Our society has a great fear of boredom. It is the quotidian complaint, the source of innumerable protests, the great enemy of fun.

As a result, many of us play video games. Rather than having to deal with our own boring lives, we can make new lives that are more fulfilling and less stressful. Thus, we have escaped that soul-crushing emotion, and can now be happier humans, free from the sameness of the physical world.

And that is what is wrong with video games. Boredom is an essential part of life. It acts as a powerful goad to action and an internal rebuke to do something useful.

Without boredom, what would we be? Would we even be willing to get out of bed, or might we all stare stupidly at the ceiling for hours until hunger drives us forth in search of food?

Certainly a brutish existence. Many great achievements just never would have happened in that world.

But video games have changed this. Somehow, they have an obsessive quality that often defeats boredom for hours, pulling us toward luminescent boxes to smite goblins for gold, while ignoring other things that could be done, or even things that must be done.

More importantly, however, boredom endlessly reminds us to think about the importance of what we are doing.

Whenever we find ourselves in the same occupation for an extended time, we are repeatedly forced to justify our actions and our inactions to ourselves, so that we might push through the boredom that pervades so much of our lives.

And again, video games conquer.

If someone told you about people spending their lives building enormous card-castles, devoting endless energy into crazed competitions for the tallest structures, and eventually losing their jobs because they do nothing but build card-castles at their desks, you would dismiss them as a weird fringe group.

And those who live in “World of Warcraft?” Is that such a weird fringe group?

It is still growing with over 11 million subscribers. And while most do not play it to the extreme that the media likes to report, the fact that some of them do is deeply frightening.

But if video games make you happy, who cares? Why should we judge the lifestyles of other people?

If someone does nothing but stare at a glowing screen looking for imaginary shiny objects, but is happier than someone who works hard and gets rich with a miserable third marriage and two spoiled kids, who wins?

Obviously, the second life has failed. To call the first successful, however, requires certain assumptions.

To be sure, if we are truly nothing but a “quintessence of dust,” if we are simply Epicurean bundles of atoms, then video games are a fantastic invention. But if you want to use that argument, then it also follows that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” and you can soliloquize until you go insane.

And if there is meaning in life, then aren’t video games one of the greatest disasters of the last century? Billions of hours have been seduced from our short lives so that we can arrange pixels in certain combinations.

You will say that everything written here also applies to other forms of recreation.

For television, you are right, but when you find yourself justifying anything in comparison to a large rectangular solid that tries to sell you things, you need a better reason.

And for other sources of amusement, comparisons break down.

Video games are cheap, flashy, time-consuming, extremely diverse, cause little physical or mental exhaustion, frequently (but not always) have practically no intellectual stimulation and are always waiting for you. Nothing else has all of those qualities to such an extent.

As a final note, it would probably be worth saying that this is not an argument against ever playing a game.

People require recreation, and games can be good for that; some studies even suggest that they can improve certain skills.

But the fact that they can defeat boredom, that scorned but beneficent emotion, makes them very dangerous.