The Daily Grind: How should we fight addiction?

Reader Comments (3)

I would be very interested to see Massively's stand on the addictive properties of television or Life cereal.

Okay, perhaps that's a smidge unfair. MMOs, being active rather than passive entertainment, are more involving than a bowl of cereal. Generally, though, that's one of their strengths. Does it make the games too fun for their own good? Well, too much of *anything* is a bad thing.

Putting a warning label of some sort on MMOs unfairly singles them out, stigmatises us as MMO gamers, and is a rank sop to the myriad of forces out there that are threatened by the rise of computers and gaming as an entertainment medium. This gentleman your site has devoted so much space to has already said here he's going to be on Dr. Phil.

What exactly do we expect this programme to tell us about the evils of MMO gaming? Picture it- stock footage of a level 2 Orc running around in WoW to the beat of ominous drums as the image fades into grisly black and white as a narrator intones an out of context statistic about how many babies have been eaten by feral gamers.

I exaggerate but you see where I'm going with this. He's being used and so is this website. In the name of "fairness" we're allowing ourselves to be denigrated and have labels foisted upon us that we shouldn't have to accept.

Why do we have to focus on this gentleman's concern for 'families being broken apart' when the norm as far as I've seen is: friendships being made and strengthened, couples playing together, and whole families playing together? How much time will Dr. Phil dwell on the positive sociological effects of gaming? 10 seconds? If we're fortunate.

I will not submit to having MMOs treated like packs of cigarettes. There is a legitimate case to be made for computer gaming and a robust defence to be had for our rights. By singling out MMOs for some sort of government sanctioned warning, we begin on the slippery slope of legal precedent. What other concessions will we make to those who are less than fond of gaming?

There is a point where these games take over, yes, and where life can be subsumed by an all-encompassing grind. A point where patch notes that advertise a nerf to your class stab you and you want to wring a dev. That's when you have a problem, when you've lost sight of reality and lost your grounding- that such trivial things make you so angry. But it is *not* addiction.

Using that word obscures the actual unique nature of over-involvement with MMOs. This isn't something a patch can fix, this isn't a physical issue. It's utterly and completely psychological. In order to fix the problem we have to call it by its name.

And it isn't "addiction."

My fellow gamers, let's show some pride.

Reply

@quinnae: i think you are making a false dichotomy between an "addiction" and a "psychological" "over-involvement". true it isn't a "physical" addiction like nicotine but a psychological addiction is still dangerous. but i do agree with your point that the genre is stigmatized. but not just by people who hate computer games. it's stigmatized by people who love them too. probably cuz we feel susceptible to becoming addicted. that's how i feel anyway.

Reply

The problem with psychological addiction is that it's a lot trickier to diagnose and quantify. As I said, there's no 'patch' for MMO addiction, no chemical substance we can use to wean ourselves off of the games.

Generally speaking, people who get "addicted" to MMOs are guilty primarily of taking them altogether too seriously. When you look at, say, the WoW forums and bear witness to the invective of the games most vituperative whiners, and how visibly angry certain changes make them... that's where the problem lies.

People will play these games long after they've stopped being fun for them, making them vulnerable to a spiral of bitterness. This is a serious problem, no doubt, as it bizarrely leads these individuals to invest ever more time in the game. No it's not healthy.

It's an addiction in a populist sense, but in a medical sense? That's very tricky to determine. The jury is still out in the field of psychology on whether or not gaming addiction is real or whether the things we *associate* with it are actually something else. Often the root causes of over-involvement have less to do with the properties of the game than particular unresolved psychological issues certain people may have. But this is all very complicated and thus not very good daytime television.

Which is exactly why we need to stop indulging the tabloid press' scare tactics and stand up with reason to say that it ain't all bad. Invariably, these sorts of campaigns focus on the negative, which will have negative consequences for us all.

Reply