Studies on Gaming Addiction?

twigles asks: "Every gamer I know worthy of the title has logged 8+ hours straight on their favorite game. But I've seen several people become so hopelessly addicted to gaming that they cease to function in the real world. After having witnessed two married couples deal with alcoholism (one made it, one didn't) the symptoms are strikingly similar. Has anyone actually dealt with this with any success? I've seen occasional articles mention this problem, but are there any studies?"

Comments

I'd comment...

[uits]

If I wasn't about to level in a couple hours, I'd write up a resounding rebuttal.

3 words

[Stargoat]

Just three words: Monster Truck Mike

And if you know what I'm talking about, you're required to friend me.

Re:3 words

[Time_Ngler]

Please tell me what this is... I can't find it online and I'm dying for a new gaming fix.

Maclean Hospital

[gcatullus]

Maclean Hospital in Boston, affliated with Harvard Med School, has a department devoted to computer addiction http://computeraddiction.com/

Re:Maclean Hospital

[gcatullus]

damn those pesky links try http://www.computeraddiction.com/

Re:Maclean Hospital

[crazyphilman]

Before I comment, let me say that I completely accept that there are people who get WAAAAAAY too involved with their online activities (the "EverCrack" phenomenon for instance). I don't believe they're truly addicted to it, but I do believe they've got some kind of obsessive/compulsive thing going on that's not healthy for them.

BUT,

I find that the people talking about "computer addiction", particularly psychiatrists and psychologists, cast their net far too wide (and do so ON PURPOSE to drum up business). The symptoms they describe are too common to be useful in considering an individual's behavior.

For example, one of the symptoms they list is someone who gets involved with a game at night, and suddenly is surprised by dawn. This has happened to many people, not just gamers. People doing movie marathons, having sex with their girlfriends, dancing, bar hopping, etc, all have had this experience. When you're having fun, it's easy to lose track of time. This doesn't imply ANYTHING except that you were having fun, and listing it as a symptom is sneaky at best. It's designed to make you think "Oh, MY! Maybe I need to see a psychiatrist too!"

Psychiatry is a business, remember -- sites like these are often commercials designed to drum up business, in particular roping in naive parents who don't know what to do about little Junior's online activities and who tend to jump to conclusions.

This entire area of "study" should be taken with a grain of salt, I think.

did you look in EGM?

[MooseTick]

They have a lot of good info in there!

From experience

[sdirrim]

While it is not a biological addiction (debatable), gaming can force the gamer to do outlandish things, including the expenditure of inordinate amounts of money for the sole sake of entertainment. However, addiction is defined as "A behavior that causes the performer to continue the behavior even with obvious negative consequences that would otherwise cause the person to not perform the task in the first place." So according to that, the addiction of gaming is debateable, but from personal experience, it is.

Re:From experience

[prof.morbius]

I want to preface this by saying that it probably sounds more callous than I intend, but that I'm terribly disturbed by a trend in the U.S. toward abdication of personal responsibility.

That aside, I'm not altogether unfamiliar with addiction. As one of those pitiable individuals who smokes cigarettes when drunk, I can say that I do have some level of addiction to nicotine; every now and then I see someone smoking and crave a cigarette. But I don't smoke one. Moreover, all the people I know who have quit smoking successfully have quit cold turkey.

Now, some addictions are far more severe (as anyone who has ever seen "dry drunking" knows), but how is it, exactly, that video game addiction is any more than lacking the strength of character to "just say no" when one either notices the time being put into gaming (to the exclusion of other things), or has it pointed out by someone else? All you really have to do is uninstall, and get on with equally constructive things like /.

I really don't get it, and would welcome someone trying to 'splain it to me.

Re:From experience

[sdirrim]

Although it is mostly a lack of strength, any gamer can tell you about a faux "withdrawal". You will sit with nothing to do, and if someone suggests something to do, you write it off as boring and unappealing. Personally, all you want to do is play games, and you will eventually go play, or reinstall and play.

