So, a report that aired on the BBC about "video game addicts" is basically bullshit, right? I didn't see it, but that's what everyone seems to be saying. Of course, "everyone" would get their panties in a bunch any time it's implied that video games are anything less than a perfect, virtuous and ideal use of one hundred percent of your time. That's why John Walker's RPS piece, being fairly measured, is my favorite response to the documentary.
Of course, even the largest and noblest of media outlets can't resist a sensational angle, which is why the "games addiction" phenomenon can be so exciting to folks like the BBC. In the '90s, it was all about "internet addiction", remember? However, it's more than sensationalism that makes the angle a little problematic. It's that video games are here getting stuck into a larger social problem: The psychiatrizing (allow me to use a made-up word) of everything, and the excessive abuse of clinical terms to explain away coping difficulties or to compartmentalize larger life problems into their own individual symptoms and syndromes.
Think about how many times you've used clinical terms over the past few years. You're addicted to True Blood; you're "a little OCD" about doing your dishes, you're "depressed" about your sports team losing, you're "having a panic attack" about running late to work. Of course, in the vast majority of cases, you are not actually. You're exaggerating. Maybe because every other nightly news ad is a prescription drug commercial, making the idea of widespread disease frighteningly normal. Maybe because your world is so crowded with the noise of social media and awareness of mass culture that you feel you need to use hyperbole to be heard.
Who knows. But when we talk about "addiction" to non-chemical things, there's a very significant difference between "a person is unable to stop repeating a behavior because they suffer extreme emotional and/or physical stress when they try" and "a person refuses to stop repeating a behavior and denies it is harming them." The former is addiction. The latter is someone who's just failing to develop as a human.
The type of people in this documentary, people who play 20 hours a day of WoW until their relatives become concerned, are not addicts. They're just losers. And if they didn't have WoW, they'd probably be doing something else to the unhealthy exclusion of all else.
That being said, I continue to be alarmed by some gamers' refusal to even examine their play habits. Defensively, they claim, "would people be complaining if I read books for 20 hours a day? What about film buffs who spend all their time on movies?" People would probably be complaining, yes. But guess what: Game designers create compulsion loops on purpose. They want you to feel invested in goals and satisfied by achieving them. That's not inherently harmful, but maybe it is to vulnerable people?
News flash: The metric of an online game's success is how many hours people are spending playing. Engagement metrics are how projects get funded and remain commercially viable. It is in the designer's best interest to make sure you stay playing, that you keep coming back. Again, that's not to say "people are designing addiction" or "making games people will want to return to and enjoy for long periods is wrong." It's just to say that it's irresponsible to ignore this fact, if you want to have a reasoned say in any "addiction" conversation.
So maybe "game addiction" is an of-yet unsubstantiated concept. But those defensive gamers aren't doing anyone any favors by vehemently rationalizing the fact they push buttons all day to the exclusion of all else. They just make normal gamers look bad.
People die in Chinese internet cafes, of exhaustion or starvation, bottles of pee under their desk. What's going on there? We're going to have to have good answers to these questions as games become a bigger and bigger part of society, so I hope auto-apologists develop an interest in being ready.
[Since people complained in comments: I should probably clarify that I am not categorizing psychological addiction as people who are losers that just don't do anything else with their lives.
I'm saying that psychological addiction is an actual problem, not just people who don't see anything better to do with themselves than play video games and refuse to try. There are plenty of people who have legitimate psychological dependencies on games or other behaviors.
But let's look closely at the issue instead of just calling someone with no life an "addict." The over-diagnosing of American society leads a lot of people to complain that they are "addicts" as an excuse to make a developmental failure or laziness into a real problem. A large number of people would rather claim they have a "condition" than deal with life; it's like when people are dangerously obese in the absence of a medical cause and, shrugging, blame their genes without addressing their diet.
the thing i'm saying here is that psychological addiction to games is likely to be a genuine issue that is not able to be correctly examined because of all the people who use clinical addiction as an excuse for their failure to nurture an emotional life, and because of all the people who are so defensive about their focus on games that they don't want to look at or talk about the issue. if you are an addict or have known one, as i have, this is what should offend you, the aimless firing of the word into an important discussion.]
