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Game Addiction Clinic Swamped
Via the Gamers with Jobs Press Pass, an article on The Australian site claiming that the Dutch gaming addiction clinic is swamped with fearful parents and glaze-eyed children. From the article: "Although experts are still debating whether excessive game playing counts as an addiction, Mr Bakker has no doubt that the symptoms are the same. 'If we see a car burning outside, we don't sit around wondering what to call it,' he said. 'It is not a chemical dependency, but it's got everything of an obsessive-compulsive disorder and all of the other stuff that comes with chemical dependency.' Tim, a 21-year-old from Utrecht, said he had hardly left his bedroom for five years because he was so obsessed by his computer games. "
Great now they can all get together and form their own guild..........
I am not a number. I am a free man!
Seriously.
His parents were frightened of him because, weighing more than 130kg, he was too strong for them to confront. Eventually they threatened to kick him out unless he enrolled for a month of therapy.
You're the parents, you make the rules. Pull the plug, take the computer away, do something, anything. You'd probably hit the roof if you caught your kid with a joint, but when he wants to wrap himself up in computer games you just fucking sit there and let it happen. That shit pisses me off. I hope this clinic is working with parents too to make sure they can control their child's behavior.
and I'm a gameaholic.
It was actually a mix of workplace burnout and World of Warcraft addiction, but I quit my well-paying job ($70k per annum) to play WoW full time.
I think for the most part it's a result of overreactive parents, combined with what I like to call "baby sitter syndrome" ("Why won't the public school teach my kids morals?!?! Why won't the gov't baby sit my kids?!?! Oh my, my kids are playing video games all the time, and I can't turn it off because they cry and scream and make a scene! I need a Gaming Clinic/Baby sitter to fix my kids for me!")
Disclaimer: I don't have kids of my own so the above is probably warped by views of other people who don't have kids of their own, not to mention stereotypes are rarely all-encompassing. Don't take it too personally. I was, however, at one point a kid, and I did have parents (who restricted my video gaming and computer time) so I think I still have some things to say on the matter.
Gaming for me was a phase. I always have enjoyed a good game, but it's not the same as it was when I was a kid. I would play games for hours on end, but now it seems my standards are higher or my attention span lower, because games don't tend to "hook" me as often as they used to.
I still enjoy a good game of course, but I think I'm still largely "gamed out" from when I was a kid.
I personally have met someone who was addicted to World of Warcraft- he stopped going to classes to play, would fall asleep at his chair while his characted rested, and unless he's changed since I graduated, has probably flunked out of college by this point.
However, for all that, I don't think that gaming addiction is all that common- compared to alcholism or compulsive gambling the number of gaming 'addicts' are trivial. Also, gaming is less physically harmful than alcohol or drugs, and much cheaper to indulge in than compulsive gambling.
I suspect that the same people who are susceptible to compulsive gambling are also the compulsive gamers, so research on the larger, more important issue (compulsive gambling) might also help compulsive gamers.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I can quit anytime I want. Really, I can! In fact, I was going to quit after I hit level 60. But now, I've decided I'm going to quit after I get all my Epic gear. That's right! After I get all my Epic gear, I'm really really going to quit. I promise!
There's more and more research emerging to support the hypothesis that any addiction to a substance without physically addictive qualities (i.e. crack and its ilk) are all rooted in the same dopamine reactions. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1669601/p osts is a short synopsis of a story I read in long form in Chicago magazine about a woman who took a drug that affected how her brain handled dopamine and ended up with a massive gambling addiction. Stopping the meds brought back her original problem but allowed her to almost effortlessly quit gambling.
All of these non-chemical addictions seem to have the same core symptoms. People do something that makes them feel good. They do it often and begin to notice other things don't feel good anymore, then they notice they need to do this new thing more and more to keep the good feeling coming. Just because our brain makes a chemical doesn't mean it won't acquire a tolerance to it.
> 'If we see a car burning outside, we don't sit around wondering what to call it,'
I do. That one looks like Ian the inferno, but last time Steve Scorchup seemed more appropriate.
