Worry about men, young men in particular, is widespread. Reports in the media track these worries, highlighting cratering educational engagement and attainment, substance abuse, social pressure, isolation, loneliness, romantic disengagement, porn use problems, violence, radicalization, anti-feminism, and more. There is a lot to worry about.

Chief among the worries we encounter is how young men are choosing to spend time online. This recent Guardian article nicely encapsulates a characteristic expression of this worry, as evidence-based concern heavily garnished with norm enforcement and aesthetic objection. Sometimes a discussion of solutions or interventions follows, variations on the theme of diverting more attention to less objectionable content.

The real problem arises when worriers like us start to imagine that less objectionable content. We’ve seen this happen in gatherings of well intentioned advocates, who imagine content that is sincere, direct, therapeutic, message-rich, perfectly produced, content that elides over the conflicts inherent in modern masculinity, and largely skirts gaming culture . . . just what the doctor ordered perhaps, but not what any young man whose media habits we’ve observed lately would ever choose for himself. Which means our interventions are dead on arrival, without a prayer of ever reaching, let alone succeeding with, our intended audience.

We can do better. In the spirit of helping us do better, below we share some of what we’ve learned from observing young men’s media habits lately, as well as some thoughts and questions that may merit deeper investigation. Some of what we share may be difficult to engage with. By sharing, we do not mean to suggest that we stop drawing bright lines around illegal, hateful, or immoral acts, online or IRL. Nor do we in any way seek to diminish the problem of misogyny or other toxicities well documented in gamer culture. This is not the latest installment of the “boys will be boys” feint. It’s just that, if we actually hope to do a better job supporting young men, then observing the objects of their attention and modes of interaction with a measure of respect, tolerance, and curiosity seems like a good starting place. And a good strategy for avoiding the adult moral panics that have long attended young people at play throughout the ages. See, for example, the chapter on game-like learning that Katie Salen Tekinbaş opens by taking us back to the early days of the twentieth century, when the series “Is Basketball a danger?” ran in a YMCA newsletter.

Games and Play

For men under twenty-five years of age on YouTube, the most important content category by an order of magnitude is gaming. Harmony Labs’ recent study on ultranationalism found that, on average, 50% of men under twenty-five on YouTube engaged daily with gaming content, as identified with creator assigned categories, such as game playthroughs, reaction videos, lore explainers, or gamer interviews. To put this in context, the next highest engagement content category was music, which reached just under 20% of young men. For young men, gaming content is a big deal, and not just on YouTube, and not just as a finding from one research study. In this recent Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens, for example, 85% reported playing video games, with 61% of boys saying they play at least once a day, as compared to 22% of girls.

What do we take away from this? First, if you want to reach young men, gaming may be your best bet. Due not just to gaming’s stratospheric reach, but also to the rich and varied engagement games afford. Game designer Frank Lantz, in his introduction to seminal game design textbook Rules of Play, characterizes this richness in terms of the “experiences games can produce—complex networks of desire and pleasure, anxiety and release, wonder and knowledge.” Lantz goes further: “Games can inspire the loftiest form of cerebral cognition and engage the most primal physical response, often simultaneously. . . . [They] are capable of addressing the most profound themes of human existence in a manner unlike any other form of communication.” This is probably due to the singular mode of participation games elicit, aka play, with all its associated exploration, choice-making, feedback, creativity, competition, and learning. Plus, there is a whole universe of additional activities that interpenetrate, complicate, and expand the game world and play experience, all the live streams, reactions, game guides, chats, mods, and other cultural productions players routinely engage in nowadays online. These all represent opportunities for reaching and meaningfully connecting with young men.

The second thing we take away from the dominance of gaming among young men has to do with style. Obviously the online domain of gaming is vast, with something for every stylistic predilection. But the online gaming content that appeals distinctively to young men in our media panels, on average, tends to share a similar look and feel. It is fast, loud, dark, rough, raunchy, comedic, chaotic, and hyperbolic. See, for instance, this video from Grizzy, or this one from Soup, or this one from Infernasu. Even non-gaming content frequently cribs from gaming stylesheets, as in this reaction video from Bobbalam or this spoof game show from Beta Squad. Recent research from Equimundo unpacks this kind of gaming content with respect to masculinity and how it tends to represent gender, race, age, and other identities.

Arousal

Such styles extend the high stimulation, high arousal play that holds young men’s attention. And arousal and stimulation are all about intensity, whether constituted by pleasure or pain, elation or anxiety, achievement or abjection. In other words, high arousal play is not always about fun or feel-good enjoyment. The negative valence in play and games has been known and explored in the literature on play and games since its beginning. In his 1958 study Les Jeux et Les Hommes, for example, French intellectual Roger Caillois assigned an entire class of games, which he dubbed ilinx, to “an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.”

