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Games Are Not Drugs
Kyle Orland has a considered look at some more poor reporting on gaming in the mainstream media. This time it's Chicago's WGN, and a weak report about the 'medical dangers of gameplaying'. From the article: "Sorry, but isn't this how rebellious teenagers have been acting for generations? I'd challenge the reporter to find a adolescent child whose hormones don't make them act this way at some point. I'd also like them to explain how playing fun games fails to make a child 'fun-loving' (or show some evidence that any of these children were 'family-focused' and 'totally different kids' before being exposed to the evil of games). And while it's regretful that the three children that are the focus of the story have a mother who says 'it felt like I really couldn't connect with them' it seems a bit much to blame video game for the generation gap that inevitably develops once a child passes the age of, oh, eight." Kotaku also has a nice deconstruction of the piece on journalism grounds.
Why'd have to tell me that.
I'm pretty sure this post's title is self-explanatory. Anyone who thinks otherwise is probably either crazy or just very badly misled.
My mind is like an arrow in flight: fast, deadly, and all the more dangerous because I have no control over it.
Drugs usually make you feel good! Getting owned by some pimply faced 10-year old and losing all my painstakingly acquired weapons and armor make me feel like crap! I only wish playing a computer game could make me feel as good as taking drugs!
I'd probably still be playing my xbox regularly.
sudo killall humans
On a related note:
Books are not drugs
Movies are not drugs
TV is not drugs
Spatulas are not drugs
Garden gnomes are not drugs
Drugs are not drugs... no, wait...
They often times can be as if not more so addicting than drugs. See recovering evercrack addicts and world of warcraft addicts.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Kyle Orland is right to catch this as sensationalist media pap, but there is another issue with videogames and human development that I think is more important and substantial: the way that games, in conjunction with other media, have affected the nature of attention, protention, and concentration, and how these changes affect the ability for certain types of interior experience (aesthetic, moral, philosophical). Not that it creates amoral psychotics, but I would, casually, make the following observations:
Affect has become a commodity, and videogames make this worse.
We have a generation that completely naturalizes the context of the problems it has to solve, even while it is more flexible about solving those problems. We think of cleverer and more novel ways to make money and become successful middle-class people, without asking about the core values that being middle-class really mean and what alternatives might exist (and particularly alternatives that are not commoditized).
Visually, we do not interact with aesthetic objects the way we used to: the ability to appreciate much great painting requires a kind of dogged patience, a kind of restraint, that is very inconsistent with videogame thinking. (This is why I think that videogame aesthetics is almost - almost - a contradiction.) Likewise with literature, etc.
Finally, videogames are both a culprit and a response to an existing problem: that children do not have an opportunity to "go out and play" in an unstructured way like they could in the past.
I think MMO addiction is also a real problem, but that's outside the scope of the piece.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when half life 2 began to take hold...
You can't change the world
But you can change the facts
And when you change the facts
You change points of view
If you change points of view
You may change a vote
And when you change a vote
You may change the world
- Depeche Mode
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
First they get hooked on the Space Invaders, then they start playing the Dungeons & Dragons game, listening to the Rock and Roll music and reading comic books! Our children will be rife with disobedience, leather jackets and sassback!
I expected to follow that link and get some incomprehensible humanities mush that tries to prove the original article means the exact opposite of what it says, because the subtext of the patriarchal influence that the interloquitor experiences is Hagelian in its existentialism... or some bullshit like that.
No, it's pretty much a straight-up rebuttal. How banal in its bourgoise-logic encased cogitation. How pedestrian!
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
No? Um, hey, let go. You said you're not addicted, so put down the controller for three weeks.
Hello?