17 comments:
The thing people need to remember, on both sides of the argument, is that gamers are not those people. Or rather, that we are not in the same category as the people who go overboard. On one side, people should not see these docs and think that everyone who plays WoW acts the same way -- don't lump everyone in with the worst offenders. On the other side, Gamers need to see that defending these people is not the same as defending their hobby. They don't have to protect anyone by virtue of having a shared hobby -- don't lump yourself in with those people.
I'm from the UK and took a keen interest in this particular Panorama episode. Although a fairly measured review of the 'problem', it did still lean toward sensationalism, but I got the feeling the producers tried to pull it away from that. It could have been a tirade against gaming, and the vicious scaremongering would have been effective. But I feel the BBC realise that such an argument is unfair.
I was left disappointed by the startling lack of research and results covered by the show, but as everyone was so keen to point out, there's simply not enough research to quote.
I agree with yours points regarding people pouring 20 hours a day into WoW. There was a point that caused me to shout at the screen. A boy, after his parents pulled his internet connection to prevent him playing WoW, went absolutely crazy, thrashing around the house before kicking a hole in his sister's door and having to be pinned down by his father. In the interview, his mother when on to say of WoW "...this game is a dangerous thing in my home". I pointed at her, and told her firmly that her son is the only dangerous thing in her home. I hope she heard me.
I do agree completely that there's too much throwing around of clinical terms, but be careful on your definitions. Chemical addiction is serious, but purely psychological addiction is too.
I mean, are the people who spend 20 hours a day on WoW (or anything else) really just losers? Games are designed, as you pointed out, to keep you playing. But why are some people weak against that while others aren't? Gambling addicts don't have any sort of chemical dependency, but they still have a potentially life-ruining problem that they can't fix by themselves.
I agree that whatever is going on there, addiction or not, needs to be studied. I also in no way think this will lead to any sort of apocalyptic video game legislation.
If anything, this could be hugely beneficial to gamers; Jonathan Blow is always complaining about addictive patterns in games as a substitute for content. If those patterns were documented, we could tell the difference between a grindfest and something substantial at a glance, maybe. Or at least make it harder for designers to get away with it. Who knows. Regardless, more information, more truth, is not going to be a bad thing.
Urgh, wow. Psychological addiction exists. I'm sure there are some gamers who are legitimately just defensive and lazy, but to characterize the people in those cafes as "losers" or "failing to develop as human beings" is kind of ableist.
Tried to post this earlier, but apparently I screwed up. Unless my comment was deleted, in which case I will give up and accept deletion with stoic grace.
Here is a TED talk about the ways in which games' reward structures keep us coming back -
http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector#p/search/1/KyamsZXXF2w
To (hopefully) build on Andrew's point, The dark side of this is the way casinos calibrate the payout schedules of slot machines for maximum homewreckage.
Whether or not we use addiction terminology, I think that when game developers exploit the hardwired reward structures of our brains--in effect short circuiting our reason and long-term decision making abilities--without regard for the well-being of the player they are acting sleazy and should be called out on it.
"Engagement metrics are how projects get funded and remain commercially viable. It is in the designer's best interest to make sure you stay playing, that you keep coming back."
This is why I'm sorta leery about games like this in general, especially free to play games. For an F2P game to be financially viable, it has to be designed so that the small number of players willing to drop real money on the game will spend as much as possible. Called "whales" in F2P, and (somewhat distressingly) online casino, parlance, these players spend a tremendous amount of time and money on the game, necessary to offset all the people playing for free. While it's not "designing for addiction" per se, the financial model of F2P games all but require designs that get whales to spend as much as possible for as long as possible. Subscription-based games are similar, in that you want players to keep paying that subscription (but at least it's capped on how much any single player can really spend).
With the games I help make, we give everyone a free demo. If you like that, you'll give us $15 for more. At the end of some time (4, 8, maybe 12 hours) you'll be done and hopefully will feel like you got something out of the experience. And that's it, our time together is concluded.
