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Fighting the Scourge of Gaming Addiction
speby writes: "With the growing popularity of LAN parties and other such channels to game (which the article at Wired doesn't mention) is it possible that gaming has become a real addiction? How can a person become addicted? And why?"
Late, frequently, because one can't pull oneself away from the same activity.
True of surgeons.
Broke or deeply in debt, because all one's capital goes into support of the activity.
True of the vast majority of small business owners.
Deceptive, distorting truth or outright lying to cover signs others observe and ask questions about.
True of the vast majority of homosexuals and still true of many.
Denial, all of the above are evident, but failing to accept that it's a problem.
True of said homosexuals and most non-European cultures.
Now, before you say "bad analogy," I freely admit that there are differences. What is interesting is what these differences consist of. All of them consist of doing things that are in violation of what the local society holds is the one correct way to be.
Let's take them one by one again:
Late, frequently, because one can't pull oneself away from the same activity.
Universal punctuality is an obsession of European cultures, particularly English-speaking ones. Native Americans think it's crazy. Hindu priests and people in Latin America mostly don't think much of it either. Of course, we know we're right, even if we punctualize ourselves into stress-related diseases because of it. Robert Sapolsky, who studies this, comments that bringing European ideals to Africa has resulted in an alarming number of early deaths amongst new entrepreneurs.
Broke or deeply in debt, because all one's capital goes into support of the activity.
It's OK to be obsessed with an activity that corresponds to the Puritan work ethic. Small business owners are OK. Starving while going to college is OK. It's even OK to be so obsessed with being against alcohol that it destroys your family (Carrie Nation). But having fun is bad in Puritan culture, so it's bad to be obsessed with it.
Deceptive, distorting truth or outright lying to cover signs others observe and ask questions about.
This is a double-whammy which is society-based by definition. Whatever society stigmatizes or even criminalizes something, then people are going to be highly motivated to lie in order to avoid punishment. Then, society takes the fact that people lie to prove that it is they who have a problem.
Liberace lied about being gay, but then again, he grew up in a U.S. where 11 states has castration on the books for that "problem." I'm sure psychologists of the 50's would have loved our definitions of addiction. It would never have occurred to them simply to get off gay people's case. I wish Alan Turing had lied about his problem; he may have been spared Estrogen injections and an early suicide. Yeah, that was a different world, but we are just as cock-sure of the correctness of our stigmata as they were.
Denial, all of the above are evident, but failing to accept that it's a problem.
An even better double whammy than the previous one. If you admit that you have a problem, you have a problem. If you deny that you have a problem, you have a problem. Brilliant.
Now, I probably need to say at this point that people who become so obsessed with games probably should broaden their horizons some. I live in this culture, and some of the values (but far from all) make sense to me. It's a fact that one's actions have to be constrained to some degree by the rules of society.
However, taking this idea and creating the mythology of an addiction around it is thoroughly bogus. If people are obsessed with something, and someone thinks it's bad, they could at least have the decency to admit they think that and that they are not God. To use a word like "addiction" to avoid acknowledging that they are making substantially moral judgements is dishonest. If repeated deception is a real criterion, then addiction-ranting is the worst addiction of all.
It's real and addiction to games, as much as drugs, alcohol, or any of a thousand other interests or passtimes has ruined lives.
Are you thinking of a heart patient's addiction to digitalis, or are you perhaps thinking of the model of alcohol addiction based on the Oxford Group's holy plan to expiate sin?
Maybe you're thinking of the fact that a person in heroin withdrawal can die, or that a person in alcohol withdrawal can get irreversable neurological damage. In that case, those are certainly addictions.
However, in the growth industry of addictionism, anything that someone does a lot that you do not approve of can be decided to be an addictive behavior. Thus, "addiction" (which word no decent psychologist has used for the past 15 years) becomes primarily a moralistic tool of Procrustes.