Why are teenage boys spending 18 hours a week playing video games?
Thousands of aspiring game developers recently funneled into the main auditorium of San Francisco’s Moscone Center for the centerpiece keynote of this year’s five-day Game Developers Conference. The audience, which had an unusually high occurrence of dark trench coats and long unkempt hair, listened to a presentation on the psychology of game design from one of the industry’s founding fathers, Sid Meier. Meier has been developing hit games like Civilization since 1982, when he cofounded MicroProse, an early game development shop. In 1999, he became the second person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame. Meier focused on the tricks his teams use to keep kids glued to the screen. The strategies he revealed have been partly responsible for the explosion of an industry and the decision of a generation of young Americans—young men in particular—to battle fictional foes instead of doing homework. A 2007 Harris poll found that teenage boys in the U.S.