Just don't ask Garcia about this

[sithkhan]

Change a few words, and his post is as appropriate here in the gaming section as it is in the pr0n section! http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161288&c id=13492184 What the fuck is this garbage? I've been with the same woman for nearly five years and just married her this weekend. If anything, porn/videogames has STRENGTHENED our relationship through mutual viewing. Are they trying to say that porno searching online/gaming online is a "gateway" to become some sort of "sexual/gaming deviant"? Give me a fucking break. Just because people's conservative sexual/gaming knowledge and behavior is the prevailing behavior (and IMHO negative) it doesn't mean that "graduating" to a different behavior is heinous. Mod -1 Flamebait/Troll I'm sorry, but 100 people aren't going to tell the tale of ALL those that enjoy porn/gaming either in solitary viewing or in group situations. I'd like to read this pile of shit and actually give a true account of the book/non-existant study rather than an obviously biased and conservative viewpoint on it.
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Easy to get addicted

[payback451]

Its quite simple to get addicted. I almost got trapped in an addiction with Anarchy Online (MMORPG) back in Februaryish. I would easily log 10 hours on the weekends and 4-6 hours on school days. Luckily I caught myself after a about a week and a half to two weeks and stopped playing all together.

Its a crappy situation and you dont even realise that you're getting into it. You start playing, set goals, and before you know if you you're eating every meal infront of the computer (I do that now sometimes anyway.. hmm.. /. addiction? :) just to get whatever level super-laser-expresso-cannon.

Re:Easy to get addicted

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what you're talking about.. but I did manage to wean myself off of games with proper medications (like ethanol) and therapy clinics (like TGI Friday's).

I managed to break my gaming addiction

[dtfinch]

I needed more time for Slashdot.

The peeper agrees, people play too many games

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I was out peeping in windows last week, and in one house I looked into the husband and wife were both in the living room, in opposite corners, playing online games. They were doing this for hours, every night. I couldn't believe it. No talking, no TV, nothing. The place was a total mess. I agree, those people are sick and need some help.

From a WoW "widower"

[Two99Point80]

My SO puts many hours into WoW, but she enjoys the social interaction. Our needs for that aren't the same, so WoW is a way to accommodate our differences.

And she's happy... and as long as the situation truly works for both of us, we'll be okay. Besides, I'm familiar with addiction recovery myself, so we have tools to maintain some semblance of balance.

(Of course, she needed better hardware so she now has an AMD64 box. I got to scrounge her old system to upgrade my own :-) )

What?

[alan_dershowitz]

Shit, I was playing Warcraft. What are we talking about? Whatever he says, don't do it.

Penny Arcade

Online activities are perfectly legitimate.

[crazyphilman]

Although nobody gnashes their teeth or pulls their hair out because JoeBob the Human Blob spends six hours a night in front of his television watching Nascar and idiotic sitcoms, every now and then, everyone freaks out over "computer addiction". Let's put this in perspective:

Older people are frequently terrified of computers. When they were growing up, their science fiction usually involved some giant mainframe somewhere taking over the world, so for them, computers were big, scary, alien things to be feared and left to the clean-cut, nice government scientists. NORMAL people were supposed to get married, have kids, spend all their time in front of their televisions, and in general, not make waves for the Establishment.

Along come younger people.

Younger people get into all sorts of things older people can't understand or participate in. They seem to have their own language, their own way of relating to each other, and their own entirely separate culture that the older people can't penetrate. With each generation, the gulf between the young and the old has widened so that the activities the kids have been into have seemed more and more alien to their parents.

People from my generation onward (born in the early '70s) grew up with video games and computers. They're simply part of our world, just another artifact. OUR science fiction listed the hacker as a powerful figure who gained power and influence FROM the computer (thus the computer was not something to be feared, but rather used). OUR generation sees computer use and video gaming as simply another side of our culture, just another set of activities that are fun and worthwhile.

So, while JoeBob the Human Blob sits passively in front of his screen for six hours, Jimmy the hacker spends three hours ownzing his friends in Halo 2, two hours working on his website, and one hour blogging about an upcoming hacker conference.

