I was listening to the radio in the car on the way home, and all of a sudden, John Tesh was talking about this study from Brigham Young University that links video games to poor relationships with friends and family.

According to John Tesh, the study says that a group of 813 students from six different universities answered questions about their gaming habits and the qualities of their personal relationships. The study goes on to say that--

What? Why was I listening to John Tesh? We're not talking about me, OK? We need to focus.

The study (if you want to read the whole thing, it's available online) makes the following connections, among others.

1) Playing video games, especially violent titles, is "negatively related" to relationships with parents and friends.

2) The young women who played video games the most often had the lowest self-esteem.

3) People who play games are more likely to be involved in "risky behaviors" like binge drinking, drug abuse, and sexual promiscuity.

If you read that article that I linked to above, you'll see that the researchers themselves say that the connection is "modest."

So what's the big deal?

I think it's a bit more telling that they were surveying 20-year-old students; you could just as easily make a connection between preference in ice cream flavors and "risky behaviors" because at the end of the day, they are 20-year-old college students.

Do you know what I think causes people to have low self-esteem, fights with their parents, and a need to drink vast quantities of alcohol?Being in college.  According to the study, 90 percent of the students surveyed lived away from their parents, which means that it's a hell of a lot easier for them to go out drinking or bring somebody home or, heaven forbid, stay up all night playing video games.

Why do they do this?  Because they can.

Laura Walker, the co-author of the study, concludes, "It may be that young adults remove themselves from important social settings to play video games, or that people who already struggle with relationships are trying to find other ways to spend their time...[m]y guess is that it’s some of both and becomes circular." This makes sense at first, maybe, but it completely ignores the element of responsibility.

Let's say, for example, that you stayed up all night playing video games, so you slept during the day and missed class. You do this a number of times throughout the semester.  When you receive your grades, you find that you have not performed particularly well.

Congratulations, says the study. Your video game habit has affected your academic performance, just like I said it would.

Now let's say that you stay up all night watching MacGyver. You miss class; you come home; you spend the next night watching Star Trek. And so on. You get your grades, and they're terrible. Why are the grades bad? Because of TV Land?  Or because you failed to get your shit together?

I'm thinking it's the latter, and it should be no different for video games. The fact is that people who neglect one part of their lives to indulge another will see a decrease in quality in the neglected area. And a big part of what people learn in college is how to prioritize, how to set goals, and how to balance work and fun. In other words, college is where many people learn to be adults.

But it's also where many people drink and have a lot of sex, because that's pretty much what young people will do, if given half a chance.

* Bonus Strangeness: The article refers to "Project READY", and the study contains a link to Projectready.net. But if you click on that link, it's an ad portal. I'm not shouting conspiracy or anything; that's just kind of weird.

Oh, and there's only one mention of Project READY on the Internet, and its goal is not to examine the transition of young people to adulthood, but rather to help nontraditional Iowa students earn a high-school diploma.

Make what you will of this information.