I would like to think of video games as films. If you watch a lot of movies that is considered completely ok by most people. Being a film buff is perfectly healthy hobby.
But if you play video games or say you are a hardcore gamer than it is more likely that people are going to say that your hobby is wasteful and frowned upon than not.
I would like to know: Did many parents, teachers, or others look down on other kinds of hobbies from earlier generations? I wonder, were any movie fans during 1914 looked down on the same way that people who play video games are today?
Comic books were widely criticized in the 40s and 50s as being dangerous for children, a waste of time, etc. John M. Brown called them "the marijuana of the nursery; the bane of the bassinet; the horror of the house; the curse of the kids; and a threat to the future."
There was even a Supreme Court case, Winters v. New York, which struck down a New York law that banned the publication of crime publications, and particularly the comic book pulps.
A Detroit police commissioner said they were "loaded with communist teachings, sex, and racial discrimination."
Sterling North wrote, “[b]adly drawn, badly written and badly printed—a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems… Their crude blacks and reds spoil the child’s natural sense of color; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories.”
I would argue that video games aren't always called wasteful, but rather dangerous considering all the media coverage that tries to link it with violence. Comic books went through a very similar cycle of resistance, then acceptance, in the United States.
Movies provided news as well as entertainment, so they were not necessarily looked at in a negative way.
However, there were burlesque (though not called that) shows in Rome that women of standing were discouraged from attending. The Romans were especially crude, and delightfully so. Read Catullus if your're interested.
Education was considered taboo for women for a very long time. Even while it was quite usual for girls of high standing to have a great deal of education, they were taught to hide it.
I think of video games sort of like the super trashy dime store novels and the early forms of porn magazines. Everyone did it, everyone lied about it. Sort of like prohibition :)
Previous to now there has not been a large enough means of communication to express disapproval. The largest gatherings occurred in churches and I'm sure that the church disagreed and damned many a past time, but there wasn't that cohesive judgement that we see nowadays.
--Not a historian, just an enthusiast, actual historians, please school at will.