Contemporary game scholars Torill Elvira Mortensen and Victor Navarro-Remesal see this “voluptuous panic” not just in vertigo-inducing physical activities, like amusement park rides, but in all kinds of digital games that hold players in a zone between suffering and relief. Deep play and dangerous play are two more kindred concepts. They point at experiences where there is, according to researcher Jaakko Stenros, “sizeable risk to the player’s life, reputation, or resources” making them “more attractive to some players” precisely because they further “raise arousal.” Indeed, Equimundo’s recent research, “The Man Box,” identified associations between risk-taking behavior and masculinity in the U.S., U.K., and Mexico. This kind of risk taking describes so much of the activity we observe young men engaging with online, activity which transgresses mainstream tastes, norms, moral codes, social taboos, terms of service, and even sometimes laws, and hence carries risks of serious consequences. Which causes us to wonder: besides its arousing adrenal kick, might transgressive online activity be serving young men in other ways? If so, how?

Transgression

In the introduction to their 2018 Transgression in Games and Play, Kristine Jørgensen and Faltin Karlsen suggest an answer, when they observe, by way of sociologist Chris Jenks, that “transgression is ‘a deeply reflexive act of denial and affirmation’ that acknowledges and puts focus on the norm, law, or convention that is being transgressed.” In other words, in the act of disregarding and moving past boundaries, transgression can reconstitute and reinforce those very boundaries. Which means the meaning, function, and activity of transgression may not be as straight-forward, nor as dangerous or potentially destructive as we might think. Indeed, transgression may sometimes serve a positive social purpose.

Consider the role of carnival in Brazil or the Caribbean. Much has been written about how a raucous unruly month-long revel both upends the social order and serves to reinvigorate it, for better and worse, for one more year. Or think of the clowns in Latin American festivals, who draw pious participants into all sorts of petty improprieties, from drinking games to sexually suggestive gender-bending flirtations. For centuries such semi-ritualized practices have served to carve out safe havens for subcultures and non-normative ways of being—think Indigenous or queer—a delicate boundary that protects both the host society from the transgression and the transgressor from the host society’s ferocious drive to assimilate, mainstream, medically treat, kill, or otherwise sacrifice “deviance” to preserve dominant lifestyles.

The transgressive online behavior of young men may share a common border with such practices, a canny resistance to the dominant cultural drive to self-define, to maximize, to produce. It may be a not so unskillful adaptive response to the mixed messages, moral confusions, and material challenges of impending adulthood . . . a way for young men to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct themselves, without commitment to a chaotic, unforgiving marketplace of masculinities, while fully exposed in social media’s permanent record.

We do not mean to suggest that every act of play is or needs to be positive, purposeful, or productive. We only mean to wonder what it is that transgressive play might be providing young men that other spaces and practices in their lives—family, school, sports—are not.

Below are a few more of the ideas we’re curious about, which could be further investigated or tested. Please get in touch if you’d like to explore them with us, or maybe you’ve already explored them and can let us know what you found.

• What ideas do young men have about what they need, in terms of online content, spaces, or support? In some of the gatherings of well intentioned advocates we have participated in, young men are conspicuously absent, despite the “nothing about us without us” dictum that generally obtains in advocacy work today. One limitation in the observational research Harmony Labs mainly focuses on is that we can only observe what already exists. Maybe currently existing content isn’t serving the needs of young men. Maybe young men gravitate to existing online spaces, because what they really want or need doesn’t exist or can’t easily be monetized. We need to ask young men and listen. Only in this way, can we hope to provide entry points to meaningful conversations that support them and speak to their lived realities.
• How does the act of transgressing differ in its effects on people from the act of consuming transgressive content? What kinds of effects can we observe in either case? How might this inform how we think about or seek to intervene in young men’s online behavior? Organizations like Diverting Hate have developed helpful scales for conceptualizing, for example, male supremacy in online content, which could be extended to consider different kinds of audience response, which might ultimately make intervention more targeted and effective.
• Is it possible to design content or online environments in a way that leaves space for transgression? We’re thinking about the difference in how, say, Dutch and American cities design for drugs or sex work. In Dutch cities, such activities are tolerated and afforded space, whereas in American cities they persist in forgotten places, amid much threat and danger as a consequence. We’re also thinking about evidence that suggests deplatforming, by pushing hateful speech and behavior into harder to reach places, may concentrate zealotry and serve as a richer substrate for growing extremism. If this is true, can we design for a balance of safety and freedom online, in a way that still leaves room for edgier, less normatively “playful” forms of play? Are there features of existing online communities that offer clues or hypotheses? Might transgression have a role to play in pro-social change?