For most of their history, video games were a fringe pastime, the loser kid brother to traditional entertainments like sports. Gamers were doughy nerds who subsisted on Doritos and Mountain Dew and feared women and sunshine.
But over the past decade, video games have achieved something of a societal coup. Piggybacking off the rise of smartphones and social media, gaming has swung with lightning speed into total ubiquity. Businessmen play them on the subway. Kids play them in school. Korean teens become millionaires playing them. Your grandmother is probably still playing Candy Crush.
Journalists play them, too, which is why they’ve recently subjected the public to a deluge of scribbling justifying the habit. Over at Reason, Peter Suderman has given us the mother of all such pieces: “Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That’s OK. (For Now.)”
Suderman’s piece is remarkably ambitious. The jobless twenty-something gamer—suspended in onanistic adolescence, cut off from work and society—remains an ideological punching bag for almost everyone. Everyone, that is, except Suderman, who wants to let you in on a little secret about that gamer: “He’s actually happier than ever.”
For us reactionaries who question the prudence of giving over one’s prime years to video games, it’s tempting to dismiss this argument. Consider the depressing irony of spending thousands of hours in a basement playing a game called Call of Duty, where the only practical end is selfishly filling one’s time. Who is this gamer happier than, exactly? His wage-slave parents?
Suderman aims to explain that video games might be more useful and fulfilling than they are given credit for. And on those grounds, it’s interesting even if you’re not convinced by his argument. But his piece also functions as an illustration of the central divergence between libertarian and conservative philosophy.
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Suderman begins with an observation and an analogy: Increasingly large swathes of the young male population are totally uninterested in finding a job, choosing instead to spend the bulk of their time gaming. But these two activities, he argues, are less dissimilar than they appear. Suderman suggests that video games can be seen as “a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks,” making them substantially similar to work.
Because of this similarity, video games can provide for the unemployed the same sorts of psychic benefits that work provides for the ordinary citizen: a sense of direction in life, of accomplishment and order—as Suderman puts it, “a universal basic income for the soul.” In this view, video games serve as a sort of cultural salve, soothing the irritations caused by the abrasive edges of capitalist society.
“A whole generation of men obsessively playing video games during their prime decades of life may not be ideal,” he tells us, “but most would agree that it is preferable to riots.”
“If such entertainments can make life more comfortable for the unemployed,” Suderman reasons, “they reduce the likelihood of anger and upheaval. Appealing, engaging games may raise the opportunity cost of both work and revolution.”
But Suderman isn’t just worried about uprisings from the underclass: In fact, he recounts a period in his own life when, between jobs and riddled with anxiety, video games helped him to decompress and stay positive. Gaming isn’t some new opiate of the masses. The sense of accomplishment it provides is real and fulfilling.
But here we encounter the central problem: While the sense of accomplishment from gaming might be real, the actual accomplishment isn’t. When a gamer comes to the end of a long day of World of Warcraft, the monsters he’s slain, the people he’s helped, the nation he’s defended—they’re all fictions, assemblages of bytes whose only existence in the real world is as an entertainment commodity. Of what use to anyone is a sense of accomplishment that doesn’t correspond to any actual reality? Which is what brings us to the conservative-libertarian divide.
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One of the central tenets of libertarianism is its commitment to the sovereignty of the individual. The human being’s inalienable right to live his life as he sees fit is its bedrock principle.
This can be seen in the preamble of the Libertarian Party’s 2016 platform: “As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty, a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others.”
“We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives,” the platform continues, “and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose.”
The libertarian thus sees the economy as nothing more than a great commodities, market wherein individuals swap their time, energy, and property in order to more efficiently pursue their own happiness.
How does a person who looks at the world this way see their own work? Simply as one such transaction: the sacrifice of labor in exchange for the currency that will allow one to pursue a radically self-determined fulfillment. A person who likes their job might be willing to trade that labor for less money, but the central transaction remains the same whether one herds cattle, trades stocks, repairs cars, or deals drugs. One’s time and energy are transformed into the tools one needs to do the things one wishes to do.
Which is all well and good, except for one question: What if you had the opportunity to skip straight to the fulfillment without bothering with any of that pesky wage slavery? Say, through video games? Gaming feels meaningful, is enjoyable, and—importantly—is cheap enough that one need not work full-time to support the habit. It may not mean anything to the outside world, but it means something to you, and that’s what matters.
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Conservatives reject the libertarian view because they reject that the individual is society’s only meaningful moral agent. As a conservative, the society into which you are born is in a sense more meaningful than you are; it predates you, and its moral ends are higher than yours. When you view community as an entity that itself possesses moral weight, it changes more than how you interact with that community. It changes how you view your work as well.
Just like libertarians, conservatives value work because of how it allows them to follow their own pursuits. However, conservatives are also connected to a deeper tradition dating back to St. Benedict, which allows them to view work as good in its own right, teaching the individual to focus on ends greater than his own selfish ones. A fulfilling job isn’t fulfilling simply because it presents the worker with a series of tasks to overcome. It’s fulfilling because it has some outcome that contributes concretely to the larger whole.
Once one accepts the existence of these larger ends, the distinction between gaming and work is crystal clear. One is solipsistic and directed inward; the other is focused outward, striving to contribute to the well-being of others. The difference is only obscured when one also views work as fundamentally transactional and selfish. It’s easier to distinguish real communities from fictional ones when you don’t view community itself as a fiction.
