My thoughts on the subject is that the real world sucks and gets worse every year. People, especially the youth, have always sought escapism, and have spent their time doing things their parents feel are negative or wastes of time. Listening to certain kinds of music, television, video games, comics, it's all faces of the same thing. While there ARE some youth passtimes that I think represent a problem, pure escapism in whatever form is not one of them. Today, the somewhat sedimentary lifestyle of the youth in part comes from the fact that liberals have made the world such a dangerous place. More than just a political rant, understand that in previous generations when kids went outside to play and such, the world was a lot less dangerous as the freaks and weirdoes were much better kept under control. Today things are entirely reactive, and profiling is demonized, if the equivalent of Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" is oogling little girls you can't really do a whole lot about it. This has lead to a situation where the liability is such where you simply can't let kids wander unattended, it's even functionally illegal in many places. It's easier than ever before for some old geezer to take action on some 12 year old for crossing his lawn (legally in this case, targeting the parents), and those who run playgrounds and such realize that they can be held accountable for bad things happening to unattended children. So where 20 or so years ago or more kids could say wander the neighborhoods freely, being called home to dinner in the evening, that's no longer the case, and frankly parents can't escort their kids around everywhere 24/7 especially when kids want a degree of privacy to be themselves... hence virtual worlds and sedimentary entertainment becoming increasingly popular.
Correcting the problems would of course be difficult which is why people tend to complain about the entertainment itself rather than the larger issues. For example if you wanted to pass laws making it so the police could profile and arrest/chase away the aforementioned "Aqualung" you'd have a massive civil liberties crusade, which would get even more complicated if in a particular case "Aqualung" happened to also be some kind of minority.
Things have also gotten to the point where you've seen deliberate campaigns in many cases to want to shut down public blacktops, basketball courts, and similar things, largely because functionally they haven't been places where kids just go to play and fool around. They become social hubs for youth gangs to meet, sell drugs, and other things that most people want to keep their kids away from, and frequently blights on the neighborhoods. This is to say nothing of gambling when sports are played there. In some communities these areas also tend to be among the highest crime areas where fights, shootings, and other things take place. Of course such campaigns are inevitably met with cries of bigotry, profiling, and even racism, when shutting them down to make neighborhoods safer is mentioned, and it gets even worse if people talk about having the police patrol them more often and chasing off shady looking folks so kids can say sit there and shoot hoops without non-kids and older kids (later teens, early 20s) hanging out and bringing their crap with them.
In short, while people here will jump on those kinds of points, the bottom line is that my big argument to people who complain about video games, TV, "Minecraft" specifically, and other things is simply "what else do you want your kids to be doing?". If the answer is that they want them to go outside more and socialize with kids their own ages, as many parents might have done decades ago, the sad truth is that most of the US at least doesn't allow for that. In most places the very least of your problems is going to be the cops bringing your kid home and accusing you of neglect for letting him wander unattended, assuming there aren't complaints attached to it above and beyond that. If your really unlucky your kid might not make it home at all. This is something I think a lot of parents realize, even as they complain, but don't have any easy solutions, so they tend to target things like video games. Like it or not the world is a much more messed up place than when I grew up in the 80s and early 90s, and political trends are moving in the direction of having a more permissive, and less controlled, society, NOT a safer one. In this particular respect I think the "Will someone think of the children" crowd does have a point, while abused and taken out of context, I think when it comes to certain kinds of public permissiveness people have not put much time into thinking of a world where it's safe for children to walk the streets unattended as regularly as they used to. Purely reactive law enforcement is one of the things that contributes to that, because simply put while they are pretty rare overall, those who victimize children and such are given a free reign until they actually do something, and at that point it's too late. Nail the child molestor just for being creepy and hanging around kids and your a bigot, nail him afterwards and people sit there and cry "Oh noes, how could we have not seen that coming, it was so obvious in retrospect". The sick thing about current society is that we can't even use that argument with a straight face because we DO see these problems coming but have created a world where the authorities simply cannot act until something has actually happened.
