“‘Cutting Class to Play Video Games’”, Michael R. Ward2017-10-12 (sociology of tech)⁠:

Video games represent a class of new leisure activity that makes use of advances in information technology. These increasingly popular pastimes can crowd out time spent on other activities.

I exploit week-to-week variation in video game popularity to identify variation in video game playing time likely due to changes in game quality rather than to individuals selecting into gaming.

I find that when video game sales increase, students spend more time playing games, and less time attending class and doing homework. Differential effects for college students and those with lower incomes indicate large effects for these groups.

Newly developing ICT based pastimes, such as use of online social media, could have similar effects.

…To address the selection issue, I adopt an identification strategy that uncovers a plausibly causal relationship operating through variation in game popularity and in other activities. This is accomplished by merging game popularity information. Specifically, I first show that time spent playing games by ATUS respondents is positively related to the volume of sales of video games in the current and previous week. This is consistent with other research finding that gaming activity spikes with game purchases and tapers off quickly (Engelstätter and Ward2016) When the quality of current games is rated higher and perceived to be better, more gamers purchase them and spend more time playing them. This generates variation in time spent gaming that tends to be uncorrelated with the gamer’s educational characteristics. I then link this variation in gaming to variation in time spent on two educational inputs: class attendance and homework. This way, the effects of time spent gaming are less likely to result from selection of poorer students into gaming.

The results indicate decreases in school attendance and time doing homework due to video game playing. When video game sales are particularly high, ATUS respondents are more likely to engage in gaming, are less likely to attend class, and may spend less time on homework. A one standard deviation in video game sales leads to an average reduction in class time of about 16 minutes which corresponds to nearly a 10% reduction. Video game time is consistently estimated to decrease homework time but this result is smaller and not always statistically-significant.

The marginal effect of gaming on homework by males is larger than for females but the effect on class attendance is not different from females. The crowding out of class time effect is larger for students from lower income households. Video game playing may crowd out class attendance more for college students than high school students, possibly due to less parental oversight. However, this also may reflect their ability to shift playing to days with fewer classes.