Fr. de Souza cogently condemns video games:
Video games take what is most precious — time and thought. And they are making kids fat.
Video games are like a black hole into which time disappears. Students today often confess to wasting a couple of hours a day on them. Corporate Canada likely loses whole weeks of productive work to those who are playing games at work. Video games have some kind of addictive allure that means any number of hours is not enough. It is always possible to play again — to rise to that “next level” which somehow acquires near-mystical importance. They are the crack cocaine of the electronic world.
My response: He’s right, kinda. But I’d call video games the Red Bull and Vodka of the video world. The stuff is addicting, in the sense that it gets kids hooked on the dopamine ups and downs and the low-impact thrill of a video world. But lots of things are like that: golf, bowling, sex, any absorbing hobby. The answer to any such threat is moderation, not abstinence. I think video games pose a greater risk than bowling, but I think it’s a difference of degree, not kind.
I think it’s an important distinction. De Souza wasn’t allowed access to video games at all. When he got to college, he got hooked on Tetris. My parents allowed me to play video games while growing up, all the while warning me against excessive play time and threatening to police my use if I couldn’t police it myself. When I went to college, I got hooked on . . . nothing (beer excepted).
This is important. If you over-state the risk (calling it “crack cocaine”), kids will stay away while living in the shelter of their parents’ home, but when they go to college and see friends playing video games without ending up on the Bowery, they’ll try it. Once they try it and discover that their world isn’t coming to an end after all, they’ll conclude everything they heard before wasn’t true . . . and they’ll charge in and play to excess. That’s when they become addicts.
Finally, the total abstinence approach gives video games an allure that they don’t deserve. Video games are stupid (often fun, but at bottom, stupid). They don’t deserve as much attention as effective prohibition requires, and by enforcing prohibition, you make the chance of their abuse much higher. They say drunks come from two types of households: the soused and the teetotaling. I suspect a similar thing can be said about the video game obsessed. They come from two types of households: The household that keeps a TV on all the time and never questions whether the screen media could be harmful (the soused) and the puritan-like household that doesn’t allow screens.
Moderation in all things, except the intrinsically evil and the holy. Any other approach will lead to problems.
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