Guess he was addicted to gaming.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
i dont get the big deal.. /. article that computer addictions getting high, u gonna ban it??
if at all games r like 'drugs', so what???
alcohol is like drugs, u gonna ban it??
gambling is like drugs, u gonna ban it??
recently there was another
comon ppl wake up, games are like good drugs, making you strong (in terms of reflexes, & other common sense stuff)
for instance, Did anybody notice that game players are better drivers in real world, & they know to keep watch on other cars while on road, while traditional drivers just watch the car before them.
Drugs used to mean medication and it still does.
But mostly people refer to drugs as a bad thing.
Like "He is on drugs" or "She gives special favors for drugs" when the meaning could be just about someone having to take allergy drugs or aids drugs or some one take a pharmacy drug for medical reasons.
One can't go about and say "That guy is addicted to AIDs drugs" because he'd most likley die without them.
However, because some medical drugs like morphine and cocaine turned out to be addicted, we ended up referring to them as a bad thing. Then we started calling things that were not medical drugs as drugs. You know... LSD and pot... While not calling tobacco and beer drugs.
I mean, one does not smoke tobacco and drink beer for cure ailments... Well maybe I do, but I don't expect medical benefits or a doctors prescription to buy a six pack. Now back to my point...
Because people who speak english have a bad habbit of making analogies like how a car engine is like Microsoft windows, we eventually started referring to anything addicting to be akin to drug use.
The truth of the matter is, anything can be addicting:
You know like breathing air and clean water.
Religion can be addicting.
Sex can be addicting.
Reading books can be addicting.
Exercise can be addicting.
Eating and sitting on the coach can be addicting.
Playing poker can be addicting.
Posting on slashdot can be addicting.
Sleeping can be addicting.
Doing nothing can be addicting
Doing everything can be addicting.
Any activity that stimulates the brain can cause an addiction. That is all there is to it. Some activities are more addicting than others and some habbits are harder to break than others.
However, this has nothing to do with drugs.
Certain drugs do give a euphoria or a brain stimulas that cannot be acheived otherwise and many people can get addicted because they haven't felt anything like it before and just want to do nothing but doing that.
While, most other activities that do not affect the mind directly with a chemical injested stimulus can be walked away from.
Well... At least until my Xbox720 or Playstation 4 has a direct neural interface into my brain via a cybernetic jack.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
That Evercrack is not a drug? Why do all my friends turn into zombies after playing that game for 12 hours a day?
The real reason pot is illegal in the US is because it cuts back on a users economic productivity. It's rather harmless substance, but very harmful to the GDP rate if the masses started smoking it casually...so it's been theorized.
Point is, once the VR experience provides a "holodeck" sense or realism then you will see a level of introversion in society like never before. Why face the real world when you can live our your fantasies as though it was the real thing?
My prediction is that a new law will be passed banning any biological or technological method of providing an "alternate reality".
Life is not for the lazy.
There has been this huge backlash against video games ever since doctors started blaming them for childhood obesity (because they didn't want to face the real reasons) and parents started blaming them for badly behaved kids (because they didn't want to face the real reasons). Gaming is an easy scapegoat and punching bag but if you look at it carefully, it's usually great for those who play.
Good games teach mental agility, strategic thinking, problem solving, and some even teach some light programming skills (macros in the old QuakeWorld and in WoW). There are twitchy games like fighting games that aren't necessarily that good for your brain but even they have evolved the complexity that requires strategic thought to be good at them.
Just like with any artistic media though, parents need to re-enforce positive messages and discourage negative ones. The problem is many parents treat games as these foreign alien things that it's not their job to have any interaction with. It's kinda like dropping your kid in front of pay-per-view and not paying any attention to what movies they choose to watch. Not a great idea.
Parents need to sit their butts down, pick up the controller, and beat some monsters with their kids. And when the game's plot starts moving into pushing drugs and slaughtering police.. they need to express disgust. It's a rare teachable moment, and if you aren't there, they aren't learning your values, they are learning lord of the flies style.
