Video Game Addiction

[jjkrause84]

Hey guys...I'm taking this from the Beaatlemania thread so Idon't hijack it too much:

Originally Posted by telideli

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/f...diction-no-fun

This I find interesting (and depressing) as there are real physical problems that have come about because of it. I will say though that wouldn't extreme trekkies be considered "Addicts" as well, albeit in a different way? Where do we draw the line between quirky/downright weird/unhealthy? Yes...nerds play a lot of video games but the "addiction" to it can only come once you're older (to my mind)....meaning, you are addicted when yo uforget to eat and pay your bills because of WoW. An 8 year old (assuming he has good parents) can still make him e a functional human being ("eat up!", "go outside!", etc.).

Also "3-4 hours a day!" is NOT "addicted". In some games it takes that long just to DO anything. Heck, I can remember in high school coming home on a half day and sitting down and playing Civilization 2 for hooooours with a friend or two. Throw in a multiplayer game and a big group of us (7-9 teenagers) might stay up, literally, all night playing. Now, that may not be strictly "healthy" but there's a WHOLE lot of socializing going on there and it certainly cannot be any worse that watching TV for that long (i.e. movie marathons with friends at a sleep-over). I would even suggest that it is much better for your brain than TV because you have to respond to changing situations, plan/strategize, etc. In any case...I turned out great as did all my other nerd friends. My guess would be that video games ARE NOT the problem....the problem is people who hate their lives and are unable/unwilling to change them, so they seek escape. Simple as that.

I love the "warnign signs" for addiction provided:

# Thinking about gaming during other activities

# Gaming to escape from real-life problems, anxiety, or depression


So if I have a bad day at work I can't come home and throw down on some Street Fighter and drink some beer with my buddy? C'mon dude. Restless Leg Syndrom, anyone?

Still...quote of the article:

"It's like a food addiction," Young explains. "You have to learn to live with food."

Um.....I'd love to know how they "teach" peopel to live without food.....


What do you guys think?

[tuuur]

I think it's a pretty real possibility.
I am playing World Of Warcraft for some time now, and I notice that during my working day I am indeed thinking about things my playing character still has to do in game...

Quite scary to see yourself having one of the symptoms.

I think a game is just a game, and that you notice it taking over your daily life, its influence gets to big, and it's time to kick that habit.

[imsilly]

I remember when WoW first arrived. I had preordered it years before it's release on Amazon and one day at university it just landed on my doorstep. It came with a 30 day free trial and I figured, "what the hell it will kill a few hours between lectures and getting drunk."

That is what I felt until my Rogue was killed by an Orc Hunter who was like 30 levels above me being played by a prepubescent scandinavian kid. Then the competativeness kicked in and I didn't stop playing until I was the first Grand Marshall Rogue on my server and I had made that Orc quit playing through 24 hour ganking with my shiney new rank 14 weapon and armour set. Then I figured I should stop this as it's getting ridiculous.

I realised it was fun to do when there was nothing going on better, but when you start going, "I'll meet you down the pub a bit later I have to grind some more gold to buy my near pair of swords" you know you are in trouble. The problem is I just can't step down from things like that when there is a goal. As pointless and stupid as it seems I just can't stop myself even it's a trival thing I need to accomplish. Games sucker you in by giving you pointless goals to achieve.

Addiction is not the right word for it, you don't feel withdrawl from not playing. What you do feel is an intense desire to plan, create and destroy. I think guitar playing is a lot like that. If I gave it up tomorrow I wouldn't feel bad if that is what I wanted to do, but I would need another outlet for my creative or destructive urges.

Saying all that there was one game that I miss DAoC Dark Age or Camelot on of the first generation of 3D MMORPGs and it was amazing. WoW killed it off by stealing all it's players, but it had very challenging, fun PvP unlike modern MMORPGs. Unlike WoW it had no grinding so it was close to a gaming form of crack. Log on teleport to a massive battleground and PvP for hours without the whole addiction thing because you could just log off and log on whenever you wanted and you could get a nice fight instantly. You didn't have to even think about the game when you weren't playing it.

[djinn1973]

I think a lot of people burn up that kind of time sitting in front of the TV, not much different than people who follow a sports team during an entire season.

