Video Games Playing: A substitute for cultural consumptions?

This article provides an applied investigation of video game users. We estimate zero-inflated ordered probit models to control for an excess of zeros in our ordinal dependent variable. We find that video games playing is not negatively associated with the involvement in other cultural practices. On the contrary, instead of being a substitute for more traditional forms of cultural consumption, the probability of game playing increases with the consumption of other cultural goods (e.g., listening to music or watching television) or active involvement in artistic activities (e.g., writing or visual arts production). Game playing is in general an urban phenomenon, and it is positively associated with the ownership of home equipment and access to new technologies but decreases with a person’s greater time restrictions. The main differences to the traditional art formats is that game playing particularly appeals to younger, usually male, cohorts.