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90% of Gaming Addiction Patients Not Addicted
phorm writes "BBC is carrying an article which states that 90% of visitors to Europe's 'video game addiction clinic' are not, in fact, addicted. The problem is a social one rather than a psychological issue. In other words, the patients have turned to heavy gaming because they felt they didn't fit in elsewhere, or that they fit in better 'in the game' than elsewhere in 'the real world.' This has been discussed before, with arguments ranging from gaming being a good way to socialize, the clinical definition of gaming addiction, and claims than males are wired for video-game addiction."
Why do people still listen to the media is beyond me. Every single year they come up with something that is either A) addicting and damaging to minds B) corrupting the family/children/society or C) is somehow harmful. Be it rock and roll, cell phones, video games, comic books, etc, the media always comes up with some "studies" to back them up while two months later showing studies that prove just the opposite is true, why haven't people realized that the media has cried wolf far too many times and just tune the crap out?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
If there's no physical or psychological dependence, they're not addicted. Turning to games for social reasons doesn't constitute addiction.
Yeah, I'll say. I just got done having a three hour bitch fest yesterday with a friend of mine who's BF is 'addicted' to World of Warcraft. She doesn't have a lot of experience with boys (much more with girls -- no comments on this please!), and I've had to mother her a bit on why a boy can sink twenty or more hours a week into a video game and says it "helps me relax and challenges me", but afterwords can't come up with anything better to do than "go bowling" ("where"? "Umm... I'm sure there's one around somewhere"), or "go for a walk".
I tried my best to explain how men are so much more visually oriented than girls, but it's a hard concept to really explain. It's not that they're addicted to video games, it's just that the game provides more visual action than the real world so they're more strongly attracted to it. Girls read books, boys watch movies--Boys play video games, girls play board games, that kind of thing. They really are wired different and it's damn frustrating.
I often find myself wishing for video games that helped build social skills for these kind of boys -- the ones that are awkward and introverted in public, but if you can get them to open up they're nice teddy bears. I don't think they'd want to play it though, unless it involved blowing up or shooting something. :( Like The Sims -- awesome game, but the only people I know who play it are other girls! Am I hoping for too much here? Is there some way to use some visual medium to help boys crawl out of their shell?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So 90% were nerds, not addicts.
to devote or surrender (oneself) to something habitually or obsessively. ie. addicted to gambling
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/addicted
Most people devote a great deal of their time socializing and thus become comfortable socializing. It's part of normal human development. We are social creatures. I tend to think that addiction starts when it causes problems in your life.
The problem is few have studied the long term impact of not learning how to socialize with someone without a LCD screen and a Internet connection. I could potentially see problems arising because not learning how to socialize only makes someone feel even more alienated.
Can you see the potential downward spiral that could apply to this situation that is typically reserved for drug abuse?
+1 Insightful if I had mod points.
Another contributing factor is, I have to say, laziness. It is much easier to stay at home, connect the Xbox to the net and play a game, then it was even 5 years ago to organize for all your mates to come around to play Perfect Dark multiplayer in the same room.
People often ignore the benefits of the social interaction, and this causes problems long term, as its hard to switch 'back' once you have isolated yourself even a little from your community.
You seem to be claiming that the disappearance of these clubs is causing kids to be gamers. I think it's exactly the opposite: Video games are causing kids not to be interested in those clubs, so they disappear due to lack of interest.
I -love- math and science, but if you give me the choice between hanging out with a bunch of kids that are interested in math or playing video games, the choice is obvious.
In addition, I can get all the info I need from the internet. I no longer have to deal with people or libraries or anything. Kids have the exact same access that I do, so it's not surprising that the smart ones choose to get their information fast and accurate, instead of wasting time. (Yes, information on the net is still far more accurate than talking to schoolkids about it.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
For starters, do you honestly believe that poor blacks are diagnosed MORE often with psychological conditions than affluent whites? Really? You really believe that someone trying to be both racist and politically correct at the same time is going to give these people an excuse for their behavior rather than simply throwing them in jail?
Second, when your getting high takes the place of working I'm pretty sure you ARE an addict, by definition. Your "hobby" is interfering with your life. This would be true of people playing video games as well, and you'll note that the article never stated that video game addiction is not real or that nobody who came into their clinic was, in their estimation, legitimately addicted to video games. Just that the majority of them weren't. (That's also not to say that they were what psychologists would consider to be mentally well; but being unwell and being addicted are not necessarily one in the same.)
