June 23, 2007
The AMA's move to classify video game addiction as an official diagnostic disorder has gotten massive attention in the mainstream media over the last few days.At least one newspaper, however, isn't buying it. The Minot Daily News says it's all about parenting:
Video game makers, of course, have dismissed the notion their products are addictive. They are right...
It sounds like another convenient excuse for people who don’t want to take responsibility for their personal behavior, or for parents who let their children rule the roost...
There’s a simple cure for a child who plays video games excessively. It’s called parenting.
Comments
Re: Newspaper Editorial Pooh-poohs Video Game Addiction
Games can beacome easily addictive for children because they're very compelling with increasing complexity, so a child becomes more facile, yet wants to know more and apply new skills. While wanting to improve their game isn't a problem in itself, it becomes one if video games are taking a youngster away too much from other activities. Then the parent has to intervene and limit the amount of time the youngster spends with the video gameor online games.
When I was a kid, my dad and i played together. We also went to the shooting range together. I never shot up my school.
I remember when I was young, my dad and I would lan MECHWARRIOR 3 and launch rockets at each other all the time, swearing happily.
I would not try reasoning with the parents over their choice in games. This is their right in parenting and offers little harm despite the childrens' dislike for the choice. Are the parents right or wrong? We don't really know. The kids may have spent a LOT of time playing games, less on homework and studying and grades may have been affected. Had my grades ever slipped they would have been gone quickly.
Their notion of the "damage" done by games will change on its own as society's view of games comes around. I say this because I have faith than reason, fact, and science will win out over sensationalism and fear-mongering in the end. Personal example. My mom HATED the Simpsons when I was in elementary school. She thought it was teaching me horrible things. We didn't have cable so she was going by her notions of the show. I had never watched it but my 6th grade teacher had parents sign a note for us to watch some episodes in class. I was the only one who had to go somewhere else while they did. He did give me a Simpsons Mad magazine when it was old and worn, and I wanted to watch the show even more then.
When we finally got cable a couple years later my mom came around. She saw how funny and smart the show was, parodying things and teaching lessons of a sort. My mom wasn't the sharpest person but she loved the show for the message despite some of the content from time to time. She didn't get Beavis and Butthead so I had to sneak that one at night. By the time South Park hit I was old enough to watch it as an adult. I still always managed awesome grades and respect despite the media content I sucked in, or the vast amount of videogames I played. I took responsibility as a kid for making sure I got good grades, studying when I needed to. I made sure my attitude was in check and that I had respect for adults, even if they disrespected me. Some children manage this, others don't and feel entitled to whatever they want to consume.
I learned this need to be decent when I was young. My mom, being totally at a loss for how to get us to stop being mean towards one another put our Atari 2600 up in a closet for months. Now, it was supposed to be a couple of months. We forgot all about it, and 13 months later had it back like a new toy. We had no other games in that time. We spent more time outdoors playing sports/climbing trees/building forts, with our friends (not playing games since she'd have found out), drawing, and reading. Kids will find things to do, and may even find a hobby they normally wouldn't have. So, don't worry about a parent's choice to cut out games, whether in punishment or in fear. At least they are taking a stand on something. Many parents don't even take a second glance at ratings, despite the ESRB's study to the contrary. If they were forced to take a quiz on the game titles and ratings their kids played, they'd fail it pretty badly.
/sarcasm
It's not just about children, they just happened to take higher importance since parents can control their "gaming addiction", where as adult gamers don't really have to answer to anyone about it. See, it says:
"It sounds like another convenient excuse for people who don’t want to take responsibility for their personal behavior, or for parents who let their children rule the roost…"
The first part of that statement applies to everyone else who does not classify as children.
But there are people that take things to an extreme and actually are "addicted". I have worked in customer support for the industry. I have seen letters from kids asking us to stop letting their parents play the game because they quit their jobs and their is no food on the table. I have also seen disgusting letters about family members who are adults that refuse to get up from their chairs. But these people definitely have other issues, and I don't think it's so much as an addiction to video games as it is another disorder that causes this behavior.
It defines addiction as: "the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma."
Those who are addicted to videogames fit both of those criteria. I don't claim to be an expert on the classification of disorders, but the dictionary and a little bit common sense lead me to believe that videogame addiction exists. And no, I am not trying to use a mental disorder as an excuse for my own problems. I rarely play video games for more than 4 hours a week. However, it is ludicrous and arrogant to dismiss the claims of those who do suffer from the problem, not to mention scientists who have spent their careers studying addiction.
On websites frequented by gamers, there seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to anything that is seen as criticism of the media. However, unlike the "theories" of Jack Thompson and similar opportunists, there is substantial and observable evidence supporting video game addiction. But denial is a difficult obstacle to overcome.
