PORTLAND, Maine – A new study has shown that male happiness is at an all-time low, so we set out to find out why. Of the 10,000 participants who completed our survey, 98.8% said their overall welfare would improve dramatically if they could just figure out how to recreate the exhilaration of an early 2000s Halo LAN party in their everyday life.

A local area network, or LAN, party consists of connecting multiple gaming consoles or computers together through an offline network to play a video game while eating junk food, drinking excessive amounts of Mountain Dew, and making fun of your noob friends as your 360-no scope their ass for the win.

“Couch co-op was peak gaming,” said Frank Gutierrez, a father of four and former avid gamer. “Playing online is a nice way to keep in touch with your old friends now that you’ve all moved away, but it doesn’t come close to the jubilation of sitting together in your friend’s basement and calling each other homoerotic slurs while dropping your digital balls on their dead avatar’s chin.”

Sadly, as the generations of men who last engaged in this archaic form of multiplayer gaming gets older, their overall happiness continues to drop.

“Men are desperate to be a part of groups of other men,” said psychologist John Moore, Ph.D., in an article for Fatherly. “The opportunities for men to bond with one another have become fewer and fewer, and so they feel more isolated and less connected, and in some cases become depressed.”

According to the General Social Survey, a massive dataset to provide researchers and policymakers information regarding the overall happiness of the American population, only 21% of men said they were “very happy” with their lives in 2021. These low numbers can be partially attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, but other internal and external factors are to blame as well.

To better understand the science of happiness, the World Happiness Report, investigated the world’s happiest countries to figure out what ancient magic they were using to fool their people into smiling so damn much. What they discovered is that there are four key characteristics people need in their lives to avoid falling into the void of existential despair running rampant in other areas of the world. They are:

  • Social Support
  • Freedom
  • Generosity
  • Trust in institutions

Unsurprisingly, all of these characteristics were cornerstones in a good ol’ fashioned Halo LAN party. Hanging out with friends provided social support. The fact we weren’t living in a totalitarian hellscape that controlled the media we consume provided the freedom we needed. The mutual potluck of snacks and carbonated beverages gave us generosity. And the fact these parties existed in a time when game studios provided consumers with full games instead of overpriced microtransaction storefronts gave us trust in the institutions.

Experts believe a shift in expectations of male behavior, the rise in cost of living and lack of wage growth, and the persistent pressure of ever-accumulating debt which cripples their chances of owning a home or having a family without relying on financial support from the state are other contributing factors to this trend of unhappiness.

“If I didn’t have to work 40-plus hours a week and spend all my free time on side hustles just to pay my bills every month, I think things would be a lot better,” said Gutierrez. “I wake up a 6 a.m. and by the time I’m done with work and taking care of the kids and apartment, it’s nearly 10 p.m. After that, I might have an hour to play a game but the chances any of my friends will be online is almost zero. And it’s not really fun to play with those sweaty kids who take the game too seriously.”

According to Gutierrez’s Xbox Live profile, the last time he played with any of his friends was in 2008, just before they graduated from college and started their venture into adulthood and their downward spiral of a career that has left them yearning for yesteryear. In the odd chance his group of friends get together, multiple promises of doing better to keep in touch and do more activities together have gone unfulfilled.

To help test the hypothesis that local multiplayer games can help reduce the level of unhappiness amongst men in America, we brought Gutierrez and his friends together to play Halo: Combat Evolved one more time. We provided them pizza, soda, chips, and cookies and recreated their friend’s basement in a warehouse downtown.

“I was really excited to get the boys back together,” said Gutierrez. “It was a little weird at first because we haven’t really talked for a few years, but it didn’t take long until we were joking around like we used to. We talked about our beloved shared memories of these parties, but it became abundantly clear pretty quick that we are not the gamers we used to be. In fact, we kinda suck at this game now. I couldn’t get a handle on the controls and ended up just spinning in a circle while staring at the ceiling.”

After about thirty minutes, the game was turned off and all gathered around one television to watch Jeopardy! and share stories about their kids.

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