When you think of teens skipping school to play video games, the last place you likely imagine this to be an issue is in a city that only within the last decade has gained consumer-level access to the internet. Huancayo is one of many supposed “satellite cities” in Peru, and like others of its kind, it's experiencing arguably the fastest urbanization the world has ever seen. We’re talking about a generational gap so wide that people’s living parents, who didn’t have reliable access to electricity, now have children that have access to malls, a horrifyingly large selection of cheap plastic junk, but perhaps most importantly of all: the internet.

This defies an old aesthetic of poverty once depicted by the international community where it would have been impossible to imagine that someone facing food scarcity might also be regularly posting on social media. Despite many homes in Huancayo being categorized as at risk of collapsing due to the poor quality of the materials with which they're built, this seems an unimportant detail of the city's growth. These same households will have phones with reliable 3G internet, a pretty decent TV and an internet café around the corner equipped with a modern GPU powerful enough to run most modern video game titles. Yet in some neighborhoods, electricity and running water may still be unreliable, and most have to buy their drinking water in bottles or risk boiling the tap.

For a growing majority of Peruvians, both parents have to work to support their family if they live in a city. An often overlooked detail of this arrangement is that the workday for most begins well before the start of the school day and few if any schools have their own public transportation arrangements. This means that students have to get themselves to school long after their parents have left the house. Understanding these details begins to paint a picture where starting from a very young age, a Peruvian student has a surprising amount of agency over their daily schedule.

"The number one problem for our students here, the young boys in particular, are los juegos ( video games). They take the money their parents give them for transportation and food, and they go to the cafés instead. We can walk into any of these cafés nearby and find our students there instead of being in class," said the school's only social worker. Over 3,000 students attend her school on a daily basis.

Let's suppose you were an aspiring entrepreneur wanting to open your own internet café. You know that your best customers are probably going to be student-aged, and they'll be spending their allowance or money earned from hawking to buy the over-priced snacks you sell alongside a few hours of game time. Where would you mostly likely want to set up shop? It likely won't surprise you if I said that most of these gaming cafés would be found on the same street and even the same block as a middle or high school.

Of course, the business model of internet cafés would not be possible if not for how cheap the PCs themselves have become. Large producers of PC components, namely those in China, have managed to find markets for overstock in cities like Huancayo. While the specs of these computers themselves would be considered very outdated to the tech-savvy among us, the reality is that even a processor from 2010 can handle most popular video games. Cleverly assembled from a vast assortment of these cheap parts and then slipped into a slick looking case, a kind of Frankenstein "gaming computer" is born.

To my knowledge, there is still no comprehensive study or data looking into a link between the prevalence of internet cafés, their proximity to schools and school absenteeism. Beyond this, the diagnosis of "gaming addiction" was only recently recognized by the World Health Organization in 2018. The scientific literature on these issues lags far behind the problem, where many psychologists have argued that the addiction patterns involved in gaming addiction are not as similar to gambling or other addictive behavioral issues as initially thought. In short, we are still far from having a complete understanding of why gaming addiction occurs, and the tools for diagnosis are unclear.

Anecdotally, several teachers and social workers I interviewed in Huancayo all brought up the topic of school absenteeism and gaming. Parents seemed at least aware of the problem, and since most of my interviews were conducted with teenagers, many would admit to me that they spent perhaps too much time and money playing games.

However, one particular case really stood out to me. Over the course of my time conducting research in the city, I had gotten to know a 10-year-old who hawked candy in the café I would often do my writing from. He'd always come by and check on how my work was coming along, and I'd ask how his family was doing. He came from a village just outside the city and took the micro (a small informal bus) almost everyday after school into the city with his brothers to sell whatever his mother couldn't in their small village store. He admitted to me that with some of the money he's able to keep for himself, he likes to visit one of the nearby internet cafés to play games. He said he'd do this almost everyday, and would catch the last micro home at 9:00 pm.

While I can't imagine that a 10-year-old would have a lot of homework, there's almost no chance he was doing it after a full day of school, work, and then gaming. Like perhaps anyone else his age, he said he didn't really like school, but the reason he gave was different than most. "It's just so boring, I'd much rather be working." I did my best to assure him that school would be really important to his goals of working as a professional someday, but he seemed unconvinced. He simply wanted to earn more money for himself right now, not 7 years in the future when he would complete high school.

To be fair, this wasn't an uncommon response from other teenagers, and many were working or at least helping their parents with the family business by the time they were 13. But what really stood out in this case is the routine of gaming, which isn't a cheap habit to sustain from an income of hawking baggies of candy on the streets of Huancayo. From what I knew of the game he played, it was likely a form of escapism for him. I know plenty of adults who struggle with controlling their impulse to play their favorite game for hours on-end everyday. When I think of these same addiction patterns affecting a 10-year-old boy from the informal neighborhoods outside a satellite city in rural Peru, I can't help but wonder what the legacy of this will be on his generation.





Author's note: I'll be writing more articles in the future on LinkedIn, and while it's partly because I'm curious about how such open-form writing will be received on this platform, I am also looking for work and research opportunities. I would love nothing more than to continue my research efforts into this and other issues affecting youth. Please be in touch if you know of any opportunities I may have overlooked!