Are violent video games really a source of youth aggression and violence? The answer is no. While violence and mayhem are constant themes in video games today, including these themes are merely for entertainment purposes only. The game companies who make these constantly controversial games are forced to “up the ante” as violence becomes more and more widely accepted and even expected by our cultural standards, basically meaning that irresponsible parents, when buying a child an M-rated game, merely thinks that because it is a game no harm can come without parent-child interaction. But they don’t realize that it’s because they don’t regularly interact, because of the harmful environment these school shooters are raised in, because they were mentally unstable and nearly no one helped them, these kids had to resort to violence just to attract and garner attention. As if to say in rebellion, “You are gonna pay attention to me wether you like it or not.”
games can be fun, an addicting because of the fun they provide, but in the sense of "addicting" in which this is talking about, i would find it odd for the addiction itself to be the dominant factor and the addiction not being a cause of something more complex and that would require serious treatment. this of course isnt going to be true for everyone but some of these gaming addiction cases give off that vibe.
"Rehab. Nearly OD´ed on Tetris..."
depressed people are often reclusive, they cut their ties with things that they either had intrested in at some point, or what other people who dont have depression are intrested in. which would explain the gaming-addicted people who cut themselves out from the world, their friends and everything else in life.
i had a friend in highschool who had to go through the death of his dad. after that, he got so depressed he just dropped out of school when before that happened he was a straight A student. it was so hard that he just gave up on everything and started drinking as a way to escape. you guys may think im dumb for saying that depression would be a likely connection to some game addiction cases, but gaming alone could not a powerful enough factor to cause someone to do such a thing, that just doesnt make sense. my friend wasnt addicted to games but i saw for the first time how bad depression is an how drastically it can make people do things that they would never do under normal circumstances, which is where the word "addiction" applies here.
I think you're being a bit hard on this forum saying half the posters. Part of the problem is that on certain topics you'll get several people who never post more than once (I'm only a lurking poster, simply because my job keeps me away from computers for 3+ hours at a time - only during lunch break do I usually get to surf.) and just basically yell and scream in a juvenile manner.
If you look at most of the posts so far, they look to me like people are admitting that you can become addicted, but that not ALL gamers are addicted. I think that most people would admit that. What you WILL get a knee jerk reaction over, however, is the implication that most or all gamers are addicted. I don't see that reaction here, however. There's an occasional one, obviously, but I think the regulars here are fairly open-minded.
That said - I do agree that the article misses a LITTLE bit of the mark. I think it hit the main point, although I do disagree with them on the point that some people just can't stop. In the case of kids, I think that this article is fairly correct - too many parents just use the game station as a nanny and don't parent, then complain when their kids don't do what they say. But I do agree that there are people out there that are addicted. However, in this particular case, purely in my opinion, I think that these people tend to have a mental instability or some sort of problem that leads to the addiction. This is mostly due to the fact that there isn't a drug addiction like in heroine, cocaine, etc. that keeps drawing you back - I tend to think it's a screw loose in the brain.
Again though - I think you're being a touch hard on the posters here. Not much, but a touch. I think most of us are relatively open-minded people who just want people to look at us with the same open mind.
Is computer gaming an addictive past-time? I'd say it is in the same way that people can become hooked on anything from Dungeons and Dragons to Bowling. Basically, anything someone enjoys doing requires an act of will to stop, if you do not have that will to stop, then it is really with the person themselves, not the thing they are addicted to. However, that said, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be recognised as a problem or that the person shouldn't recieve help.
Fun is addictive, we consume it whenever we can, that;s human nature, I guess.
Thats when you spank your kid and ground him/her, take away his shit and if he threatens again, hit him/her again. If they actually try something, beat the ever living hell out of them. I know for a fact that if i said that to my dad during my early teens, i'd be in a wheel chair for the rest of my life.
Let's face it, nearly every reaction to this debate, by all parties involved, has been reflexive. The game industry's general response (as well as the response of this site's posters and those of other sites) has been to get overly defensive and dismiss the idea completely, which is a mistake. And anti-game groups and their associates have kept up their standard knee-jerk procedure, which is also a mistake.
Let's look at the facts of the issue:
1) A small percentage of the gaming population does, in fact, play games excessively and to the point where their behavior negatively impacts both their social relationships and their health - the standard definition of addiction.
2) Members of the AMA, observing this, have decided to try to get video game addiction classified as a mental disorder.
3) IN NO WAY would the AMA classify the act itself of playing video games as abnormal behavior, only the act of playing obsessively, in an addicted fashion.
It's pretty straightforward by itself, but the reactions of all parties have turned this simple matter into a tangled mess of misinformation.
As far as I can see, there's no entirely positive outcome to this thing now. The AMA needs to wise up and merge all the recognized addictive disorders into two categories: physical/chemical addiction, and psychological addiction, something that has needed to be done for many years now.
@ Valthun:
The Restless Legs thing is indeed a real syndrome. My mom has it, and has had it for many years. Heck, her mom even had it - it's by no means something new, it's just garnered more attention recently because there are now ways to treat it. I can see how it would seem fake to someone who doesn't have it, or know someone who has it, but let me assure you, it does exist.
Now that I think about it, this actually does have some bearing on the topic at hand. Video game addiction is a disorder that also sounds silly or fake if you don't know anyone affected by it. I personally don't
Agreed, this has always been right at the very root of the problem when identifying medical disorders. It's like all the focus on what TYPE of Manic-obsessiveness serial killers have, whether it be Guns, Insane Clown Posse or Violent Video Games, trying to find a causal link, and forget that the common denominator is the Manic Obsessiveness itself.