[Saxguitar]

I used to hate the thought of playing video games really weird for someone my age, but as soon as I got high speed internet Xbox-Live was a whole new way to game so I teid it. Now I am addicted to Call of Duty and Halo 3 which is stupid but I just can't stop playing them and thinking about them.

[studio1087]

My boys cannot endure a 6 minute car ride without their Nintendo DSI's. Sometimes I wish that I had never bought the consoles.

The staying power of video games freaks me out. My age is showing. I had pong and Space Invaders. An hour of gaming per week was more than enough when I was a kid.

To me, every game is up/down/shoot/hit/fire........it just seems boring and it seems like the same stuff with different pictures and characters.

I'm glad that the boys are learning guitar. I'm glad that they enjoy shooting compound bows (real bows). I'm glad that they get outside and that they are physically fit.

One of my college fraternity brothers is a child psychologist. He hates DVD players in mini vans and he hates video games because he believes that we are raising a generation of kids who cannot think for themselves or imagine things for 2 minutes at a time because they are always mentally plugged into something electronic and dumbing.

I have friends who cannot drive their kids 7 minutes to school without playing a DVD.

It's too bad.

[imsilly]

I don't think psychologists should blame games for kids not having greater attention spans. I think they should look at more powerful influences on a childs brain. I wouldn't be surprised learning an instrument as a child is beneficial, but like all things only if done in the right way.

I remember before I went into secondary education I had been forced to learn to play the violin and guitar. They didn't make much impression on me I gave them up at the first chance. I remember I could play them pretty well at the age of 11, but by about 16 I hadn't the foggest idea what to do with an instrument.

I think it's all about being able to relate the hard work that goes into music with the joy it produced. I didn't get a single moment of joy from instruments until about a year ago. Primilary because the relationship between me playing an instrument and producing music I actually like did not exist.

It should be like that with all children. I dear say that it's is about fostering a love of music first and then finding a way for a child to participate in that music. The hard work, patience and pain that accompanies activities like learning an instrument is pointless without the reward of enjoyment.

I would predict that if you combined computer games and music you would probably have a healthier combination then music alone. I don't mean Rockband or some other such game. I realised that Digital Audio Workstations are something most kids love if you teach them how to use them. I have often thought of teaching my little sister how to use Logic or Cubase to create music. I think she would get more out of it then her current choice to learn the bloody Oboe. I have never heard her listen to any music with an Oboe in it, but she does spend all day listening to terrible pop-R&B and Hip-hop. I would love for her to learn how to use a DAW or MPC and make decent beats. As opposed to her learning how to play an instrument that sounds terrible and listening to music that sounds terrible.

[jjkrause84]

Originally Posted by studio1087

My boys cannot endure a 6 minute car ride without their Nintendo DSI's. Sometimes I wish that I had never bought the consoles.

The staying power of video games freaks me out. My age is showing. I had pong and Space Invaders. An hour of gaming per week was more than enough when I was a kid.

To me, every game is up/down/shoot/hit/fire........it just seems boring and it seems like the same stuff with different pictures and characters.

I'm glad that the boys are learning guitar. I'm glad that they enjoy shooting compound bows (real bows). I'm glad that they get outside and that they are physically fit.

One of my college fraternity brothers is a child psychologist. He hates DVD players in mini vans and he hates video games because he believes that we are raising a generation of kids who cannot think for themselves or imagine things for 2 minutes at a time because they are always mentally plugged into something electronic and dumbing.

I have friends who cannot drive their kids 7 minutes to school without playing a DVD.

It's too bad.

My mom is your age, she just turned 45, and she is somewhat similar to you. When I go home we have a BLAST playing Galaga or Duck Hunt but after 30 - 40 minutes you're totally burned out on it. The game is too one dimensional to hold someone's attention for long. This was perhaps a good thing. Now a days things have radically changed....I was 13 when Final Fantasy VII came out....OMG! We never ranted about the gameplay or anything for that game, we ranted about the STORY. I would honestly hold it up as a piece of art...I really would. I, for one, still trust kids to go out and play when they get the chance. I loved sports and I was a puny shrimp of a boy (still am!). Pickup games of basketball and football....swimming....all of it was had in great quantity.


