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

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: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.

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.

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)

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

[Evro]

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

Lots of gaming habit info.