Slashdot Mirror
First-Person Account Of Video Game Addiction
The Evil Couch writes "Jive Magazine, an entertainment magazine based in Atlanta, has just released a feature article that the editor has spent over a year investigating on gaming addiction. Starting from being on the outside of the gaming community, she has gone from being a somewhat normal person, to being one of the higher level characters in Anarchy Online. 'People have worse entertainment addictions than playing computer games. If I am going to be addicted to something, I would choose online gaming over drugs, bowling, gambling, television, or being a baseball fanatic easily. I don't have to wear ugly shoes, lose my hard earned money or do the wave next to someone I don't know and that just about makes it a no-brainer for me. It IS after all just a video game, like Neal describes in his great novel, Snow Crash. It is just another amusement park.' Sounds like a happy ending to me."
Having all my money going into arcade games was morale destroying. I believe that there is no difference between being addicted to video games and VLT's (slot machines).
It's not whether you win or lose, it's just that you have to keep playing. It's a vaguely sexual feeling -- that you might be found out, that you'll be "in trouble."
Profoundly depressing, actually. After a couple of years I managed to stop, but there was no self help groups back then, nobody to talk to (and who takes a 12 year old that's spending $50 a day on video games seriously anyway??)
If you're addicted, step back, do whatever, throw out the computer. Quit two, three, four times or as many as it takes to get it out of your life. And don't go back.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
...between online roleplaying and other games, even online ones is the amount of time needed to get "into the game" every time you play.
If I compare my Everquest addiction (which is over) to my Counter-Strike addiction (which is being revived) I'd say that I can pop in for a quick game of CS, but just as quickly log out again and go off to some social activity, whereas EQ would keep me tied to the screen.
The problem with EQ (and AO, DAoC, whatever) is that you need on average around an hour just to get going in the game. You need to get to some place where you can kill something, find a group, wait for friends, etc etc...
Once you enter the high level game in any online RPG you will have to sacrifice even more time. 24-hour non-stop playing sessions of a 50+ member guild for some rare item are not uncommon in the very high end game.
THAT's when your life starts going down the drain...
Well lets see when was the last time one of your family members jumped in a car totally blitzed on EQ and rammed it into a three other cars?
That'd be never I'm guessing.
When was the last time your father had too much EQ and beat the crap out of your mother on a family vacation?
Again I'm guessing never.
When was the last time one of your family members had too much EQ and beat one of their kids with a golf club?
Again, I'm guessing never.
Don't compare the horror of alcohol addiction to a video game until you've lived through it. The entire notion that they're even remotely as damaging is insane.
I once had the Everquest on my back, but I kicked. Believe me, these addictions do screw up real lives...
And addictions always have a way of being justified as many people are trying to do here.
Anyone who has ever smoked cigarettes and quit successfully can tell you that it plays games with your mind when you try and quit. It can even make you feel crazy. The addiction intermingles with your whole being. Without it, you are not the same person everybody loves. You aren't happy. You're stressed out. Unless your craving is satisfied.
And when the addiction is well on its way to leaving your body and mind, you start to think in new ways. You think "what the fuck was I thinking all those years?" You might even cry about the days of your life that were wasted.
So do yourself a favour: take one addiction, and stop it. Fill your time with something else. Dwell on helping others instead.
These "people" are pathetic. They are simply people with zero self-esteem, zero drive, and who are intrinsically lazy.
I can remember when I played MUD 15 hours a day, fanatically, to protect my position on the toplist and my position in the guild. I thought I was very important, and with that devotion, drive and laziness were not the problem at all. I wouldn't wake up at 7.30 to be at the uni computer rooms at 8.00 then (note: all of this is years ago). Self-esteem, perhaps. The other two are horse-shit.
In my opinion there are three big factors that make online roleplaying addictive:
And for some people, social contacts I suppose. But I was thinking of xp/hour, and finding exploits (always a fun race between players and coders).
In short, the human brain wasn't built to make a difference between real life and virtual life. And the importance people want to have in RL is sometimes easier to get online.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
You have an excellent point that there are three different forms of addiction which should be regarded as very different:
Combined and Physical addictions tend to be narcotics-related and tend to be understood in a simplistic way by non-addicts. But the war on drugs hasn't had a new twist since the rise of ecstacy in North America; fighting drug addiction cannot hope to attract the funding or media attention it once did. So now purely psychological addictions are en vogue.
I'm not suggesting that some addictions should be left untreated, but it is important to keep their power in mind when making judgements about the sufferers. Right now the hot addiction in Canada is gambling. Should I feel as sorry for someone who goes through mood swings when they stop gambling as someone whose heart stops when they go off heroin? Should I wish the government to devote equally proportional tax dollars to each? Should I spend as much of my time worrying and learning about each?
There's a tendency in talking about this to either a. defend the substance ("it's not the game's fault! It's the personality of the person/their lack of willpower/etc! Anything can be addictive!") or b. attack the substance ("won't someone think of the children..." etc.). Both are somewhat wrong-headed. It's naive to think that the game/whatever has nothing to do with it - some things are intrinsically more likely to be part of addictive behaviour than others. Some games are more addictive than others, and MMPORG's seem to lead the pack (there's a lot of possible reasons - their open structure, the psuedo-social aspect and the sense of competition and fear of getting "left behind", the enormity of the game-zone, etc.) MUDs and MOOs used to be the culprit, probably for similar reasons. (The whole "endorphins" explanation that gets tossed around, like the article has it, is really overextended. There are limbic systems far more extensive than that one at play, and it doesn't explain the nature of addiction any more than talking about the digestive system explains world hunger. And other, more 'neuroactive' games, don't show the same addictive effects as the frankly slower Everquest and company.
Even though many people play FPS's a lot, I haven't seen the sort of destructive fall-out from them that I've seen with other games - I don't know of anyone who failed out of school or became an antisocial shut-in because of Quake or Counterstrike.
In a sense, people who really like video games but would never let them interfere with the normal functioning of their lives (personal and professional) abuse the term "addiction" when they describe themselves as addicted to the games. I found the article underinformed and somewhat irresponsible - the realities of addiction are far more complex than a little controlled "experiment" will illuminate.