Video Games

Video Games Are Not Making Men Miserable

Video games, pornography, and gambling: One of these things just doesn't belong!

Robby Soave | 8.27.2026 3:15 PM

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Video games (Illustration: Midjourney)

Are men, particularly young men, spending all their time playing video games, gambling, and watching porn—and hating their lives because of this? Those are the apparent implications of a new report from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) that offers some intriguing insights and perhaps reasons for concern…while also conflating several fundamentally distinct habits.

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For starters, video games are not at all like gambling and porn, and lumping all three things together under the nebulous category of vice is a huge mistake. Yet the reason for doing so is obvious: The authors want to show that men en masse are succumbing to the "addiction economy," which is making them miserable. The report has policy implications: IFS senior fellow Brad Wilcox and media director James Lynch write in Compact that the "libertine wing of the Republican Party" must be reined in.

"The American founders were not libertarian about vice," they write. "They understood that a republic whose young men cannot govern themselves will not govern anyone else for long. A political vision for American men necessitates rediscovering the fact that liberty and license are not the same thing."

Yet it's hard to take their calls to restrict liberty seriously........

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