Do you spend a lot of time gaming? You are probably ugly.

Video games have become big business, generating an estimated $347bn in revenues in 2022, almost ten times more than the $39bn in box office revenues the movie industry generated. According to a survey of more than 3,000 Americans, about 55% of teenagers aged 12 to 18 play video games in any given week, spending on average 5.3 hours with video games. Among young adults, aged 26 to 32, about 40% were playing video games in any given week and they wasted some 7.5 hours each week doing that.

Who are these people playing video games?

Well, according to a group of researchers from the US, the UK, and China, it’s ugly people.

They asked health professionals who conducted the survey to rate the looks of the interviewee on a scale of 1 to 5 and correlated their physical attractiveness to their gaming habits and the number of friends they had.

This analysis showed that teenagers who are more attractive than the average teenager have more friends and spend about 30 minutes per week less playing video games. Among young adults, people who were less attractive spend about two hours more per week gaming than good-looking people.

The researchers say that if you are good-looking, you have more friends and thus an easier time socialising. Hence, the opportunity cost of playing video games is higher and they correspondingly spend less time gaming and more time honing their social skills and generally having a good time.

So, there you have it. The cliché of the ugly, unloved, and lonely teenager spending all day in his/her parents’ basement playing video games is true, except…

…none of these differences are statistically significant or significant in any meaningful way. Once you read the study and check the numbers you find that all the results are pretty much within the statistical error and often not of any relevant size anyway.

Indeed, the only variable that is statistically significant and economically relevant is being female. Girls and young women spend about 2.5 to 3 hours less gaming per week than boys do. The rest of the study is all nonsense, which is why it is so important to check the numbers yourself, rather than rely on summaries and abstracts other people have prepared.