Addicting Games

Hey buddy. Wanna buy something that’ll ease all your worries and steal your life away at the same time? Yeah, I’m talking about an addiction. You’ll need 512 MB of memory and a Pentium 4-class CPU...

What Are They Thinkin’?

It’s true - your favorite game developers want you to develop an unhealthy pallor from sitting in front of a cathode ray tube all the time. Unlike manufacturers of cigarettes and pharmaceuticals, game companies make no bones about wanting you addicted, wanting to alter your life in a permanent and potentially hazardous way. And it’s legal.

My Chemical Romance

Unlike drug-based addictions, video game addiction isn’t chemically-enhanced... directly. A 1999 study of people playing a gambling game gathered PET scans of the players’ brains as they played. Increased dopamine levels were detected, confirming some experts’ opinion that gaming is chemically addictive.

Author and psychology professor Mark Griffiths said in a 2005 interview with the BBC that, "It does seem to be the case that online gaming addiction for a small minority is a real phenomenon and people suffer the same symptoms as traditional addictions.” He went on to say, however, that the majority of gamers are unaffected.

Ugly Symptoms

It’s also hard to argue with some of the anecdotal evidence of video game addiction. Columbine’s murdering teens claim video games were an influence. Everquest, a hugely popular and involving online role-playing game, is popularly known by its users and critics alike as “Evercrack” because of its power over players’ lives. And in August of 2005, a 28-year-old South Korean gamer died from heart failure in Taegu after playing the classic real-time-strategy game Starcraft for almost 50 hours at a PC game room. According to witnesses, he hardly ate and took only brief breaks to use the bathroom and nap. Unsurprisingly, he’d lost his job earlier in the year for failing to show up for work.

Readers should take note of the prevalence of online gaming in the tech-savvy nation. Starcraft, a doddering grandfather by American standards, is enormously popular, and at times there are two Starcraft matches being observed and commented on, ESPN-style, at the same time on South Korean cable television. Top gamers can make a decent living playing the games they love, and 30% of the population is signed up for online gaming accounts.

Life In A Box

When making games, developers try to incorporate many compelling elements. They get the players to invest emotional energy into the story and their characters’ adventures. They tease with constant discovery. They present surmountable obstacles with constant challenges. You learn new skills and pick up new tools. You meet, communicate with, and cooperate with other players. All of these experiences mimic the ones that make real life enjoyable.

Drugs Redux

Should games be regulated by the industry or the government? Are they truly an addiction epidemic? This is a topic still in hot debate, and a favorite whipping boy for conservative U.S. legislators.

The dopamine allegations are debatable as well. As Dr. Vagdevi Meunier, staff psychologist at the University of Texas, recently said at an IGDA panel, “If you had an autistic child banging their head against the wall over and over again, you might find increased dopamine. Does that mean that the person is addicted to banging their heads against the wall?”

The Cost

Addictive video games have taken a toll on many lives. Marriages sundered, jobs lost, careers ruined, students expelled, and even lives lost, as we saw earlier. And dignity lost. A weekly paper conducted an interview with a San Francisco Ultima Online addict in the early 2000s and found his apartment plagued with rats and the smell of urine. He revealed that playing the game to the detriment of all else even caused his bowel movements to become “weekly poos.”

A Sordid End To A Sordid Problem

So readers are expected to make up their own minds on this contentious issue. Are video games dangerous? Or are there simply some people who are hiding their bigger problems in a digital one?