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Social Media Is The World’s Worst Video Game
As is often the case with stereotypes, the stereotypes about video games are almost completely wrong.
While gaming is often thought of as a male-dominated hobby, 48% of gamers are female. While most people imagine pimply teenagers hunched over their controllers, the average gamer is between 35 and 44 years old. While the image of the basement-dwelling, anti-social nerd lives on, 50% of gamers use games as a way to connect with their families.
But there is one area where the stereotypes hold true.
According to the American Psychological Association, over 85% of video games contain some form of violent content. Games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty rake in billions of dollars purely thanks to hyper-realistic, disturbingly inventive depictions of violence. And the fact that children play these games has led many to the perfectly reasonable concern that this violence will spill out into the real world.
Thankfully, this last intuition is also wrong.
For most people, games, even violent games, are nothing more than a way to blow off steam. A place to do things they’d never dream of doing in real life. A place to try on personas that are a million miles from who they…