I'm incentivized to make our few hours together as awesome as possible, so during and after, you'll tell your friends you thought it was great and hopefully buy more games from us in the future. The incentive for F2P designers is creating experiences that continue for as long as possible, ideally perpetually. The base experience is intentionally hobbled so you'll want to pay for improvements.
Are there ways to make F2P, and other continual games that are respectful of the player's time and don't seek to take advantage of them? Possibly. But it requires making decisions that don't maximize profits and honestly very confident we'll be seeing much of that in the near future, if ever.
The "we're just giving players what they want" justification reeks of willful naivety if the creators refuse to consider what impacts (good and ill) their games will have on players.
The choice of phrasing used while discussing psychological addiction, dismissing it as merely people 'refusing to stop' who are 'failing at developing into a human' is incredibly shortsighted and unsettling. By this definition of what addiction is and is not, in my opinion at least, you seem to be utterly dismissing the psychological side of any addiction, the way that the object of your addiction, whether it is a drug, prescription or otherwise, alcohol, television, or video games themselves causes a rewiring of the brain to make the object the one thing that provides mental and emotional relief. As a person who has seen the overreaching affects of physical and psychological drug addiction in a relative, your refusal to admit that there is a psychological side to any addiction is very troubling, and extremely dismissive.
I will admit that I only skimmed your article, but I'm not really impressed. It would be great if you could link some published research or something to back up your claim that "The type of people in this documentary, people who play 20 hours a day of WoW until their relatives become concerned, are not addicts. They're just losers." Additionally, it's hilarious to me that you complain about people using "hyperbole" to describe their experiences (re: appropriating clinical terms to describe subclinical symptoms) and then close your post with the most hyperbolic, extreme example possible.
Kinda weird, you didnt generalized so much in most of the posts ive read arround here. Anyway, i play a few MMOs, sometimes i just log on out of compulsion, to check trade list or items for sale, not rly interested in interacting with anything, it probably became a bad habit by now. Well, if you think about it, an online game doesnt really wait for the player, the universe keeps changing regardless of the players interaction... thats probably a good metaphor for something that i dont know yet
I had a response, but I decided it's not worth the effect. Your kind of ableist bull shit is why society at large still has a hard time identifying and treating psychological disorders. That you can't even do the basic research to understand what addiction actually is, is sad. That you took your time to write out an ignorant blog post is even sadder.
Good job. Were you trying, or do you really believe the uninformed shit you spewed here?
Thank you...
Your article felt like a breeze of fresh air.
Happy holydays!
A few months ago I collected some screencaps of Facebook ads. See if you can spot the theme:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4142/4855138255_bb778e469f_b.jpg
Seeing that word being used as a bullet point in favor of playing a game still weirds me out, a decade after we got AddictingGames.com.
I should probably clarify that I am not categorizing psychological addiction as people who are losers that just don't do anything else with their lives.
I'm saying there's a long way between that and psychological addiction. There are plenty of people who have legitimate psychological dependencies on games or other behaviors.
But let's look closely at the problem instead of just calling someone with no life an "addict." The over-diagnosing of American society leads a lot of people to complain that they are "addicts" as an excuse for making a developmental failure into a real problem.
Explaining it after the fact, and only after it's been pointed out by quite a few readers, isn't preferable to clarifying your point while editing.
Sorry, I will offer you a full refund.
(sometimes people's feedback is the only way one knows that one hasn't conveyed one's point in the way they intended)
Point taken and true.
I am sorry for my comments putting you on the defensive (am I reading into your comments correctly?), and for misunderstanding what you were trying to say. The attitude that pyschological addictions and/or illnesses are non-existant seems to be so wide spread, at least in the United States among several groups, is what prompted me to speak up here, as it seemed like more of that same attitude.
Thank you for clarifying, and thank you for not taking my comments as direct attacks towards you rather than the misunderstanding and explaining further without the conversation devolving into overly-defensive posturing on both sides.
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