While gaming can be enjoyable in the moment, it can feel like a waste of time.
On the other hand, you can't work 24/7 and need downtime.
Like anything, be it junk food, gaming, sex, life, sleep, alcohol, etc, it must be taken in moderation.
Now if you only play video games and nothing else... yes you wasted your life. We've lived thousands of years without electronics and video games. But people would lose themselves in work, in books and fiction, but the length of how much you can dive into in a single session depends on how many books you can pile in your lap at a time.
So let's back up, what do you need to live?
Sleep (they say 8 hours, but can be 6-10), food, shelter, and Family. Before the more modern age, you would spend nearly all your time hunting and just staying alive. But i'm not spending 3 hours every day trapping or growing veggies or foraging. Instead people tend to have jobs or work they do to earn money (a generic currency), and there's enough people that want general goods that you can specialize in making one thing and make enough to get by.
Family, love, children, and social interactions is the one that's most harmed by video games, or rather by shutting oneself into fantasy. But often that's a case of stress, and in many cases unwritten rules you somehow have to follow that don't make sense. For many especially NEETS and introverts it's too much and you just do something to keep yourself occupied. Some will even turn their missing love affections on.......... unhealthy hobbies and obsessions. But like drugs or anything else it's a coping mechanism due to a flaw in society.
As things stand, i think video games should either be banned under a certain age (probably 18), or be heavily restricted. I say this because children are being handed phones and tablets and entertainment machines to keep them occupied because parents can't be bothered to babysit or have someone babysit their kids. They don't have the dexterity to do fine work, to use pens and pencils, to have interests in anything physical like models and painting and drawing and art and music, and instead occupy themselves to the glowing screen that when you walk away may give you some hand/eye coordination but is ultimately a pseudo reality. Because of this younger doctors and surgeons are messier and more likely to make mistakes, people have short attention spans, and they don't know how to DO anything in the real world.
I noticed when i got grounded as a teenager that it would take 2 whole weeks to detox from electronics before i could think outside of only playing games or doing things on computers. And we aren't suppose to live that way. So what happens when you grow up and computers/video games are the only way you know the world? Or worse.... TicTok and social media? For some video games and their digital hobbies is their world, and they just HAVE to inhabit a physical meat body until they can drown themselves back into their games, and resent the rest of the world. They have no life experiences and they have no useful real-life skills.
Add to that since we have the internet how we learned (memorization repetition and practice) kids aren't learning important things like math, history, they aren't having to force themselves to remember and instead 'just look it up on wikipedia' (which can be changed at any time vs say a physical book), and phones and calculators in school.
TLDR: A little video game time is okay.... too much is very very bad.
