Video Games as UBI and the Unnecessariat

Recently I was recommended this article about young guys my age are turning to video games in favor of that old chestnut gainful employment and found it pretty interesting. The rising importance of video games in my demos life doesn't seem very surprising to me, especially considering how quickly we've gone from:

to

The big takeaway: "For Hurst, the pull that games exerted on his son helped illustrate what's happening to young men in the broader economy. Between 2000 and 2015, he said, the percentage of lower-skilled men aged 21 to 55 who had a job dropped from 84 percent to 77 percent, "a massive change relative to historical levels." The decline is particularly acute among men in their 20s. Employment fell 10 points over the same period, from 82 percent to 72 percent. In 2015, he noted, 22 percent of men in their 20s who lacked a college degree had not worked a single day during the previous year—up from 10 percent in 2000." A couple of things here. First, as someone who enjoys video games quite a lot I think it would be insane not to admit their addiction potential (and if that isn't the right term for it I'm not sure what is) - its in their nature as games to be at least somewhat addicting dopamine release tools, they just require a significantly lesser amount of effort than playing a game of basketball or something. Since we all love dopamine (internet porn is pretty big I hear) it tracks that some people will choose to forsake their less-than-dope waking existence, especially if their choice of jobs is between flipping patties at Wendy's or stocking shelves at Ace Hardware and they can maintain a sufficient standard of living by either living with their parents or taking handouts from Uncle Sam. 

If this was really such a historic phenomenon you would think that we have begun to see at least some indication of these missing dudes' presence, but I don't I personally have noticed anything. As far as I can tell houses are still being built, roads are being maintained, and trucks are being driven... but to be fair, the type of guy that this article talks about probably isn't one that I would've really had much experience with in my life regardless. I grew up in a fairly affluent small town in Michigan and was pretty solidly middle-class so college was more of an inevitable thing to be planned for than a potential option among many, and right now I can only think of 1 guy I knew from high school who I know for sure did not go to college, and he is going to be in prison soon so... yeah. This trend of under educated guys dropping out of the workforce like this reminds me of another article I read about a year ago about a torrent of people, disproportionately white, women, rural and not well-off, who are not even "unemployed" at this point. They've been rendered obsolete by technology and automation and are currently committing quiet heroin/alcohol-aided suicide in pretty historic numbers as the global information economy leaves them in the dust (another great piece on this situation). This phenomenon of young men passing by the hours in front of video games seems like a companion piece to what is happening to their female counterparts, and while it certainly isn't ideal I wonder how much worse this will get before it gets any better, since I doubt Amazon has plans to slow down anytime soon. Luckily these gaming fiends seem to be pretty cool with it for now so we won't be seeing molotovs through the windows of Congress just yet, but I'm very interested to see how (if at all) the government begins figuring out new, more constructive pursuits for all of us in the unecessariat after the singularity.

(And yes, I acknowledge that games are a valid entertainment art form just like movies and books blah blah blah, that isn't the issue. The problem is that when you give people a relatively cheap and easy way to feel happy/engaged/challenged like you normally would at some crappy minimum wage job I'm not sure how surprised we can be that they choose illusion instead of reality).