Gaming by America's youth has been accused of contributing to everything from school shootings to the obesity epidemic. These accusations, however, lack a key piece of information: the actual role played by gaming in the typical young person's life.

Results of a survey of American adolescents have appeared in the June edition of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, and they paint what is likely to be a reassuring picture for those willing to listen: less than half of adolescents are gamers, and they spent a small enough time gaming that it plays a minimal role in their lives. But don't expect the mainstream media to report this. Instead, coverage so far is leading with the more sensational headline, "Video Games Cut Into Teens' Reading, Studying." The truth is anything but.

The study obtained data by having about 1,500 representative adolescents in an existing survey population complete 24-hour time-use diaries, which provided detailed descriptions of their activities on randomly chosen days. The researchers found that 36 percent of adolescents played video games, and that there's a stark split along gender lines: 80 percent of those gamers were boys. Typical use was about an hour of gaming a day during the week and an hour and a half on weekends (females played less than males).

The authors then compared the gaming population to the non-gamers on a set of five activities: interactions with parents and with friends, reading, homework, and sports. They controlled for basic demographic issues, such as adjusting figures on the time spent with parents according to the hours the parents worked; student times were adjusted based on the hours they worked or spent in school.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the results was how little an effect gaming had on adolescents. Hours at the console had no link to time spent in sports, with the exception of a minor drop for boys during weekends (where each hour of gaming lead to 8 minutes less time on sports). Even some potentially disturbing figures seem minor when examined in detail. For each hour spent gaming during the week, the time that boys spent reading dropped by 30 percent. This would be problematic except for the fact that boys only spent an average of eight minutes reading on a typical weekday.

Instead of turning kids into loners, gaming largely fell in line with general trends of social interactions. Although there was some variability between the sexes, children who gamed with their friends generally spent more time with friends in every other activity. A similar trend held with parents, in that children who had fewer interactions with their parents in general were less likely to game with their parents, as well.

The strongest effect seen in the study was related to homework. In this case, homework and gaming were unrelated in boys; the same trend held for girls during the week. But, on weekends, each hour girls spent gaming was correlated to 13 fewer minutes spent on homework, a drop of 34 percent. Still, the authors caution that this link does not indicate a drop in academic effort; they note that it's entirely possible that gamers organize their time better. Again, this important observation has been ignored.

Overall, the survey suggests that, far from being endemic in youth culture, video games play a significant role in the lives of only a minority of US children, most of them male. Although there were some figures that might suggest that gaming displaced academic activities, such as reading and homework, the total time spent on these pursuits was so small that minor effects were magnified. If people are concerned about the lack of reading done by adolescents, the fact that non-gamers spend only eight minutes a day reading should be a far larger concern than the fact that gaming causes that figure to drop by a little more than two minutes.