The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect. It's pretty well documented that boys play more videogames, especially going into the later teen years, and that's more conducive to smaller, tight-knit (today, likely discord) communities.

If the time being spent on a discord call with your friends playing Minecraft are being counted as social media use the same way doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok is, then that's going to obscure the social media influence on mental health outcomes. It doesn't seem too hard to control for this, but I struggle to find any studies that meaningfully disambiguate the two.

>The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect.

I never thought of it that way but it makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

It would also explain why the only people I know who developed IT skills on their own were boys. Running videos games or trying to create them back in 2004 required you to learn a lot about how computers work and how to use them. There were no free-to-play easy-to-install AAA games like we have today. We didn't learn it because the process was fun, we did it because it was required if we wanted to play games. If all you do is browse the web, you don't need any IT skills. I'm sure there are many security specialists now who started their career by trying to remove the virus that came with a pirated game on their parent's computer in high school. It's crazy how fast kids learn on their own with the right motivation.

In my perhaps anecdotal experience, the risk of getting a virus from a crack is and was hugely overblown. And we now know that copy protection came with malware too, most infamously with Sony's SecuROM (same group also seems to have made Denuvo).

I got a few viruses myself. There were no free easy to use like we have today to sandbox an application or run a VM and it was well known that almost all cracks/keygen gave false positive. We just rolled the dice and hoped for the best.

The viruses I have seen myself were really not that dangerous. Ransomware were not popular yet and our life not was tied to our computer as much. It was also easy to detect with task manager/services compared to today and it was possible to remove them yourself with your AV or manually. There were far less things running on your PC in the background and internet traffic was minimal.

Only if you define any driver as "malware". SecuROM didn't actually come with malware in the way normal people define it, it was just described that way by salty pirates.

Eh. If it messed with the regular optical drive’s drivers, hooked privileged kernel functions, and generally (just like modern things like EAC) introduced holes the size a semi truck could drive through, it qualified as malware. No intent to pirate anything needed.

That's my point: that's not the definition used by anyone in the actual anti-malware space.

Video games are a sore subject in my house... I grew up with them and I turned out arguably okay (healthy, employable, sociable, etc). But my wife thinks they are the bane of society. And it wasn't until recently that I realized how much the "endgame" of video games has shifted since my childhood in the 90s. Back then, it seemed like the majority of games had an actual end, or they continued to get progressively painfully harder, or both. The number of mainstream games that went on 'forever' (and encouraged you to keep playing) seemed much lower. Now it seems like it's quite the opposite, and of course its the addicting, never-ending, always-online games that our kids and their friends want to play.

For now I'm mostly letting my kids play on one of those mini Super Nintendos with a bunch of built-in games, which they always eventually get tired of and decide on their own to go do something else. When it's Minecraft... I basically have to peel it out of their hands.

yes, things have definitely changed for video games in the past few years.

Loot boxes and the concept of being peer-pressured into paying money for trendy skins is not something that existed when I grew up. TBH, I think many concepts that are popular in AAA games today should require robust 18+ (or even 21+) ID verification to be allowed to use them. I generally never like the idea to banning things for everyone, but we can at least make it a bit harder for kids to access them.

Minecraft is one of the extremely few addictive games I wouldn't be too worried about if I was raising kids but I would verify what type of server/maps they are using. They get to build things and interacts with other people and last time I checked they had relatively few dark patterns (no gambling, loot boxes, paying for trendy skins, pay-to-win, etc.). I hope it is still the same today.

I have a collection of MS DOS games that my kids sometimes play too, precisely because they are the games with a single player mode and an actual end.

Strongly agree, but the challenge is that it is not a hard and fast distinction within a single product/app. Take Snapchat for example (popular with the under 18 crowd). It is both a messaging tool to communicate with friends (great) and it also has a ton of other doom scroll/UGC feed services. I'm not sure what the break down in time and profits for the two services are, but I suspect that they make good money from the doom scroll stuff so it is hard for their executive leadership to be ethical on this issue. I would personally be very supportive if the Government would take measures to protect people under 18 from feeds without restricting access to messaging. Such a law will require a bit of subtlety in how it works.

Yep. Even for video games in my teens I created and led a clan. It was very social and constructive for me.