Are these "addicts" getting the Dutch equivalent of disability payments for this bullshit?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Eight years ago, my father had a brain aneurysm and stroke and I am his sole caregiver. I was 21 when it happened. I've mostly been stuck at home taking care of him for my entire 20s while I watched friends finish school, get married, have kids, etc. Between the area where I live and the limited ability I have to go out to enjoy life with my friends, I really started losing touch with society and became depressed.
In 2003, my best friend bought EQ at the urging of one of his co-workers. After two months of him nagging me incessantly to try it, against my better judgement, I did. Everything started out fine, him and I would log on for 2-3 hours a night to play together and that was it. About two months into it, him and I were asked to become officers in our guild. At the point you become an officer, you suddenly feel a whole lot more responsibility and you feel like you're important - everyone in your guild counts on you. Not long after, I became our raid leader and, given the absence of the guild leader for a long period of time, people began to see me as the guild leader as well. Eight months in, I was tagged with the guild leadership officially. I now had seven officers and in the neighborhood of 120 guild members counting on me to be there. By now, I wasn't playing 2-3 hours a day, I was playing 8-12 hours a day. It wasn't reality, but it felt real enough - I was important to people and interacting with "society." Along the way, I met a girl from the other side of the US and we had a fairly turbulent relationship(mostly due to her being bipolar), but we were in love and planned to get married. I knew that EQ was taking up my entire life, but my girlfriend was there and that's how we spent time together from 3k miles apart and I was the engine the drove hundreds of cogs. At our peak, we had 1039 tagged toons.
This spring, my relationship of two years ended with her and at the same time, the officers staged a coup as the pressures from EQ's death throes were mounting (yeah, EQ is dying, netcraft, server consolidations and mmogchart confirm it). About a month after I left the girl and my guild, I realized that I no longer had a reason to play and I simply logged off one night never to return again. That was three months ago last weekend.
For me, it wasn't a game I was addicted to, it was all the social interaction, feeling important and spending time with my gf. After years of being depressed, it was nice to be somebody even if it didn't mean anything in real life. After the way things ended, my biggest regret is that the things that helped me break that addiction didn't happen earlier. Oddly enough, despite becoming "nothing" again, I haven't been depressed and I find myself enjoying the mundane things in life that I neglected for 2.5 years. I still frequently think about EQ and some of the fun times I had in it, but I have no urge to play it anymore... and I deliberately avoid anything that might suck me into a similar situation again. In the meantime, I'm trying to rebuild my life even though I feel that I'm fighting an uphill struggle now at 29.
Our brains are an electro-chemical system and I would argue that the stimuli that make you feel important and good about yourself can be just as addicting as putting that cigarette up to your lips, especially when you and the rest of the world appear to have given up on each other. At 21, when you still have pretty much everything going for you and life hasn't completely knocked every one of your plans for the future out of whack, it's pretty easy to think idealistically about how everyone should be able to feel/be/do exactly like you.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Hell with that. I don't have time to be addicted...I have a raid schedule to keep.
Medical condition. Before the self obsessed BabyBoomers started raising children the majority of young boys didn't have A.D.D.. This is all just one more "What about me!" from the BabyBoomer generation. "My kids aren't perfect! Fix them!" This is coming from the people who invented, "Turn on. Tune in. Drop out." "Free love" and your classic 1960's 1970's do it if it feels good self absorbed generation. As my hero George Carlin put it, "From cocaine to rogain". ""These are perfectly decent kids whose lives have been taken over by an addiction," said Mr Bakker, a former drug addict. "Some have given up school so they can play games. They have no friends. They don't speak to their parents."" Giving up school? Normal. No friends? Normal. Who didn't feel isolated in high school? Not speaking to parents? Normal. Sounds like the kids aren't watching TV all hours of the day and night and the new technology is frightening mummy.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
We used to call this neurosis. The actual neurotic behavior isn't really all that important. What is important is addressing the underlying causes, which often have little or nothing to do with the resulting behavior. This guy obviously has a problem, but obsessive gaming is just the symptom. He could equally well be compulsively plucking his eyebrows or watching TV.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
You know, a lot of people watch television in excess of 4-6 hours a day. I've never once heard any of them referred to as "addicts."
