgotten about and goes completely unnoticed. I personally know several men who became completely entranced by this game in their late-teens/ early twenties and never seemed to recover. They exist now as perpetual man-children with gaping nostalgic holes in their hearts, longing for the ‘good old days’ and forever waiting for their corporate overlords to provide them with a virtual gaming world that can reinstate in them the sense of youth and adventure that WoW provided for them. This new game will never come, but they refuse to let go of this false hope. The people who fell victim to this golden age of gaming are usually our more intelligent men of good potential, and all of this happened at a time during their lives when they were supposed to be coming of age.
Of course, MMORPGs are a particularly dangerous and addictive genre. I prefer more directly competitive genres such as MOBAs, RTS and FPS. But with competitive games you run up against a problem: If you want to excel at the game you need to put in the hours; and if you put in the hours, there is very little side-benefit to the rest of your life than there would be relative to other hobbies. Thus, the only healthy way to play a MOBA is to be mediocre at it: becoming a master would mean a near lifetime of dedication and going pro is largely a pipe-dream. And who wants to be mediocre at something where rank is king?
Don’t get me wrong, I played these games, I attended those bomb-ass LAN parties. I’m one of those millenials with that nostalgic hole in my heart. I don’t mean to proselytize. But my God am I glad I managed to listen to my instincts in my early 20s and wrestle myself away from that God-forsaken computer screen when I did.
Part of the problem is that there is no maturity or male leadership in the gaming community. Esports had the potential to be a healthy male outlet like chess or other sports, but the degeneracy of our age and the highly addictive nature of these games made it so that they instead dragged our men down into the pits of despair. You can very easily find these men’s stories with a simple YouTube search.
The best way for us to play games in the future is as a community in casual lobbies with one another; strategizing, bonding and talking shit with ‘our guys’. Single player is not where the magic happens, what makes video games special is the potential for male competition and camaraderie. There is potential for some positivity. Nonetheless, with gaming, proceed with extreme caution.