Video Games

50 Things That Made the Modern Economy

BBC

Business

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2017

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From Spacewar to Pokemon Go, video games – aside from becoming a large industry in their own right – have influenced the modern economy in some surprising ways. Here’s one. In 2016, four economists presented research into a puzzling fact about the US labour market. The economy was growing, unemployment rates were low, and yet a surprisingly large number of able-bodied young men were either working part-time or not working at all. More puzzling still, while most studies of unemployment find that it makes people thoroughly miserable, the happiness of these young men was rising. The researchers concluded that the explanation was simply that this cohort of young men were living at home, sponging off their parents and playing videogames. They were deciding, in the other words, not to join the modern economy in some low-paid job, because being a starship captain at home is far more appealing. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Photo: Hands holding game pad and playing shooter game on TV screen. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	50 Things That Made The Modern Economy
0:10.0	With Tim Harford
0:15.0	Early in 1962, a young student at MIT was on his way to his home in the nearby town of
0:20.8	Lowell, Massachusetts.
0:23.0	It was a cold night with a cloudless sky.
0:26.2	And as Peter Samson stepped off the train and gazed up at the starfield, a meteor
0:33.2	streaked across the heavens.
0:35.5	But instead of gasping at the beauty of creation, Samson reflexively grabbed for a game
0:39.9	controller that wasn't there and scanned the skies, wondering where his spaceship had gone.
0:45.9	Samson's brain had grown out of the habit of looking at the real stars.
0:49.8	He was spending way too much time playing Space War.
0:56.8	Samson's near hallucination was the precursor of countless digital fever dreams to come.
1:05.8	That experience of drifting off to sleep, dreaming of Pac-Man or rotating Tetris blocks
1:11.1	or bagging a rare Pokémon jigglypuff.
1:14.0	That ability of a computer to yank our Pavlovian reflexes and haunt our sleep.
1:19.8	In 1962, that would have been unimaginable to anyone but Peter Samson and a few of his
1:26.0	hacker friends.
1:27.7	They were avid players of Space War, the first video game that mattered.
1:32.4	The one that opened the door to a social craze, a massive industry, and which shaped our
1:37.2	economy in more profound ways than we realised.
1:44.1	Before Space War, computers were intimidating.
1:47.4	Large grey cabinets in purpose-built rooms closed off to all but the highly trained.
	...

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