In South America it's become common to hear about adolescents and young people (mostly men) who spend all their time on video games and neither work nor study.

In South America it's become common to hear about adolescents and young people (mostly men) who spend all their time on video games and neither work nor study. I imagine this to be a very different phenomenon from Japan, because the culture is so different. In South America I think it is just general disengagement and disillusion with society and work environments in general. For most people life is having a bad job that pays very little and you have to spend hours on a crowded bus to get to a pretty horrible part of town. Living in the virtual world is much more comfortable and pleasant.