Are Games a Waste of Time? This Old Question Has Kept Finding New Targets

The old pressure that says pleasure is not enough

There is no real need to begin this story with the game industry. It is older than that.

In Book X of The Republic, Plato says poetry may be heard in its defense if it can show itself useful to the state and to human life, while also arguing that poetic imitation damages the understanding of its hearers.¹ What matters here is not whether poetry is enjoyable. It is judged by whether it is useful to truth, to education, and to civic order.

Ancient Greece did not have television or games, of course. But the form of the argument is already there. Anything that moves emotion, absorbs attention, and resists immediate conversion into practical benefit is told to prove its usefulness first. Pleasure alone is not enough. Show that it serves the soul, the state, or education.

That pressure is not very far from the modern question: does it help you get a job? Does it build a skill?

Novels, comics, and television were also accused of idleness first

Each time a new medium spreads, similar words return.

In eighteenth-century England, the rise of the novel triggered what has since been described as a reading panic. Ana Vogrinčič shows how novels were criticized for drawing especially women and young readers into fantasy, distracting them from domestic and practical duties, and overheating the emotions. A 1796 issue of Sylph even offers a caricature of a mother weeping over a heroine's distress while her own children cry for bread.²

In 1954, the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency held hearings on comic books. As the Law Library of Congress later summarized, fears that comics were pushing children toward crime had become a political issue, and Fredric Wertham delivered the testimony that made him notorious. The result was the Comics Code, which imposed a long regime of self-censorship across the industry.³

In 1961, FCC chair Newton Minow called television "a vast wasteland."⁴ His complaint was not only about violence, formula, or the excess of commercials. It was also that broadcasters were using public airwaves without enriching the intelligence and citizenship of the people who watched.

Set beside each other, the sequence is almost funny. Novels produce idleness. Comics produce delinquency. Television corrodes intelligence. Games steal time. The details shift from medium to medium, but the structure stays strangely familiar.

New entertainment is often read first not as recreation but as decline.

What is happening now is not pressure on games alone

What makes the story more complicated is that it cannot be reduced to old people scolding the young. Behind it is a broader pressure: the pressure to reclaim time for utility.

According to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences' Humanities Indicators, U.S. colleges and universities awarded 165,489 bachelor's degrees in the humanities in 2024, down 30% from the recent high-water mark in 2012. The humanities' share of all bachelor's degrees also fell from 13.1% in 2012 to 8.4% in 2024. Over the same period, engineering, health and medical sciences, and the natural sciences increased their share.⁵

This is not simply a story about young people reading less. It means the university itself is more openly measured by what can be explained as career preparation, what can be converted quickly into wages, and what can justify itself to the labor market.

Once that happens, the gaze toward games becomes harsher almost automatically. Games look like a farther detour than study, certification, or internships.

But what appears here is less that games are uniquely hated than that the space for non-instrumental time as a whole has narrowed.

Even then, the hierarchy inside culture remains

That still does not finish the story.

Poetry, literature, painting, or classical music can at least be defended as culture or art. Even when they are not practical, they are more easily protected by claims that they deepen a person, cultivate sensibility, or broaden social understanding.

Games, comics, television, and pop music are often pushed down once more at that stage. They are seen not only as useless, but as not elevated enough.

This second hierarchy is stubborn. Given the history of film being treated as vulgar for a long time, it is possible that games will someday be fully sheltered by the language of art as well. But for now, games are still often placed below the phrase "well, reading would be one thing."

At that point, the concrete experience of games fails to translate into the language of value.

The feeling of filling in the blank space of a map in an exploration game. The way the reason for losing in a fighting game remains in the body at the level of a single frame. A night when repetitive leveling in an RPG unexpectedly steadies your thoughts. Hours spent failing alongside a friend who exists only as a voice in a co-op game. Those experiences are different from the afterimage of a novel or a film, but they are not obviously empty.

And yet they are often summarized as nothing more than "just playing."