Parents with badly behaved kids need to understand that if the "real rules" are fair and consistent, kids will follow them. They also need to understand that the real rules aren't what you say they are, they are what you enforce. For example, saying "turn that off in 15 minutes or I'll take it away for a week" and then saying it again in half an hour means the real rule is "Ignore them and we do what we want" and every time you do that you reinforce that rule. Pay attention to what the real rules are and make sure they are fair and consistent. With games, making them fair usually means not making the end of play time based. "15 minutes then shut it off" is rarely fair except for the most twitchy stateless games. Most parents don't bother to understand the games their kids are playing enough to set realistic rules. Setting an arbitrary time like that in a game where it's not appropriate is not fair. If a kid's been working towards something for 2 hours and has 5 minutes left until they achieve a goal, coming in and pulling the plug is cruel. It's like walking into a room where kids are building something and stomping all over it, destroying it, and kicking them out. To be fair you often have to understand the game and that's more work than parents often want to do. "You can play until this map is done." "Go straight to a save point right now without doing anything else." "You have 5 minutes, tell the rest of the party to find a replacement, kill the next boss, then hearth." Those are all much more appropriate rules and will help children feel respected and understood. Monitoring that they aren't abusing those rules is harder than looking at your watch every time a commercial comes on though so parents often don't bother.
That said.. exercise is important for kids too, especially young ones, so don't let them hide in the basement playing games every day either. A little moderation is warrented.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Seems like a bit of a straw man setup to me. Of course games are not drugs, the association is entirely due to the likelyhood of becoming addicted. But how long are we going to blame the capitalist for finding a good market, and creating a good offering, instead of holding an individual responsible for his own behavior?
A prime example, from world of warcrack, is the pvp honor grind. The game holds 14 ranks in pvp, each week one's standing in overall honor point gain is used to determine if they gain or lose progress in these ranks. Rank 14, the coveted grand marshall/high warlord, can only be held at any one time by less than 1% of the server.
The result? Fierce competition. People spending 16 hours a day farming for pvp honor. People ignoring jobs, school, families, for a chance to succeed in reaching rank 14. And after months (yes, months) of this behavior, they look up and realise their real lives have been affected. Some revolt quit the game outright, some return to normalcy, a good number run to Blizzard forums or other means of public communication - to denounce Blizzard for creating the system. But the fact is, and more and more realise this, that it is the people making crazy insane attempts to overcome one another that created the problem, not Blizzard.
We expect game creating companies to make really good games - the same way we expect the ride designers in an amusement park to make exciting roller coasters, or film directors to make awesome movies, or a restaurant to serve great food. But it is our own responsibility as consumers to make healthy choices about how much food and entertainment we can afford, it is not on companies to cut us off at the tap.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
I would guess that the parents complaining about games are the same ones whose children go to school on a shooting rampage. Seriously folks, the populace of the United States has some serious issues that are a direct result of reduced social expectation of individual responsibility. To be blunt, The parents of these children should be taking responsibility for their own (in)actions that led to their childrens' so-called "addictions", just as they should be held responsible for their kids becoming hooked on drugs (or other results that the parents did not want to see realized). Put the parents in jail overnight when they complain like this; teach them to take responsibility for their kids' actions, as any good parent should already be doing.
I'd mod you up if I had any points today... hehehe
Gravity Sucks
When I was younger, my parents limited the amount of time I could play video games. If our homework was done, they sent me outside to play baseball/croquet/whatever with my brother, or had us do other things like play a board game, or maybe even try to get us engaged in a new hobby, like woodworking. Now that I'm in college, I know how to limit my time spent playing games, although online multiplayer games haven't helped with that... ;)
Any parent who doesn't provide alternative activities in which their children can engage is doing a piss-poor job.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
Holy crap, that's so true! I rolled up and tried to smoke my GTA3 manuel but only got a headache.
I even tried to shoot WoW into my arm but all it did was make me run around shouting "LFG GNOMER" in my neighborhood.
When I snorted my UT2004 my head exploded and all I heard was "Head Shot".
