The professor who thinks video games will be the downfall of men

Philip Zimbardo is a superstar mainstay of introductory undergraduate courses in psychology – well, a lot of them. He’s the man behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, which provided insights into the psychological impact of being placed in either a position of power, or powerlessness in a confined prison setting. But in a new book out this last week, Zimbardo’s focus has shifted to – in his view – something much more concerning. Zimbardo thinks that there is a crisis in menfolk going on, and it’s all the fault of video games and porn.

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A bit of background first. In 2011, Zimbardo gave a TED talk called ‘the demise of guys’. “Guys are flaming out academically. They’re wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women”, he opined. On the back of this, he co-wrote with Nikita Coulombe a short polemic, ‘the Demise of Guys: Why Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It’, which weighed in at just over 100 pages. His new book – Man (Dis)connected – is essentially an update of ‘Demise’, and elaborates on the idea that certain aspects of modern technological life are becoming so much of a distraction for young men, that it’s impacting all walks of like - their academic abilities are dropping, they are struggling in forming successful social relationships, and their employment prospects are taking a hit.

There are a lot of reasons why Zimbardo and Coulombe think these problems have come about – and a lot of those seem to be grounded in bizarre views about gender stereotyping and old-school sexism – but I want to concentrate on their ideas about video games in particular, because the evidence just doesn’t stack up.

Is excessive gaming driving a crisis in masculinity?

One of the main concerns that Zimbardo and Coulombe seem to have is that young men are playing video games to excess, and that they are using games as a form of extreme escapism from the worries and responsibilities of real life. To support this viewpoint, they provide an onslaught of statistics: that Call of Duty: Black Ops had been played for a collective 68,000 years one month after release; that the worldwide revenue of the gaming industry totalled $66 billion in 2013; that since 2013, the number of UK children between 5 and 15 years old who own a tablet has doubled; that a study of 349 marriages found that in relationships that consisted of one gamer, 84% of the time it was the husband. This is all fine, but there doesn’t seem to be any coherent link between these numbers and the stated problem at hand. Part of the reason is that I’m not convinced that Zimbardo and Coulombe have clear definitions of excess – or even ‘average gamer’ - in mind.

As a case in point, in an interview in the Independent over the weekend, Zimbardo says, “For me, ‘excess’ is not the number of hours, it’s a psychological change in mindset.” Yet in the book, we get a different definition: “We consider four or more hours a day of playing video games alone to be excessive”, the authors claim in Chapter 11. Unfortunately, it’s not clear where this four hour figure comes from – no research evidence is cited to back it up. Kate Mills, a PhD student at UCL investigating developmental trajectories through childhood and adulthood, points out, “large scale population studies haven’t really found evidence that we’re using things like internet-related technologies to excess.” She adds, “the studies that really have been conducted looking at excessive internet gaming and relating that to brain changes and cognition are looking at very specific populations, and probably do not apply to the majority of young people.”

For Dr Andrew Przybylski, based at the Oxford Internet Institute, Zimbardo and Coulombe are asking the wrong question. “The book does a pretty good job of looking at summary stats, but the real question is, to what extent are these different levels or doses of video game systematically linked to the wellbeing of young people?” he says. Recently, his work has looked at the extent to which different doses of video game play might affect childhood wellbeing. “Essentially, compared to young people who don’t play video games at all, those who play about an hour per day tend to have higher levels of life satisfaction, lower levels of externalising problems (so they’re less likely to have issues with conduct and hyperactivity), whereas those who tend to play or more 3 hours per day tend to come off worse off on those measures” he says. “But these differences are very small – between 1 and 2 percent of a child’s functioning is in any way correlated with their video game play.”

At any rate, it’s not clear how Zimbardo and Coulombe link video game play to maladaptive behaviours. Mills points out, “in the studies I’ve reviewed that look at the relationship between engaging in online behaviours and engaging in the real world, there doesn’t seem to be a clear link to suggest that by connecting with people online, you’re not doing that in the real world.” She further adds “actually, there’s sometimes a positive relationship between internet use in moderation and participation in real world activities like sports and clubs

So at face value, while there seems to be evidence to back up the four-hour definition of excess, in actuality such ‘excessiveness’ doesn’t seem to have the impact that Zimbardo and Coulombe’s believe it does. “The question in my mind is, ‘does it matter what you’re doing excessively?’” Przybylski explains. “Because built into Zimbardo’s thesis is that there’s something special about video games – and men – that is in someway different than the effect that it would have on women, or other forms of leisure.” Debates along these lines have existed in the literature for some time. For example, is ‘video game addiction’ a disorder in and of itself (and therefore special), or is it better characterised like other forms of psychological addiction (gambling for instance), or as an impulse control disorder? Unfortunately, by simply listing a whole raft of seemingly unrelated facts and figures without explicitly outlining how the popularity of video games is causing behavioural issues, I’m not convinced that Zimbardo and Coulombe’s thesis adds anything meaningful to this debate.

Why would this just be a problem for men?

Central to their ideas, Zimbardo and Coulombe are worried that these are issues solely for men. But again, the data don’t seem to reinforce this idea. For example, they suggest that “for the ordinary gamer a sixteen-hour stretch would be just another typical weekend, and few parents would even bat an eyelid.” Given that they provide no definition of the ‘ordinary gamer’, all we can do is to look to data that tell us something useful about age and sex. “We do have some pretty good research that suggest that ordinary gamers are middle aged women who play social games on facebook, and that the median age of gamers is probably in the mid-30s and less than a quarter are under 18, and of them, roughly half are female” says Przybylski. According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the average gamer in the US is 31 years old, and 95 percent of parents pay attention to the content of the children their games play, while 83 percent place limits on playing time. An increasingly large proportion of gamers are women aged 50 and over, and on average 52 percent of gamers are male, 48 percent women. In the UK, the numbers are similar – 52 percent of all people who played some form of video game in the first half of 2014 were women. For most ‘average’ gamers then, these data just don’t seem to play into the idea that anyone would simply have time to spend 16 hours playing games on an average weekend. That Zimbardo and Coulombe suggest that parents wouldn’t care about the amount of time spent perhaps belies the perception of the typical gamer that they hold – lone boys, below the age of 18. Yet even if we accept that sort of age range, games still aren’t a solely masculine pursuit. In Przybylski’s study mentioned earlier, of a sample of 2463 male and 2463 female children aged 10-15 years, 42.3% of boys and 40.4% of girls reported playing between 1 and 3 hours of computer games per day.

The trouble with Zimbardo and Coulombe’s line of reasoning is that they don’t make it clear how, specifically, video game use might be a causal factor in driving any sort of behaviour crisis. But even if we could tease that factor out, it still doesn’t make sense how it would just affect men and leave women unscathed. By avoiding any sort of rigorous and systematic evidence base, they’ve had to rely on anecdotes, personal views, and ultimately, the same boring old arguments about the internet affecting the brain that we’ve seen other pundits spout before. It’s frustrating and tiresome, and to be honest, they should both know better.