The evidence is beginning to say that time alone is not enough

So are games actually a waste of time?

At the very least, research is now more careful than the old blanket claim.

The WHO defines gaming disorder in ICD-11 as a pattern involving impaired control, priority over other activities, and serious functional harm. At the same time, the WHO also states that such disorder affects only a "small proportion" of those who engage in gaming.⁶

That means it is not the same thing to say that gaming can become a serious problem in some cases and to say that gaming as such is wasteful.

More recently, a 2025 study from the Oxford Internet Institute analyzed over 140,000 hours of actual Nintendo Switch play across 150 titles and 703 adult players. It found that playtime itself did not significantly affect mental well-being, life satisfaction, or depressive symptoms. What mattered more was how gaming fit into a person's life and values, and the context in which it was played.⁷

This is not the same as saying games are simply good. It is saying that hours alone do not explain very much.

Reading can also become a way of wearing yourself down in flight from work. Films can also turn into passive repetition that destroys sleep. By contrast, games can function as relief, social connection, achievement, or a calming rhythm of repetition. The UK government's Video Games Research Framework also treats games as an important part of social, cultural, and economic life while arguing for better independent research on their effects.⁸

The point, then, is not to sanctify games. Games can help people, and they can harm them. But the line between those outcomes is not drawn automatically by the mere fact that something is a game. It changes significantly with the life in which it is embedded and the relations it forms there.

Better than asking whether it was waste: ask what remained

In the end, "are games a waste of time?" is simply too blunt a question.

There are ways of playing that do waste time. There are nights when sleep gets sacrificed, promises to other people are broken, and a life becomes narrower. It would be dishonest to deny that.

But that is not a sin unique to games. Novels can do it. Television can do it. Social media can do it. Work itself can do it. Time that is supposed to be useful can empty a person out just as easily.

What becomes clearer, then, is not that games are intrinsically more wasteful than other forms of leisure. It is that societies have repeatedly called new forms of entertainment a waste. What has really been at stake each time is the legitimacy of leisure, the hierarchy of culture, and the boundary that decides whose time looks respectable and whose pleasure looks childish.

So if the question needs an answer, this is probably the more accurate one.

Games can sometimes waste time. But games are not uniquely wasteful.
The phrase "games are a waste of time" often says less about games themselves than about the values of those who want to rank time and culture into higher and lower forms.

The real question is not only how many hours were spent.
It is what remained after the game ended: bodily fatigue, escape from reality, a memory with friends, a newly ordered thought, or mere inertia.

What remains, here, is not just a feeling or an opinion. It also includes what was set in motion in the imagination of the receiver. Did it make you picture another person's life more concretely than before? Did it let you see your own situation from a different angle? Or did the stimulus simply pass through without taking shape as anything at all?

The same question can be asked of YouTube and TikTok as well. Did that stretch of short-form viewing become nothing more than finger movement and anticipation of the next hit of stimulation? Or did it leave behind a creator's distinctive rhythm, the atmosphere of a place you had never known, the texture of someone else's work or bodily skill, a desire or anxiety you had not yet put into words? The issue is not only "games or video." It is closer to this: did that time activate the imagination, or did it get swept onward to the next stimulus before imagination could begin?

So who gets to judge that? Probably not any single authority in the end. But as guiding lines, three questions may help.

1. Does it make you want to say something back in your own words?
2. Does it widen your attention to other people or to the world, even slightly?
3. Does it thin out the rhythm of your life, or does it help it regain some shape?

The first asks whether the experience remained purely passive. The second asks whether that time stayed sealed inside the self alone. The third asks us to read cultural experience not through moralism but through its relation to lived life.

This does not mean that only experiences meeting all three conditions have value. But it is at least a better cut than asking only what practical use something had. Time spent with culture cannot be judged only by credentials or metrics of productivity. We also have to look at how imagination moved, what language remained, and what changed in the texture of life. Without that slower register, the judgment that something was a waste still comes too soon.

Unless we look at what remains after play, the word "waste" arrives too early.