As a former game "addicted" teen, I don't see this as a problem.
While my friends were out, wandering the town, drinking from an early age, causing chaos and running from the cops (small town), I was inside, playing multiplayer Quake and later Half-Life with a friend.
Later, when my friend's started attending parties, getting into drugs, having unsafe sex, moving in with each other and living in squalor, I was deep into the world of Norrath, exploring and leveling my Ranger.
Video games kept me out of a lot of trouble as a teen and while I wasn't perfect in any way (I'd often skip school to play games, barely graduated high school, flunked out of college on my first go) and did attend parties on occasion, I mostly just wanted to exist in a digital world. Later, once I started having success with girls, that steadily dropped off and I started living more and more in the real world. Game were still a fixture and always will be, but it was what I needed at that time.
And even in the mid 90s to the early 00s when my friend's and I were teens, there weren't a lot of spaces to hang out. You weren't allowed in parks after a certain time, you couldn't wander the streets without being harassed. Most the time when we did hangout somewhere, it was the 7-11 parking lot or other vacant parking lots around town.
Basically, the situation doesn't sound too different to how it's described in this piece; people are going to find something to complain about as it relates to teens. At one time, there was complaining that Teens read too many books and lived in fantasy land, then it was Rock & Roll, Dungeons & Dragons, etc, etc, etc.
I guess this post of mine kind of amounts to nothing. I'm broadly agreeing that it's fine for kids to play lots of video games; honestly, I'm not sure what I'll tell my kids if they take a similar direction as I did when they're teens. For all my game playing, doing poorly in school, etc, I got my act together in my 20s and have had much success since then. My friends, my partying friends, love those guys, still hang out with them on the regular and talk to them everyday, but they're sort of floundering as we enter our 40s now; recovering from drug and (or still in) alcohol addiction, working dead end jobs and barely keeping their heads above water. I'm not sure if playing video games excessively lead me down the path I'm at now, but I think I'd choose games every time.