I personally don't, but I'd be very willing to bet that to those who are addicted, or who know someone who is addicted, video game addiction (like RLS) is very real and (unlike RLS) often very disruptive, even devastating.
There are no chemicals introduced solely by videogames, so it's not the games themselves that are addictive. Unlike alcohol and tobacco, which introduce chemicals into the system, video games and so-called video game addiction is more akin to what action junkies and sports nuts experience. There is no chemical dependence here, only a lack of self control for some people, as games are more accessable than other forms of activity.
What is lacking is self control and/or good parenting. Of course there will be the occasional person who is already mentally unstable or has an addictive personality who becomes "addicted", but the games are not to blame in those exceptions - if not games, some other medium or activity would become the focus, and often does.
People are far too willing to point the finger at games, as we've all discussed over the past few years. If only people would take a step back from their knee-jerk reactions and actually examine the situation on a case-by-case basis instead of taking the easy way out - not thinking... perhaps as a society we could make more progress.
To me this is another way for doctors to make money for medicare, treatment or even medication for people that they don't really need.
Even worse what scares me is because I bee nthrough all kinds of theirpy and stuff for anger mangagement Bi-Polar and ADHD. From my expereicne I know that some of the people that are "addicted" to video games probably have the same things as I do...
Which means they'll be getting treatment for the WRONG things.
If this was done and passed 10 years ago...I could of gone to treatment for my PC addictions...not my much more needed Bi-Polar and ADHD....
You know I think I almost seen a fight between a mother and a clerk in a CD store a few years ago. The lady eventually stopped yelling in a manner in which you could understand her and began sounding like a rabid dog. I think the clerk refused to sell her son a CD and she had to walk all the way from her car into the CD store(which she should see from her car)... Yea it was a pretty good bit of entertainment especially when security came and she didn't get to purchase the cd. Felt kinda bad for her son, took a trip with his crazy ass mom to get a CD he really wanted and not only did he not receive his CD but his mom embarassed him and herself and maybe she got arrested.
Maybe the government should issue "My parents are fucking crazy" cards to minors that allow them to purchase entertainment for adults. Lets face it they fucked them up enough already a Metal/Rap CD, Violent Movie/Game isn't going to matter at that point even if violent games create violent children(which they dont). Infact i'll go out on a limb and say it would probably help them cope. I know it feels good playing God Of War when I'm angry or listening to some thrash metal and/or death metal usually puts a smile back on my face within the first 30 seconds.
To say there is no chemical dependence is somewhat incorrect: the feelings of pleasure that cause and perpetuate addiction to video games - or to sex, or any other activity (i.e. addiction to activities rather than addiction to foreign substances) - are caused by endorphins and other such chemicals produced by the body in response to the activity.
You described the addiction perfectly with the "lack of self-control" comment, but you fail to realize you did so. The people who get addicted have two things in common: they derive more pleasure than most people from these activities, and they have lower overall self-control than most. The problem with your argument is that you put too much stock in people's ability to control themselves (and don't seem to realize that not everyone has the same level of control over themselves as you or I do).
And that comment is the kind of overly defensive reaction I was talking about before.
NO ONE is "blaming games", aside from the anti-game activists, and that's nothing new. The AMA is trying to classify game addiction as a disorder so that those who suffer from it can have an easier time finding help in dealing with it - none of what they're doing involves blaming video games.
In my opinion, no one who's thinking clearly about the issue would think about placing blame on anyone anyway - with addictions of this nature, it's not the addict's fault that thy're susceptible to addiction to a stimulus that is, for other people, harmless, and it's certainly not the fault of the game developers or the games themselves.
Making comments like this; being unreasonably defensive; unnecessarily guarding games, gamers, and the game industry from completely nonexistant threats; none of this makes any sense, nor does it do any good.
By the way: not singling you out, Mnementh, your post just happened to be the best one representing this viewpoint that I could find.
(before my first paragraph):
"There are no chemicals introduced solely by videogames, so it’s not the games themselves that are addictive. Unlike alcohol and tobacco, which introduce chemicals into the system, video games and so-called video game addiction is more akin to what action junkies and sports nuts experience. There is no chemical dependence here, only a lack of self control for some people, as games are more accessable than other forms of activity."
(between my second and third paragraphs):
"What is lacking is self control and/or good parenting. Of course there will be the occasional person who is already mentally unstable or has an addictive personality who becomes “addicted”, but the games are not to blame in those exceptions - if not games, some other medium or activity would become the focus, and often does.
People are far too willing to point the finger at games, as we’ve all discussed over the past few years. If only people would take a step back from their knee-jerk reactions and actually examine the situation on a case-by-case basis instead of taking the easy way out - not thinking… perhaps as a society we could make more progress."
I tried to reason with them and their knee-jerk reaction, use of research info (they use the biology=certainty strategy), christian values, and 'even if it's not a threat it wouldn't be a problem anyway'.
PPOOOOOOOOOOOP IS SO YUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMY
your project sounds like .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................U NEED TO EAT SOME POOOP YUMMMMMMMMMMMY
..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................YUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMY