In the last decade and a half, boys and young men ages 15 to 24 more than doubled their average time spent gaming, to about 10 hours a week, according to a major survey.
Some teachers say gaming has disrupted focus in classrooms. Some economists have linked it to the decline in young men’s work hours. Many readers told us it was a chief reason for the recent struggles of boys and young men, when we started our series on the subject in May.
Yet video games also serve an important role in young people’s lives. They’ve become a central way that young people socialize and provide them — especially boys — with a sense of belonging.
The increase in time boys and young men spent playing games was the biggest of any activity measured by the American Time Use Survey, the large federal survey that each year asks a nationally representative sample of thousands of people what they did every minute of a day. (The category includes other types of games, like cards, but evidence suggests it’s mostly video games.)
The rise has coincided with technological changes that made games much more engrossing. Gaming went from an activity done at home on a console or computer to one also done on phones, anywhere and anytime.
While parents have always worried about video games (especially whether playing certain games causes violence, a connection that has not been proved), a pressing concern now is about time spent playing. As it has increased, the fear is that video games have displaced other activities in boys’ and young men’s lives — including physical activity, in-person socializing, homework, jobs and sleep.
“Boys would rather sit in front of Minecraft or Fortnite than play outside,” said Susan Donohoe, an elementary schoolteacher in Portland, Maine. “They are living a virtual life instead of real outside play and chores, which develop social skills and responsibility.”
Yet researchers, and teenagers themselves, said these virtual worlds were also a place to make and build real friendships.
“The nuance on boys and gaming is completely overlooked,” said Annie Maheux, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies adolescents and digital media. “There’s this social outlet for gaming that much of the research has missed.”
Most teenagers play games with others, even if they’re not physically with them, according to a nationwide survey of 1,500 teenagers published last year by the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Boys — who researchers say tend to prefer doing activities while they’re spending time with friends, more than having face-to-face conversations — are more likely than girls to game with others, the survey found. They are more likely to talk with friends while playing, like on FaceTime or Discord. And there is a social cost to abstaining.
“It’s an opportunity for boys to build up their community and feel connected to others,” said Zhiying Yue, a scientist at the Digital Wellness Lab.
Beckoning boys
The hobby is nearly universal: 97 percent of teenage boys play online games, according to a Pew Research Center survey of teenagers last year, as do 73 percent of girls. But boys spend much more time doing it, the time use survey showed — 10 hours a week in 2024, compared with two for girls.
Young people play video games to satisfy core developmental needs, said Ms. Yue: competence, by developing mastery; autonomy, by creating avatars and exploring worlds; and relatedness, by connecting with peers. These are things all adolescents crave, research shows. But boys and young men might seek them in the online world at a time when many say they’re feeling adrift in the offline one.
The risk is that new technology has made games much more immersive and addictive, said Zach Rausch, chief researcher at the Tech and Society Lab at N.Y.U.
The major change, he said, came in the 2010s when many games became free to start playing, versus purchased upfront. This shifted companies’ business models — the goal became to maximize the time people spent and incentivize small, in-game purchases.
Online games update constantly, reward daily check-ins, sell limited-edition virtual goods and make real-time tweaks to keep players hooked. Many never end, making them hard to put down.
By 2015, these changes had reshaped gaming — and the hours boys and young men spent playing had pulled ahead of the hours they spent on sports or hanging out with friends or family, the time use data shows. (Many spend even more hours watching people play video games on YouTube or Twitch.)
Many of the top games played by young people, measured by Morning Consult, a survey firm, are cross-device and multiplayer, and have free-to-play versions, including Roblox, Fortnite and Call of Duty.
“Millions of boys are struggling because they carry in their pockets constant access to products that are addictive by design,” Mr. Rausch said. “I am worried about boys, but my focus and my worries are aimed primarily at the predatory business models that profit from their vulnerabilities.”
Males are more susceptible to video game addiction than females, who are more likely to become addicted to social media, research has shown. One reason is that males tend to be drawn to competition and risk-taking, said Dr. Marc Potenza, who studies addiction at the Yale School of Medicine. Brain scans show that when males play video games, they have stronger activation than females in the brain region involved in reward processing.
Amy Gifford, the mother of an adolescent boy and girl in Salem, Mass., said her daughter often gets together with friends, while her son’s friends mostly meet up online, which they find easier because it requires little planning.
“It is more addictive for boys and it’s hard for them to pull away from that,” she said. “We have literally sent our kid knocking on doors asking other kids to play or ride bikes, and they say no because they’re gaming.”
A social outlet, to a point
The pandemic supercharged the time spent gaming: Males ages 15 to 24 spent 13 hours a week gaming in 2022, up from seven and a half in 2019. Many described it as a welcome way to connect during lockdowns, and evidence suggests it mitigated stress and depression. Since then, time playing games has not returned to prepandemic levels.
“It was really, really helpful to me,” said Julian Minkoff, 19, of playing Fortnite and Minecraft with friends during the pandemic. He still sometimes turns to video games as a way to hang out with friends in his college’s dorms: “It’s really good at creating memories.”
While the Digital Wellness Lab survey found that lonelier adolescents gamed more, gaming didn’t alleviate their loneliness — a pattern that was more pronounced for boys. This could be because those with weak social skills were more comfortable making friends online, but then got less practice interacting offline, researchers said.
None of the researchers interviewed suggested that parents ban video games. Games are important to how children bond today, they said, and there are also benefits for cognitive and problem-solving skills, mood and self-esteem.
Instead, they recommended that parents play alongside children, monitor the time they spend, and have conversations about the risks — including addiction and exposure to gambling, harassment, violence or extremist views. Some games are safer than others, they said.
The challenge, as with other types of screen time, is that it’s up to individual parents to figure it out. Aubrey Quinn, a senior vice president at the Entertainment Software Association, a video game industry group, said its members offer many tools for parents to do so, including a rating system for games and various safety controls, like for parents to limit screen time or block other players.
Some experts studying young people and technology said it should be tech companies’ responsibility to block addictive or unsafe features for children in the first place.
“Parents’ boundaries don’t stand a chance against products designed to keep kids hooked,” said Bennett Sippel, a research assistant at the Tech and Society Lab. “Platforms must take responsibility.”
Claire Cain Miller is a Times reporter covering gender, families and education.
Amy Fan is a Times reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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