In my recent essay for the American Conservative, “Are Video Games the New Novels?”, I answer with a resounding and unequivocal “no.”

The essay is largely a response to an article by Nick Gillespie in Time in which he praises video games as the most important art form of the 21st Century, and compares them favorably to the novels of Charles Dickens. Gillespie is a journalist and polemicist I greatly admire. His libertarian activism and advocacy with Reason magazine is of crucial importance in a political arena hosting a brawl between one wing that wants to rob America’s liberty and another wing that wants to revoke its freedoms.

His argument in support of grown men and women wastefully idling their hours on toys designed for children is dreadfully unconvincing, however.

In my essay, I argue that video games are damning evidence of how American culture has undergone a process of juvenilization (it has become difficult to find real adults), which I also wrote about for Front Porch Republic and True/Slant, and I rely on Marshall McLuhan to explain that electronic games, despite their content, are bad for the attention span and inferior to literature. “The medium is the message,” as the old dog put it a long time ago.

On an interesting side note, followers of my work are well aware that I tackle many controversial political, religious, and cultural issues, but never do I attract scorn equal to that of the adult video game player. The gamers come out of their rooms to attack anyone who will question their favorite hobby. It often seems to me that they protest too much.