More importantly, addiction is (among other things) an inability to stop your behavior. If that druggie really can stop doing drugs tomorrow, he's not addicted--same with a video game addict. The distinction the article seems to be drawing is that being unable to stop a behavior and not having another choice available due to other psychological issues aren't the same. These people fill their lives with video games because they have no other social interactions to fill them with. It's bad, maybe worse than addiction--but I would agree that it is not, in itself, actually addiction.
One reason...It use to be that these people could join a club and usually a "geeky" one: A Chess club, a remote control aircraft club, a rocketry club, a science club, an electronics club. These kinds of organisations are disappearing and the activities are being labelled as dangerous or complete social death to get involved in, leaving a void which is being filled with idle gaming.
Yeah, because all the traditional, pre-internet outlets of 'geekiness' used to command so much more respect than spending all your time gaming. These activities always were 'social death'.
I have a theory that the reason gaming gets a disproportionate amount of media attention for supposed 'violence' is because of its accessibility not to minors, but to those seen as nerds. There is a need to see the socially 'weak' retain their introverted role of passive victim. Games go against this by providing an outlet for the frustration visited upon them by the rest of society (however vicarious the aggression of a video game is), but the natural social laws wired into the human mind (at least among the non-introverted majority) do not allow this.
If all video games were non-violent and never had been, they might still have be popular among 'nerds' but they would also by association be 'social death' as the OP describes.
I definitely agree that there is a parallel with slots/gambling/whatever. I think it's something that more people need to acknowledge. Games are great way to entertain/challenge yourself, but there is a point where they need to be turned off. Now, I'm not saying that people shouldn't play games or that these people are necessarily addicts, but the internet should not replace all social interaction.
We need to keep in mind that a good number of these people have turned to games as a way to escape from a feeling of helplessness or social awkwardness. They become powerful in their online world and it's difficult to leave that, especially when you don't know how to approach the 'real' world. I know this is true for at least some 'addicts' because that's exactly what my issue was/is. It took me a long time to figure it out for myself.
What would be ideal is for someone to reach out to the 'addicts' and show them that they are interesting people in their own right and encourage them to come outside. I don't know how feasible that is as a large-scale solution, but I know that having a friend drag me out to go bowling or something would be much more effective than trying to lock me in a room with other 'defective' people. I'd actually welcome the chance to get out of the house, even if it were difficult.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
Your dead right. Addiction as a problem is really a manifestation of a fault in the system which also gives us our drive to survive and succeed.
:D ... Go bully some nerds and make sure they're never invited to parties! We need smart technical people to fix our planet, we can pump gas into their Ferraris, but ahah, their still nerds!
Like most human behaviors, it's a useful trait 90% of the time. 10% of time when it gets out of hand, you can consider it an illness requiring remedy.
This is why tagging the term addiction on any problem for an individual brings up all kinds of issues. Genuine addiction is very neurological/chemical, other examples may be inaccurately labeled addiction but the fault is actually behavioral. The lay person's understanding of the clinical definition is clearly different.
Ok so, kids who spend alot of time playing 'WoW' because they don't fit in socially, whats the problem? They'll probably learn some social skills in the game, whereas if they remain marooned in real life they will just become socially isolated as a lot of these kids do.
If some young person was doing some useful task, with the same pattern of compulsive behavior, would it still be called addiction by the concerned parent observing?
Further, isn't it really actually rather funny how any reasonable analysis (anything other than knee-jerk finger pointing) of issues for young people boils right down to social problems and deficient parenting?
Scratch that, what the hell am I saying: if we didn't have bullying in schools and a social structure that marginalizes eccentrics and intellectuals we wouldn't be able to breed the sub population of scientists and engineers that make the world a better place to live.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
where should they have fit in ?
working 7 to 19.00 every day, in a thankless job that demands way more than it pays ?
or, they should have fit in sleazy bar corners, wasting their life away with sluts (male or female) ?
or, they should become career bitches (male or female) and waste their life away in that manner ?
or they should have fit in with a family. but then again, they have to create a family first, and creating a family has SO much overhead and effort in these days that you can maybe compare it to swimming across english channel.
or, they should have fit in with the immense crowds that are sedating their brain through football spectatorship, or in front of dumb tv shows each night ?
or maybe they could have fit in with their peers, who are entertaining themselves with the MODERN entertainment form that is called gaming ? you know, fitting in WITH YOUR PEERS, as countless generations in the history of mankind has done ?
well. they are just doing that. i think a lot of people, but especially 'experts' need to shut their traps about it, and get to accept this as a normal stage of human civilization.
Read radical news here
As an experiement re-read TFA substituting the terms for "games" "gamer" etc to "sports" "sports fan". Try it.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
In highschool I started an informal survey after getting tired of being "addicted to computers".
"SOooo like all you do all day is like sit on computers and shit."
"What do you usually do when you get home from school?"
"I don't know I usually watch TV."
That summarized about 99% of all conversations I had. Some people usually read books. Some people usually just talked on the phone. But across the board almost every single person only had one or at most two hobbies (usually an extra-curricular sports team).
Because most people don't play video games the average game plays exponentially more games than they're used to observing and as a reslt the conclude that person is crazy addicted. In reality almost nobody does anything productive in their leisure hours and most of their time is taken up by one or two activities.
Computers are also tricky because while an external observer may simply note someone staring at a screen for 6 hours. You may have watched a TV Show. Read the news paper. Played video games. Talked to your friends. Read Slashdot. Read up on science news. Posted a blog on something you read. Worked on an art project and read a short story.
The variety of what I read and do on a computer vastly dwarfs what most people do in a day when broken down into activities instead of locations "Sat on couch reading and typing on keyboard."
I get just as addicted by good books as video games but if someone gets hooked on a book its a positive thing. "Oh my Jeny was up till 3 am she was so engrossed in Twilight." Meanwhile "That Jimmy is rotting his brain playing video games he played for 2 hours yeserday and I tried to get him to put it down and do something else but would have just played till 2AM can you believe it if I hadn't pulled the power cable."
It's a double standard perpetrated by the majority in order to shame the minority into conformity. Which usually entails sitting on the couch and watching TV till you go to bed.
I've been employed at several companies that kept employee net usage logs. Of course, I was always the one charged with keeping and auditing the logs. My idea of what constituted behavior worth investigating and reporting was always limited to hacking attempts, security breaches and such. None of my employers made any more specific rules regarding what they meant by "inappropriate". :)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I'm not surprised that hobby clubs are dying. As you say, face-to-face was the best way to acquire knowledge prior to the Internet Age. But now it seems like an extraordinary waste of time - invest three hours with people you barely know to maybe get the same information you can now find with two minutes on Google. If your goal is to learn about and discuss your hobby then the Internet truly blows away the hobby club.
But, as some of us realize, face-to-face meeting is still valuable for other reasons. You're more likely to learn something you didn't know that you wanted to know. You develop relationships that provide support outside of the narrow topic of formal interest. And humans are hyper-social creatures that thrive on the richness of face-to-face interaction.
The desire for face-to-face relationships has already led to the Internet being used as a source to find them: online dating, flash mobs, meetup groups. Maybe, with the Internet becoming more common than the telephone and a greater appreciation for what's lost without face-to-face interaction, there will be a rebirth of hobby clubs organized and supported with the efficiency of the Internet.
Not when you are admin for a media company or a sales firm. Both people are required to be on the cutting edge of trends. Same applies to a receptionist though that's just because I know she's bored (so long as it doesn't affect her work).
Incidentally if you can get a job as a Digital Researcher that is justification to surf porn on the job (Porn used bluray rather than HD - as a rule not a definition - and look what "won" the market).
Should the beancounters be on facebook? No. Should they be permitted on the Internet? Hell no.
Just because it's a shitty site doesn't mean it's a problem.
Just a thought.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
The simple answer is that there is a clinical and non-clinical definition of the word "addicted". If I observe a person playing WoW 12-16 hours a day, I might say that person is addicted to the game. From a non-clinical standpoint I am correct. They feel compelled to play the game all of the time, regardless of the reason for their choice (because all of their friends are there, because they feel like they fit in there, or because of some true, clinical, addiction) they are displaying what a laymen would call an addictive behavior. Physiologists have a clinical definition of the word which has a more specific definition, and requires someone to repeat the same behavior over and over because of a clinical or physiological bond to the behavior itself.
To use a more concrete, real world, example: imagine you have started smoking because all of your friend smoke, and you are up to a pack a day. Now imagine that you are, for some reason, immune to the physically addictive properties of tobacco. Now imagine that all of your friends abruptly stop smoking or you get new friends. Not being physically addicted, and only having picked up the habit because you wanted to fit in, you stop smoking as well. While you exhibited the behavior of an addict (smoking all the time) you were never really addicted to smoking, you smoked to fit in with your friends.
Essentially what this study is saying is that the majority of gaming "addicts" aren't actually "addicted" to games, they simply play them a lot of the same reason other people might go to bars a lot, or a crochet club a lot, or talk on HAM radios a lot. They feel like they fit in there and they've built a social circle (a guild in a MMORPG, a team on a server for an online shooter, or whatever) inside in the virtual world they inhabit. They obsess over gear and min/maxing stats for the same reason that my manager at work obsesses over his scuba equipment, or a car nut might obsess over ecking one more horsepower out of their engine. It gives them status in the mini-world of hobbyists that they choose to inhabit.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.