It’s lazy to blame video games for young men’s educational failures

While the gender gap in higher education is growing, it's facile to say playing Minecraft and its ilk are the cause

Online video games are to blame for a decline in young men entering higher education. This is the neat claim made in a recent op-ed published by the Times under the subheading "The gender imbalance in higher education may not be as complicated as it looks". Emboldened by a recent report from the Higher Education Policy Institute, which found that boys were 10 times as likely to play collaborative online games than girls, the author repeats its assertion that "the gender gap in video gaming translates into a performance advantage for girls". Not correlation, then, but grim causation: play video games, drop grades.

This medium, in its glorious marriage of art and science, has the capacity to teach skills both dextrous and cerebral