Are Video Games a Waste of Time?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 24 August 2017
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Video games are a huge industry, bigger than Hollywood, and billions of people around the world play them for fun. But new economic research in the US suggests that young men are dropping out of work to play games more. This is both because some jobs are becoming harder to find and less rewarding, and because video games are becoming more and more attractive. The gamers say they are happy, but the research has sharpened long-standing concerns about video games. Will there be a 'lost generation' of young men sitting in their parents' basements, frittering their lives away on mindless games, with disastrous long-term effects for them and the economy? Are video games a waste of time?
(Photo: A visitor plays on a computer while visiting the Gamescom 2017 video gaming trade fair in Cologne, Germany. Credit: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.6 | Welcome to the inquiry on the BBC World Service. Each week we bring you four expert |
| 0:34.5 | witnesses answering one pressing question from the news. University graduation addresses generally have an inspiring message. |
| 0:49.0 | Think of Apple founder Steve Jobs telling students to follow their hearts or Harry Potter author. or Eric Hurst took to the stage at the University of Chicago last year. |
| 1:04.2 | Instead of offering inspiration, he pointed out a stark statistic. |
| 1:09.0 | In the US, almost a quarter of lower skilled men in their 20s did no paid work at all in 2015, a figure that's |
| 1:18.0 | grown rapidly. |
| 1:19.7 | These young men without a college degree are now less likely to work than they were before, |
| 1:24.8 | are less likely to marry than they were before, have not increased their propensity to go to school, |
| 1:30.2 | and are more likely to live with a close relative or parent. |
| 1:34.0 | So if they're working less or not at all, what are they doing? |
| 1:40.0 | Professor Hurst had a surprising answer from his own research. |
| 1:44.0 | Video game playing. |
| 1:45.0 | The average young lower skilled and non-employed man spends about two hours per day on video |
| 1:49.9 | games and 10% of them report 42 hours a week, a full-time job of video game playing. |
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