Studies on Gaming Addiction? 28
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?"
I'd comment... (Score:5, Funny)
3 words (Score:2)
And if you know what I'm talking about, you're required to friend me.
Re:3 words (Score:1)
Maclean Hospital (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maclean Hospital (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Maclean Hospital (Score:4, Interesting)
BUT,
I find that the people talking about "computer addiction", particularly psychiatrists and psychologists, cast their net far too wide (and do so ON PURPOSE to drum up business). The symptoms they describe are too common to be useful in considering an individual's behavior.
For example, one of the symptoms they list is someone who gets involved with a game at night, and suddenly is surprised by dawn. This has happened to many people, not just gamers. People doing movie marathons, having sex with their girlfriends, dancing, bar hopping, etc, all have had this experience. When you're having fun, it's easy to lose track of time. This doesn't imply ANYTHING except that you were having fun, and listing it as a symptom is sneaky at best. It's designed to make you think "Oh, MY! Maybe I need to see a psychiatrist too!"
Psychiatry is a business, remember -- sites like these are often commercials designed to drum up business, in particular roping in naive parents who don't know what to do about little Junior's online activities and who tend to jump to conclusions.
This entire area of "study" should be taken with a grain of salt, I think.
did you look in EGM? (Score:1)
From experience (Score:3, Informative)
Re:From experience (Score:1)
I want to preface this by saying that it probably sounds more callous than I intend, but that I'm terribly disturbed by a trend in the U.S. toward abdication of personal responsibility.
That aside, I'm not altogether unfamiliar with addiction. As one of those pitiable individuals who smokes cigarettes when drunk, I can say that I do have some level of addiction to nicotine; every now and then I see someone smoking and crave a cigarette. But I don't smoke one. Moreover, all the people I know who have qui
Re:From experience (Score:1)
Just don't ask Garcia about this (Score:3, Interesting)
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Easy to get addicted (Score:3, Interesting)
Its a crappy situation and you dont even realise that you're getting into it. You start playing, set goals, and before you know if you you're eating every meal infront of the computer (I do that now sometimes anyway.. hmm..
I managed to break my gaming addiction (Score:3, Funny)
The peeper agrees, people play too many games (Score:1)
From a WoW "widower" (Score:1)
And she's happy... and as long as the situation truly works for both of us, we'll be okay. Besides, I'm familiar with addiction recovery myself, so we have tools to maintain some semblance of balance.
(Of course, she needed better hardware so she now has an AMD64 box. I got to scrounge her old system to upgrade my own :-) )
What? (Score:3, Funny)
Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com]
Online activities are perfectly legitimate. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate. (Score:2)
But, I don't think that videogames are addictive.
With an actual addictive thing (like heroin, or cigarettes, or alcohol) it doesn't matter WHO you are, if you do the same set of things you'll probably end up with
Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate. (Score:2)
You're wrong. You're talking about physical addiction, when psychological addiction is just as real. For example, the psychological addiction to cigarettes lasts long after the physical addiction to nicotine is broken.
Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate. (Score:2)
Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate. (Score:1)
As I see it, you're setting up a dicotomy between hard drugs (i.e. the problem is the drug- and *anybody* using them will fall into addiction) versus video games (the problem is that some people enjoy video games a lot but can't manage their time well, or tend toward obsession in *whatever* they do). Addiction
Alcoholism and Computer/Internet addiction (Score:3, Interesting)
My theory is that some people have addiction prone personalities, and they will readily substitute one drug/behavior for another. I also believe that others are susceptible to one form of addiction, but not others - there are people who would be alcoholics but, lets say, gambling does nothing for them.
I will agree with a previous poster that addiction has become a huge industry, and there is every incentive to overdiagnose addictions of all sorts
(Posted AC for obvious reasons)
Re:Alcoholism and Computer/Internet addiction (Score:2)
As I understand it, physical addiction is only a small part of the overall addiction for most people, and it's mainly relegated to a few substances. The psychological aspect of addiction is many times more important. What happens is that people tend to use the addiction as
How to tell (Score:1)
This isn't about addiction, per se... (Score:2, Interesting)
Lots of gaming habit info.
I gave up playing MMOGs... (Score:2, Insightful)
I know that MMORPGs also save your progress (wouldn't be much point playing otherwise), but its just not the same, because theres always the feeling that everyone else is flying ahead of you, and you just have to keep up, which kind of means you aren't in control of the 'world',