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Too Much Gaming, Anyone?
Nrik noted a wired story about too much gaming and how sometimes a few too many hours of gaming can cause your mind to blur some lines. For me it was Tony Hawk- I played so much that I started sizing up curbs for grinding while driving home from work. Katamari Damacy has been a problem too. I'm fairly certain my car is large enough to pick up the railings on the overpass near my house. I'm even more certain that these thoughts are bad.
"I've been using the computer for so long, and command-Z works for undo in all the software programs," Hoffman said. "So whenever I find something in my life that I want to undo, I reach for the command-Z keys and I find it weird that it doesn't work."
You need a fucking vacation. NOW.
~D
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Mostly it was Tetris Attack for the SNES for me. When I played a lot of that there were tiles in the bathroom that I kept rearanging in my head to make matches like in the game.
We won't talk about what too much Goldeneye made me think.
This is honestly like almost any other phenomenon... If we do something enough, we start thinking of the world in those terms. If you do art, you begin to see things as an artist does... Colors, relationships of spaces, etc.
By no means is this limited to gaming, and it's also what makes interactivity such a powerful tool for learning. Most people I know prefer to learn by doing. Doing in a properly engineered virtual world is a great way to prepare people for doing in the real world. That's what simulations are all about... And most games are simulations.
~D
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I'd say it's pretty bad when you hear a techno tune, close your eyes and you can just see the arrows...
Anyway, it's when you start having dreams about gaming that it maybe too much. But then again when you're dreaming, maybe you just haven't played enough?
When you're dreaming about a video game, you're seeing your mind self-optimising to play that game more effectively.
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This is one of the reason I call bullshit on anyone who says that videogames can't actually spawn violence, or that it's easy to entirely differentiate between videogames and real life. I'd like to hear more opinions on this.
But it is easy to tell, as evidenced by you not stealing any cars. You might feel a GTA-inspired urge to size up the car and take the nice fast one so you can evade the cops(I do too), but you know that you are in reality and that the real-world consequences (not just legal for you, but the consequences for the one you steal the car from) stop you.
The problem is not that reading/seeing/playing a game involving some concept may cause you to think about doing it in reality. The problem is the "more easily influenced" people who actually would forget about the barrier between reality and fantasy and act on the urges.
If playing GTA can make you commit real-life crimes, then watching the History Channel can make you commit genocide, and either way you are a nutjob who should be locked away. That's just my opinion, anyway.
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You're completely right... (not about my comment being stupid, but about the flip-side)
If a child can't control himself after playing video games, he shouldn't be playing them. It would be the parents' responsibility to monitor the child and make this decision.
Some people get really angry when playing games... (I'm one of them) others have a hard time ending their competition when they stop playing... (I'm fine on this part). The combination of these two factors could be enough to let a game send someone over the edge. That's not the fault of the video game (there are hundreds of other scenarios which can do this) but it should be headed off before it becomes a problem. My parents recognized that I would get in fights with my brothers if I lost a game... so they shut me off from gaming, adjusted the amounts I was allowed to play, and restricted the types of games I had. Of course, this is all anecdotal, but it certainly ends with "and I turned out fine." Fifteen years later, I am perfectly capable of enjoying a game without letting it blur the lines between video game reality and the rest of the world.
There are games that I won't let my children play until they're older... maybe 14 years or so. GTA isn't a game for anyone younger. But that doesn't stop them from wanting it. And when parents buy it for their kids, they're contributing to the problem.
My wife is a developmental psychology PhD candidate; her specialty is in parental monitoring of adolescents. I get to hear/read about this stuff from a more "scientific" perspective, and it's amazing how much we agree on this topic.