Jimmy's parents are like JoeBob, but not like Jimmy. Thus, they don't understand what's going on and they panic. Many harsh words about "computer addiction" will be thrown around. Jimmy might try to bring up JoeBob's widening ass and the ironic similarities and differences between the two activities, but it won't get him anywhere. And poor Jimmy won't be TRULY free until he gets his own apartment (with a cable modem, naturally).

All this is about generational conflict. Give it a few years, it'll all settle down as the computer becomes more ubiquitous and people start relaxing.

Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate.

[Rhovanion]

I think this is a perfectly valid point. But I'm not sure it's the whole story.

For a lot of people, television and video games are fairly equivalent- i.e. you essentially make the point 'video games are the television of our generation.' We'd rather play video games than watch television, presumably because we find them more interesting and stimulating.

Some people, however, react to video games in ways they'd never react to television. Because video games are interactive, certain psysiological positive-feedback loops can more easily come into existence and create a real addiction. I'm not saying that no one can be addicted to television, but video games press more "psysiological buttons" than television and hence can lead to addiction in a larger subset of the population. Games like WoW press quite a few such buttons.

I've seen video game addiction. For those who are susceptible to it, it's as real as alcoholism or even cocaine addiction.

I'm not suggesting you're saying this, but for folks replying to my post, anecdotal evidence that "I've never been addicted to video games, and I play a lot of them, so video game addiction isn't real" isn't a valid argument.

Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate.

[crazyphilman]

Well, I don't believe it's an addiction per se, but I do think that there is a percentage of people who get tied up in some sort of obsessive/compulsive thing and get way too carried away for their own good. And I do think that people who get obsessed like this could screw things up for themselves.

But, I don't think that videogames are addictive.

With an actual addictive thing (like heroin, or cigarettes, or alcohol) it doesn't matter WHO you are, if you do the same set of things you'll probably end up with the same result. Start smoking and it'll be hard to quit. Drink too much and you'll get hooked. Do any hard drugs at ALL and you're probably screwed for life. Go off the addictive material, and you suffer some sort of terrible withdrawl -- if you ever touch it again, you're going to get sucked right back into it. It's pretty serious, and life threatening.

With videogames, though, it's purely behavioral and psychological. Stop playing, and you're not going to go through a chemical withdrawl process, you're not going to die, you're just going to be annoyed and unhappy.

I think that rather than approach the topic as an addiction, and assume people need to never touch a given game again, etc, I think time management skills are what should be applied. Teaching the person how to limit his gameplay and have some kind of balance in his life would be far better than stripping him of a remarkably entertaining facet of modern culture.

People love "all or nothing" solutions. I think something more subtle would be much better for these people.

Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate.

[Nasarius]

But, I don't think that videogames are addictive.

You're wrong. You're talking about physical addiction, when psychological addiction is just as real. For example, the psychological addiction to cigarettes lasts long after the physical addiction to nicotine is broken.

Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate.

[crazyphilman]

We'll agree to disagree then.

Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate.

[Rhovanion]

I think you have a good point- sometimes people overdo things because of an addiction, and sometimes they overdo things because they have poor time management skills or obsessive/compulsive tendencies.

As I see it, you're setting up a dicotomy between hard drugs (i.e. the problem is the drug- and *anybody* using them will fall into addiction) versus video games (the problem is that some people enjoy video games a lot but can't manage their time well, or tend toward obsession in *whatever* they do). Addiction to hard drugs is chemical, but that to computer games is "purely behavioral and psychological" and hence more a personal problem.

I think this usually works, but not always- and I think it'll work less and less with games that tap into common pre-existing behavioral/psychological structures to increase immersion (i.e. MMOs). I'm reminded of a somewhat recent NYT article where the effects of love on the brain were shown to significantly parallel the effects of cocaine; the barrier between chemical and psychological addictions may be somewhat contrived, especially if the right buttons are pushed. I think games like World of Warcraft may push this envelope-- the cause of marathon gaming sessions becomes less the fault of the player and more a function of how Addictive the game is. MMOs are now breaking up marriages-- I'm not sure this is merely a function of one spouse having poor time management skills; it sounds more like a real addiction.

