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.

Maclean Hospital

[gcatullus]

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

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.