It is practically guaranteed that Grand Theft Auto VI, expected in November 2026, will be the most successful entertainment product of all time. Rockstar’s latest entry in its open world video game series is estimated to have a budget of over $1 billion, which is more than twice the cost of Marvel’s last Avengers movie. Considering that Grand Theft Auto V has sold over 200 million units and generated $8.6 billion in revenue since it launched in 2013, the hype for the next one makes sense.
The video game industry is worth nearly $250 billion worldwide—more than films and music combined, which is a testament to the amount of influence and relevance they’ve had on our culture for decades. A 2024 study from the Entertainment Software Association reported that 55 percent of millennials and 63 percent of Gen Z preferred spending their free time with video games over movies and TV shows—indeed, video games have become the default medium for leisure among the majority of young people today, even with social media and short-form video content grabbing everyone’s attention. These games hail from game-first franchises like The Legend of Zelda to universes that took other forms first, like Hogwarts Legacy.
Born in 1997, I’m part of that odd intergeneration of “zillennials” that initially grew up with millennial culture in a pre-smartphone world, but quickly adapted to the technology and trends of zoomers. I remember being made fun of for enjoying video game music back when I was in middle school, but I ended up having the last laugh with the scores of Super Mario Galaxy and Final Fantasy broadcast on BBC Radio and performed in concert halls across the world. I also live in Kyoto, Nintendo’s birthplace and the home of their museum, which attracted over 500,000 visitors less than a month after it officially opened last year.
I’m contextualizing the current state of video games because the political right apparently has a significant problem with them. Matt Walsh’s generally dismissive attitude toward video games is so well known, it has even been parodied by the Babylon Bee. The late Charlie Kirk lumped video games with “smoking weed” and “looking at porn,” while bashing Tim Walz’s enjoyment of the Sega Dreamcast as “weird.” You don’t have to look far on social media to find dozens of viral posts calling video games a waste of time or reporting on negative attitudes toward video games by non-gamers. The time-wasting allegation is particularly sticky: Writer and mathematician James Lindsay sparked outrage earlier this year after posting that he “stopped playing video games”—he insinuated they were “childish”—when he was 25 and got his Ph.D. instead.
I am a gamer and happily married to a fellow gamer, have lived abroad for years in a country where video games are accepted as socially normal, and have managed to achieve bylines in outlets like The Spectator and UnHerd while working on a Ph.D. in international relations. And I wish to make the case for why video games are not time-wasters or enablers of real-world violence—and for why those on the right who are prejudiced against gaming would be better off trying to understand the important role this industry plays in our culture.
First, some clarification is in order. A lot of non-gamers, mostly older folks whose recollection stops around the time of the Nintendo Entertainment System, usually associate the medium with more archaic titles like Pac-Man or the original Super Mario Bros. These are what I like to call “stereotypical” video games: the ones with crude graphics, bleeps and bloops for sounds, and very simple controls. But video games have evolved far beyond these pixelated origins. The latest and greatest big-budget titles can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and companies employ hundreds of people in fields from programming to sound design in service of that development. Some have production values that rival Hollywood, with the voice acting, music, and stories produced by some of the most respected professionals in their fields.
Even those older games, however, are more complex than you may think. The original 1986 Legend of Zelda encourages real problem solving and planning because of its nonlinear structure. By the time the hardware got noticeably better by the 1990s and early 2000s, works such as Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid were asking deep questions about free will and nuclear disarmament with their narratives. Just listen to some of the conversations in Metal Gear Solid’s 2001 sequel and you’ll find themes eerily prescient to the world we live in today.
But despite that, are video games still a “waste of time?” On their own in a vacuum, perhaps. Compared to other “mindless” activities? Not even close. Recent studies estimate that the average American household watches more than 43 hours of content on screens a week. Time spent on smartphones is more than 7 hours a day, which is practically a full-time job. Video games, on the other hand, are largely consumed in moderation. One source reports that approximately 22 percent of U.S. adults from age 20 to 29 play video games for a grand total of … 6 to 10 hours a week. When that time is doubled to 20 hours a week, the proportion of players from that age group shrinks to just 8 percent. Other stats place kids and teenagers having slightly longer gaming sessions than adults, partially because younger people have more spare time.
Of course, you can find horror stories of people dying after marathon video gaming sessions, but these are extremely isolated incidents. It makes little sense why video games should be singled out as uniquely terrible against other pastimes. Any activity taken beyond reason is bound to lead to disastrous results, whether that’s regularly choosing to skip work to play World of Warcraft or drinking alcohol to the point where you pass out every night.
