Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, esti-mates that people around the world spend a collective 3 billion hours playing video games each week, and that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the time they reach age 21 (McGonigal 2011).
Who’s playing all these video games? It’s men. Some gamers are female, there is no doubt — and video game companies are very aware of this. Still, young women don’t play to nearly the extent that young men do — only 5 hours per week compared to young men’s 13 hours weekly (Gentile 2004). That adds up to roughly the entire month of February, each year. If a young man invested those 10,000 hours into his education, he would have acquired two bachelor’s degrees. Instead he has become master of his virtual kingdom.
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