The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

Author:Andrew Yang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: politics, economics
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

VIDEO GAMES AND THE (MALE) MEANING OF LIFE

Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life… it gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.

—JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL

When I was seven, my parents bought me and my brother an Atari 2600, the first mass game console. The game it came with was Asteroids. We played that game an awful lot. One night, we snuck down in the middle of the night only to discover my Dad already playing.

My brother and I loved going to local arcades and to try to make a few quarters last as long as possible. It was the perfect set of incentives: You win, you keep playing. You lose, you’re forced to stand there and watch others play, hoping that someone is forced to leave their game in the middle so you can jump in. We became very good at video games. My favorite was Street Fighter II. I memorized the Mortal Kombat fatalities to inflict graphic harm on defeated enemies. On the PC, I was hooked the first time I played Ancient Art of War when I was nine. As I got older, real-time strategy games like Warcraft and Starcraft arrived to combine efficiently building armies and settlements with defeating live opponents. My friends and I would sit next to each other in a house with several networked computers taking on strangers and talking trash.

The amount of time I spent on video games dropped dramatically after I graduated from college. I wanted to go on dates, and playing video games wasn’t helping. I developed a notion that virtual world building and real-life world building were at odds with each other. I started reading books on investing and financial statement analysis, which seemed to me to be the real-world analogue to becoming good at video games. By the time I started dabbling in games again and asked my brother-in-law to school me in Defense of the Ancients (“Dota”) over the holidays, they had leapt forward to a point where I felt old and slow. Memorizing key commands seemed beyond me.

That said, I still understand and appreciate video games on a visceral level. I even imagine that I could get into them again. They speak to a primal set of basic impulses—to world creating, skill building, achievement, violence, leadership, teamwork, speed, efficiency, status, decision making, and accomplishment. They fall into a whole suite of things that appeal to young men in particular—to me the list would go something like gaming, the stock market, fantasy sports, gambling, basketball, science fiction/geek movies, and cryptocurrencies, most of which involve a blend of numbers and optimization. It’s a need for mastery, progress, competition, and risk.

As of last year, 22 percent of men between the ages of 21 and 30 with less than a bachelor’s degree reported not working at all in the previous year—up from only 9.5 percent in 2000. And there’s evidence that video games are a big reason why.

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