*Winners Don't Use Games*
In fact, replace those 2 hours of gaming with television (typical shows) and I've likely put myself at more of a 'risk' (just to stay proportionate) for something like overeating because my body is not actually occupied with anything, or even mental deterioration since my mind is being hardly being stimulated by watching TV the way it could be through playing a relatively challenging game.
It is true that some people spend unhealthy amounts of time playing video games, and will neglect their priorities to play... but this is true with all kinds of activities other than video games. And certainly the amount of exercise and social activity has gone down among kids these days, but couldn't television, movies, music, and internet be as equally to blame? Of course, the media is less likely to attack any of those without strong warrant because they are a lot more likely to sponser their program than a game company is. I wish the public media would stop wasting energy trying to bring down video games at every exposed angle, or atleast have decent proof to backup all these claims.
Yeah! They should know better. I mean, games aren't drugs.
They're porn!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I want to start by saying that I agree that the idea that "video games are a negative influence" is horribly flawed. People have been making that conjecture about any activity that they don't like for all of recorded history. Dungeons and Dragons is a good example and, before that, cards and dice in general.
However, there is something to the addictive nature of games. There are three forms of addiction. The first is a physiological addiction where your body is used to something and craves it. This kind of addiciton is well understood and pretty easy to deal with. The second kind is psychological and/or social, where people feel that doing such a thing will make them happy. Often they are right, but they don't consider the future consequences of such actions (i.e. rampant consumerism gives you cool toys, but results in being poor).
The third kind of addiction is something that's only been recognized in the past ten years or so, and it's neurochemical in nature. The short version is that endorphins cause the release of chemicals that mark recently fired neurons to tell the mind that the behaviors associated with those neurons are the "good" behaviors. This is how our body teaches us that things like exercise, sex, and food are the good things to do. This worked fine a few thousand years ago, but technology has caused a few glitches in the system.
Specifically, chemicals like heroin imitate endorphin and teach us that taking heroin is a good activity. This is the primary basis of heroin addiction. Alcoholism is similar because alcohol triggers the release of endorphins. (surprise, it isn't just poor self control!) Similarly, television, video games, spectator sports, gambling, and consumerism all tend to release endorphins into our system, resulting in a neurochemical addiction.
They've actually discovered a cure for this addiction called pharmacological extinction. Again, the simple version is that (activity + endorphine = addiction), whereas (activity + !(endorphin) = extinction). Extinction means the neurochemical addiction goes away. They're treating gamblers like that right now by blocking the endorphin receptors with naltrexone and having them do their usual gambling. The gamblers lose interest over time and get control of their habits. In Finland they're using this to very effectively treat alcoholics, over a three month period the treatment turns hard core drunks into people who can drink socially.
This bit of science is in its infancy, but it's likely that it can be used to treat compulsive spenders, bulimics, anorexics and overeaters, drug addicts of all kinds (except nicotine - still haven't found an appropriate chemical for that), and, yes, even video game addicts.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
You guys are welcome for the video. I spent 2 hours converting the video, and posting it on You Tube. I also spent a considerable amount of time writing up the blog that that I LINKED MY VIDEO TO. You guy's can use the video, just give the original poster of the video(me) and the writer of the blog which broke the the news of the video(me) some credit. By the way, I am going to update my blog tonight, at around 8 to 10 pm, I will be posting new videos of newscast trashing video games(comparing them to porn etc..) Most of these videos are between 1 and 3 months old, but I wanted to post them as part of my blog on the way the news media twist the facts and give half-truth's about video games. These video's are interesting to say the least. Here's the link to my, blog, which originally posted the video. http://www.1up.com/do/my1Up?publicUserId=5713859 Thank you.
All bad parents. That will teach them not to raise their kids poorly.
Do one of you want to print out this thread tomorrow and send a copy to the offending newspaper, and then it's rival? Because otherwise it's not going to matter - no really.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret