It should be noted that most culture war stuff is itself engineered for an emotional "hit", although usually an angry one.
1990s: Kids these days wouldn't have the attention span to {read a book}. All they can do is {watch music videos}.
2020s: Kids these days wouldn't have the attention span to {watch a music video}. All they can do is {browse TikTok}.
On the extreme end, you got the Civ series. It's been around for 30 years now. There is literally a joke website called Civ Anonymous. "One More Turn"
FPS games like CS really feed that dopamine hit when you get a kill, especially a head shot. You think the game designers aren't thinking about how to make that kill as satisfying as possible?
Even the games of the 90s were engineered to be addictive. Tetris when you clear the blocks. Mario when you get a power up. Even Solitaire when you win the game and the cards go flying.
You remember those old farts, annoying everybody with their sanctimonious imprecations about video games ? They were right.
I wasted so much time especially in my 20's racking up idiotic "achievements" that exist only in a Factorio savegame and other similarly irrelevant places.
Most people, opponents and supporters of video games alike, tend to discuss if the activity itself is harmful - does it make us desensitised to violence etc, but the real issue is what you are NOT doing when you play those games.
If a child doesn't have easy access to cheap thrills from a video game, she will start using her imagination, draw something, go to a friend, come up with some mischief.
Time is limited, and childhood is the most precious thing in the world, don't waste it.
I think there are also serious qualitative differences between games in the 90s/00s and mobile freemium games of today.
This is rather sad; would you rather have been prevented from them? What would you prefer to have been made to do?
Yes, playing video games occasionally with friends or watching the odd film can be good things but that's obviously not what we're talking about here.
I'm very happy most of my childhood memories revolve around tree houses, bicycles and gangs of friends roaming the streets.
Do they used to watch MTV in School?
Do they used to watch MTV while waiting for bus?
Was their classmates all making videos for MTV?
Not MTV exclusively, but yes I knew kids (in elementary school!) that watched TV for hours every day (although I didn’t grow up with that habit).
Pretty sure the same hours-a-day thing was true for video games as well, although in my view at least that’s not totally passive and was sometimes social (kids playing against each other in person).
Which I suppose was a small minority. Defintely not the case with TikTok.
That seems to fit with this recent data [1], which shows the average as still high but lower in the younger demographic. It has the 65+ group as 7+ hrs/day on average, which seems mildly horrifying considering half of people are likely above that. But perhaps not surprising - especially with the obesity rates being what they are, many people may not be very mobile at that age.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...