I'm not for releasing people from all time management responsibility, and I don't have many hard facts for you (there are well-done studies about video games and addiction, sadly), but we do know from MRIs that there's little actual difference between chemical addiction and some forms of behavioral compulsion- i.e. being in love, or being "addicted" to video games.

So in the end, you give good personal advice- work on those time management skills and play video games responsibly- but I'm not sure how well your dicotomy translates into the real world in certain circumstances, and these certain circumstances (MMOs, for instance) look to be growing more common.

Anyway, thanks for the quality response.

Alcoholism and Computer/Internet addiction

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife is a (recently) recovering alcoholic, and one thing I've noticed is that her computer use has spiked waayyy up. Some of the same behaviors, too - underestimating time spent (beers drunk), neglecting other responsibilities, etc. She may be substituting the internet and games for the alcohol.

My theory is that some people have addiction prone personalities, and they will readily substitute one drug/behavior for another. I also believe that others are susceptible to one form of addiction, but not others - there are people who would be alcoholics but, lets say, gambling does nothing for them.

I will agree with a previous poster that addiction has become a huge industry, and there is every incentive to overdiagnose addictions of all sorts

(Posted AC for obvious reasons)

Re:Alcoholism and Computer/Internet addiction

[miyako]

One of my good friends was a substance abuse counciler for a number of years, I've also dealt with addictions on both sides of my family. According to what my friend has told me, as well as my own personal experience, you are spot on.
As I understand it, physical addiction is only a small part of the overall addiction for most people, and it's mainly relegated to a few substances. The psychological aspect of addiction is many times more important. What happens is that people tend to use the addiction as a way of fulfilling needs that they are otherwise unable to fulfill. For example, an alcoholic may use alcohol as a way of supressing the need for, say, self-esteem.
In essence, the focus of the addiction becomes an intergal part of the psychological makeup of the addicted person. This is generally called an addictive personality.
In general, any addiction can replace any other. MMORPGs specifically are a likely substitute for a replacement addiction because they are structured to give us the feeling of fulfilling those needs that if we cannot fulfill may otherwise be filled with other addictions.
One good example is Smoking. Although nicotiene itself is chemically addictive, one of the things that makes smoking so difficult to quit is that people learn to socialize around their smoking.
People who smoke often base friendships largely around their smoking. When they quit, they often feel they have lost friends and find it difficult to learn new ways to socialize, since smoking has been at the center of their socializing for however long they have smoked.
Since MMORPGs have (a form of) socializing at their core, someone who quit smoking may find that they use the game as a way to compensate for the gap in the socialization that was taken out by their quitting smoking.

How to tell

[GWBasic]

I was able to tell that a fraternity brother of mine was addicted to Evercrack based on his answer to "Where's brother Joe?" "He's in [insert some random Evercrack location]" We ended up blocking Evercrack in our router because of the problem. At least he wasn't an alcoholic.

This isn't about addiction, per se...

[Evro]

http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/

Lots of gaming habit info.

I gave up playing MMOGs...

[Norfair]

... because it seemed to me that they have too much potential to destroy a person's sanity. Of course, 'offline' games can be equally ruinsome, but nowadays you'd have a hard time finding a game without some kind of 'save' function.

I know that MMORPGs also save your progress (wouldn't be much point playing otherwise), but its just not the same, because theres always the feeling that everyone else is flying ahead of you, and you just have to keep up, which kind of means you aren't in control of the 'world', unlike you are with offline games.

I think thats what it boils down to, ie. the save option. I bet most people who are addicted wish they could save the progress of the entire server or world or whatever, seems silly, I know, but it would save a lot of people from the desperate situation they are in. Your comments are welcome; I don't claim to have the last word on this, its just my take on things.