As for kid's attention spans....Hmmmmm. I think I'm silly is right when he says not to blame the kids (i.e. blame the parents). A DVD on the way to school? C'mon. It's meant for road-trips. Likewise the hand-held consoles...they're meant for the long haul. When I was a kid I knew that and they stayed stored away unless the family was going on a long drive at which point my sister and I would dig them out and play...well...Donkey Kong, Galaga and Bomberman most of the way. More to the point are attention spans getting shorter and people getting dumber? Probably not. POSSIBLY, but not necessarily. What did people say when Television or, worse, the home VHS player, came out?

One argument for the idea that attention spans are narrowing is the preponderence of ADD/ADHD. Sure a WHOLE lot of it comes down to mis-diagnosis and Americans will have to pay fro a GENERATION of medicated children (such a problem does not exist anywhere else in the world), but then again it did not exist 40 years ago, so....have the doctors changed or the kids? A lot of these kids were mildly quirky....then after drugs they develop dependency or ticks and they become socially isolated for the rest of their lives because they were a little hyper as kids. Where does this hyper-activity come from IF indeed it exists at all? Who knows. Hard to say.

My money would be on "diet"....what the kids have recieved as nutrition since the womb. You can't blame TV/video games when kids get diagnosed with ADD at 5 or younger. However, Americans eat way more chemical garbage than any other Western nation. No one else allows growth hormones to be used on their dairy cows (at all!) and no one uses anti-biotics and petro-fertilizers anywhere near as much as the great American industrial farms. This is not to mention the widespread use of various chemicals for binding, flavouring, colouring, texturizing food that are used (many of which are gleaned from the leftover material for making ethanol....yes, we eat chemicals we wouldn't dare put in our cars). We can't all afford to eat organic (in fact, very few people can) so that means that this plethora of harmful chemicals is in our food web, it is inextricably part of most people's diets and eating it all must come at SOME cost.

[studio1087]

Originally Posted by jjkrause84

My mom is your age, she just turned 45, and she is somewhat similar to you. When I go home we have a BLAST playing Galaga or Duck Hunt but after 30 - 40 minutes you're totally burned out on it. The game is too one dimensional to hold someone's attention for long. This was perhaps a good thing. Now a days things have radically changed....I was 13 when Final Fantasy VII came out....OMG! We never ranted about the gameplay or anything for that game, we ranted about the STORY. I would honestly hold it up as a piece of art...I really would. I, for one, still trust kids to go out and play when they get the chance. I loved sports and I was a puny shrimp of a boy (still am!). Pickup games of basketball and football....swimming....all of it was had in great quantity.


As for kid's attention spans....Hmmmmm. I think I'm silly is right when he says not to blame the kids (i.e. blame the parents). A DVD on the way to school? C'mon. It's meant for road-trips. Likewise the hand-held consoles...they're meant for the long haul. When I was a kid I knew that and they stayed stored away unless the family was going on a long drive at which point my sister and I would dig them out and play...well...Donkey Kong, Galaga and Bomberman most of the way. More to the point are attention spans getting shorter and people getting dumber? Probably not. POSSIBLY, but not necessarily. What did people say when Television or, worse, the home VHS player, came out?

One argument for the idea that attention spans are narrowing is the preponderence of ADD/ADHD. Sure a WHOLE lot of it comes down to mis-diagnosis and Americans will have to pay fro a GENERATION of medicated children (such a problem does not exist anywhere else in the world), but then again it did not exist 40 years ago, so....have the doctors changed or the kids? A lot of these kids were mildly quirky....then after drugs they develop dependency or ticks and they become socially isolated for the rest of their lives because they were a little hyper as kids. Where does this hyper-activity come from IF indeed it exists at all? Who knows. Hard to say.

My money would be on "diet"....what the kids have recieved as nutrition since the womb. You can't blame TV/video games when kids get diagnosed with ADD at 5 or younger. However, Americans eat way more chemical garbage than any other Western nation. No one else allows growth hormones to be used on their dairy cows (at all!) and no one uses anti-biotics and petro-fertilizers anywhere near as much as the great American industrial farms. This is not to mention the widespread use of various chemicals for binding, flavouring, colouring, texturizing food that are used (many of which are gleaned from the leftover material for making ethanol....yes, we eat chemicals we wouldn't dare put in our cars). We can't all afford to eat organic (in fact, very few people can) so that means that this plethora of harmful chemicals is in our food web, it is inextricably part of most people's diets and eating it all must come at SOME cost.

That was very atriculate. I enjoyed that. You're making me think about it. Good stuff JJ.

John