Video games being a punching bag isn’t anything new. A significant moral panic against violent content featured in games like Mortal Kombat occurred throughout the 1990s with the late Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman at the helm, which led to the creation of the ESRB age rating system. Throughout the 2000s, former attorney Jack Thompson essentially waged a one-man crusade against video games, blaming them for society’s ills like violent crime and anti-social behavior. Bashing video games has surprisingly been a bipartisan pastime, with the latest criticisms around gamers being unattractive, antisocial, or having their brains rotted just a retread of what came before.
But compared to other forms of media, video games at least have the advantage of requiring active participation and actual cognitive function. When played in moderation, the mental benefit of doing something that actively forces your brain to work is obvious over consuming an endless supply of “brain rot” content on TikTok. To put it simply, you need to pay attention when playing most video games.
Another common criticism that people on both the left and right of the political spectrum level at video games is that they promote graphic violence. That’s certainly something to consider, especially when children and younger people are the players. But when played by adults, video game violence should be viewed with context. Grand Theft Auto, like its title suggests, is about criminality, yet so are The Godfather and Breaking Bad. (There is even a GTA-like open world video game directly based on The Godfather, which amazingly enough features Marlon Brando’s last performance, but I digress.) Many of these games use violence to tell their stories and often contain biting satire or commentary on real-world issues. Spec Ops: The Line, a modern retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is a metatextual deconstruction on the concept of player violence itself. Some of these “violent” games are more successful than others in making a point, but then again, can’t the same be said about any subversive work?
There are arguments that video game violence is potentially more of a problem than cinematic or literary violence since people tend to spend more time on video games, but I’m not really convinced. While correlation is not causation, violent crime in American society is significantly down today compared to 50 years ago. Things have not gotten worse amid the rise of video games as a popular medium.
Painting all video games as violent also oversimplifies the genre. Papers, Please, described by the creator Lucas Pope as a “document thriller,” puts players in the shoes of an immigration officer in a fictional Eastern bloc country during the Cold War. The player has to carefully decide whether to admit or reject people crossing the border security checkpoint while taking care of his own family and appeasing the ruling government’s demands. Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls series features Tolkien-like levels of complicated lore and worldbuilding, with hundreds of hours of gameplay possible across each mammoth entry. Rockstar’s L.A. Noire is a meticulous recreation of 1947 Los Angeles, and there’s even a VR expansion that attempts to make the proceedings more immersive. Other titles like Shadow of the Colossus, Bioshock, and Silent Hill 2 are frequently cited for how their gameplay and moving stories evoke powerful emotions within players.
In all of these cases, the interactivity itself is integral to the story. In Papers, Please, you have to choose between helping dissidents and feeding your family, giving insight into the experience of hard choices under an oppressive regime. Adventuring in The Elder Scrolls and slowly gaining new pieces of lore provides insights into a world inspired by everything from the Roman Empire to Nordic history. There are Bible-like lessons on hubris and power struggles—only you’re one of the figures involved. When games are designed by people who care, they can leave surprisingly deep impressions, quite beyond cheap violence.
If none of this convincingly sells the value of video games, let me stress their pragmatic value. Progressives are fully aware that games are the dominant form of entertainment. More than 400,000 viewers watched Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch livestream of Among Us, and Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign even tried to use Animal Crossing: New Horizon for promotional purposes. The industry itself, especially in the United States, largely leans left: Many companies have hopped aboard the DEI bandwagon, and LGBT characters in video games are practically a requirement at this point. Left-wing political activists are open about their desire to use video games to push their talking points. Good luck trying to find any mainstream video games with conservative themes, because they pretty much don’t exist.
Let me be clear: I don’t want video games to become more tools for propaganda, whether by the left or the right. At the moment though, only one side of the mainstream political aisle dominates the industry. Matt Walsh’s complaints about the “wokeness” of the games industry ring hollow when he spends the rest of his time demonizing the medium as having little cultural or social value.
But not everyone on the right is like this. Andrew Klaven, ironically the oldest contributor at The Daily Wire, is an avid gamer and has devoted entire segments to his show covering video games. Since he was a published novelist and screenwriter before getting into political commentary, Klaven understands the importance of all art forms better than most. My libertarian friend Austin Petersen also loves video games and shares my beliefs that more right-leaning people ought to take them seriously. Another conservative friend, Colin Moriarty, co-founded his own successful PlayStation-themed podcast.
Like it or not, video games are the future. If conservatives continue to ignore video games, dismiss them as a waste of time, and belittle those who play them, then they might be brushing off a significant chunk of Americans.
