> What if you could have done something more productive or rewarding with your life instead, like developed new friendships or deepened existing ones, learned new skills, or read something that opened your eyes or changed your life
So the couple years I spent playing WoW back in university did these some of these things for me.
The friends that I played with are some of my best friends 15+ years later with the time we spent playing being a formative part of building those relationships and us still occasionally referencing stories from that time-period. Mind you real-world friends that I later did things like play D&D and other TTRPGs with so I'm not making the argument video games would have been enough on their own.
Getting bored of the time-sink in Wow lead to me investigating game hacking, lead to me learning memory modification and reverse engineering skills, and was my first try at process exploitation techniques all contributing to my eventual career in computer security. That said, I was already interested in the field and if I hadn't been I probably wouldn't have tried those things.
I don't play games very often nowadays but last year, while I was going through a divorce and dealing with depression and some amount of substance abuse in response, playing Disco Elysium was very relevant and contributed a ton to working through the thoughts and emotions around what I was going through. It helped me pull myself out of destructive patterns and I consider it one of the more important pieces of fiction I've experienced personally. That said, it is more or less a really complex illustrated choose your own adventure book so its not quite what most people think of when they think about "video games".
If my qualifications don't make it clear I don't think my anecdotes count as data nor am I discounting your personal experience, but I do feel the time I spent playing video games have been a net positive for my life.
So the couple years I spent playing WoW back in university did these some of these things for me.
The friends that I played with are some of my best friends 15+ years later with the time we spent playing being a formative part of building those relationships and us still occasionally referencing stories from that time-period. Mind you real-world friends that I later did things like play D&D and other TTRPGs with so I'm not making the argument video games would have been enough on their own.
Getting bored of the time-sink in Wow lead to me investigating game hacking, lead to me learning memory modification and reverse engineering skills, and was my first try at process exploitation techniques all contributing to my eventual career in computer security. That said, I was already interested in the field and if I hadn't been I probably wouldn't have tried those things.
I don't play games very often nowadays but last year, while I was going through a divorce and dealing with depression and some amount of substance abuse in response, playing Disco Elysium was very relevant and contributed a ton to working through the thoughts and emotions around what I was going through. It helped me pull myself out of destructive patterns and I consider it one of the more important pieces of fiction I've experienced personally. That said, it is more or less a really complex illustrated choose your own adventure book so its not quite what most people think of when they think about "video games".
If my qualifications don't make it clear I don't think my anecdotes count as data nor am I discounting your personal experience, but I do feel the time I spent playing video games have been a net positive for my life.