Likewise, a lot of retired people play golf all afternoon six days a week. Are they "addicted" to golf?
Gaming is just another form of recreation, and like any form of recreation, some lazy slobs will do it to the point in which it interferes with their various "obligations" (school, work, family, etc.)
That's hardly the same thing as somebody who suffers violent withdrawal symptoms when they go for a day without cocaine.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You know, a lot of people watch television in excess of 4-6 hours a day. I've never once heard any of them referred to as "addicts."
That's because very few of them have any obsessive compulsion to watch TV. You put them in a room with a TV and they'll watch it... its the path of least resistance to entertainment for a lot of people; for most of them its just lazyness.
If you give them something else to do they won't get all anxious and grouchy until they can sit in front of the TV again. They might have a favorite show or two, or go out of their way to catch specific event... but they don't habitually miss work & school, stay up all night, skip meals and showers, and abandon their friends, just to put little more time in with the TV. If "a lot of people" started doing that then we probably -would- call them addicted.
With video games, particularly MMOGS, however, this is exactly what they do. They'll spend every available waking moment playing them. They will give up their friends, they will skip meals, they will skip school & work.
They aren't "lazy" at all. Laziness requires a certain level of passiveness. "Addicts" aren't passive. Quite the opposite - they will go to great lengths to keep playing as much as possible for as long as possible as often as possible.
Whether or not its a chemical addiction with pysiological withdrawl effects or purely psychological doesn't really matter. Like compulsive gambling, it effects a surprising number of people, and it hits them hard. It is a real problem, and ignoring it or pretending its not real because theirs no obvious chemical dependancy isn't going do anyone any good.
Why do people think it's 'not real' if it's conducted primarily on a computer?
Before Everquest existed, I 'was somebody' online - ran a guild on a MUD (although not as big as yours), and eventually even ended up running the MUD itself. There were definitely some stretches where I'd often spend 16 hours a day on the computer.
But I've also 'been somebody' in real life too. I have a real job with real responsibilities and most of the people I work with I have met once, or no times at all, and interact with almost entirely via computer. I'm also the president of one national non-profit organization with a few thousand members I never see, and run another business with 30,000 customers I don't see either.
And I find that I often spend 16 hours a day on the computer.
Now, most people would consider my job, my non-profit, and my business to be 'real life', and I enjoy them. So why are people who enjoy spending 16 hours a day doing something else on the computer not doing 'real life'? I really can't think of anything that's much different between the 16 hours a day I spend playing networked computer games and the 16 hours a day I spend doing various forms of (enjoyable) work. And while you may have felt compelled to play more everquest because people were depending on you, how is that any different than me feeling compelled to go to work for the same reason?
Computer games are certainly no less productive than the time I've spent shooting pool at the bar. But somehow going out and shooting pool at the bar is OK while playing games at home is not - why? Also, why is someone who spends 16 hours a day reading books and/or watching TV considered to be doing 'real life'? All you're trading is a networked screen with a non-networked screen or page.
Playing on the computer a lot, in and of itself, isn't an addiction. It's only natural that you're going to do the things you enjoy doing as much as you can, and playing computer games isn't any different than reading or anything else, except people who do those other activities want to pretend their life is more meaningful than computer gamers I guess.
People need to understand what an addiction really is. If you are COMPELLED to do something so much that it interferes with your ability to pay your rent, feed yourself, or maintain relationships that are important to you, that's an addiction. If it consumes all of your free time, that's just recreation. And I think it's a tragedy to try and label someone an 'addict' just because of their prefered form of recreation.
Anyway, the time you spend on EQ was real life. And it wasn't because you were 'addicted', it's because you enjoyed it. Not playing anymore wasn't an addiction-ending event; you just stopped enjoying playing so you stopped playing. Simple as that.
paintball