Video Games Are Not Making Men Miserable

Video games, pornography, and gambling: One of these things just doesn't belong!

Are men, particularly young men, spending all their time playing video games, gambling, and watching porn—and hating their lives because of this? Those are the apparent implications of a new report from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) that offers some intriguing insights and perhaps reasons for concern…while also conflating several fundamentally distinct habits.

For starters, video games are not at all like gambling and porn, and lumping all three things together under the nebulous category of vice is a huge mistake. Yet the reason for doing so is obvious: The authors want to show that men en masse are succumbing to the "addiction economy," which is making them miserable. The report has policy implications: IFS senior fellow Brad Wilcox and media director James Lynch write in Compact that the "libertine wing of the Republican Party" must be reined in.

"The American founders were not libertarian about vice," they write. "They understood that a republic whose young men cannot govern themselves will not govern anyone else for long. A political vision for American men necessitates rediscovering the fact that liberty and license are not the same thing."

Yet it's hard to take their calls to restrict liberty seriously when their target is so broad—and in the case of video games at least, entirely undeserving. Yet the IFS study takes every effort to lump in video games with porn consumption and gambling: On X, research fellow Grant Bailey calls attention to the fact that just 2 percent of men don't engage in any of these activities, and Wilcox notes the "staggering" number of young men who do all three—a fate he considers to be obviously characteristic of "addiction."

We have a generation of young men trapped in the "addiction economy"—and the numbers are staggering:

☑️ 1-in-8 use porn, gamble & game daily
☑️ Almost 1-in-4 gamble daily
☑️ 1-in-4+ use porn daily https://t.co/ayewfXxREO pic.twitter.com/R6H72bDU5o

— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) August 25, 2026

So let's start with the obvious: Is someone who plays video games every day addicted to video games? The answer is certainly not.

For starters, the study does not really have a good sense of what it means to play video games too much. It tracks how often young men play video games: many times a day, daily, several times a week, or less/often never. But what does it mean to play video games "many times a day"? Surely a better measure would be how many hours a day a person spends gaming. Someone who takes a break from work to play a quick round or two of Super Smash Bros. a couple times a day is not actually playing video games with as much intensity as someone who plays once a day but for 10 hours straight. By this measure, I myself would fall into the category of the highest level of addiction, since I pause to play the online card game Dominion, which lasts about five to 20 minutes per game, many times throughout the day. But I am quite obviously not addicted to video games, nor am I negatively impacted by playing them.

To its credit, the study does acknowledge some positive aspects of video games, describing them partly as "a source of camaraderie and collaboration, which, as we have seen, is often in short supply." But overall, the study is understating the fact that video games are very often—though not always—a source of positive social interaction for young men. This includes in-person socialization and virtual socialization: Many guys play games while wearing headsets for communication with teammates and rivals so that they can collaborate to solve problems and clear obstacles. Yet the study's authors lament that frequent gaming is "enervating, at odds with other valuable goods in life, including relationships, and yet another cause and effect of demoralization."

Let's consider that claim: Video games are getting in the way of "other valuable goods in life." In some sense, it's absolutely true. Doing anything in excess is bad for you and will conflict with other healthy activities you could be doing. But it seems to me these endless efforts at diagnosing what is supposedly causing people to be unhappy make a lot of casual assumptions about what men would be doing with their time if they weren't playing video games or scrolling social media. Maybe they would just do nothing and be bored! Maybe they would sit on the couch all day watching television, a technology that has been around a lot longer than smartphones and video games. Maybe they would binge drink and beat each other with their fists: It used to be far, far more common for people (mostly men) to get in physical confrontations with each other, but the inclination toward violence has fallen rapidly in part because there are so many other (better) uses of a person's time.

That doesn't mean we need to accept increased feelings of loneliness as the price we pay for a much safer society, although it is always useful to counteract overt romanticization of the past with cold, hard facts. But with growing calls from both sides of the aisle to regulate all the ways that people—particularly young people and young men—freely choose to preoccupy themselves, we should challenge policymakers to be very precise about the professed harms and the proposed solutions. For example, as a result of its $17.1 billion settlement with various state attorneys general, Meta will be implementing measures to curtail young people's usage, even though there is scant evidence that Facebook and Instagram have a widespread pernicious effect on this group.

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Worth Watching

RIP Tim Curry, one of my favorite actors and a man I truly admired. He appeared in so many of the films and TV shows I enjoyed as a kid that it's difficult to remember them all: from his mustache-twirling turn as the villainous Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers to his characteristically earnest portrayal of Long John Silver in Muppets Treasure Island (alongside the decidedly less serious Muppets) to his many random appearances on '90s and '00s cartoon shows like The Wild Thornberries, Hey Arnold!, Batman Beyond, and Samurai Jack. He even voiced Big Brother in the special 1984-themed episode of Johnny Bravo—please stop what you are doing and watch this clip.

Of course, the performance of Curry's that I treasure most dearly is Wadsworth the butler in Clue. The entire cast is great, but it just wouldn't work without Curry's mania.