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I used to think that I was addicted to video games when in high school I would get together with my friends and play Civilization all night long, every single d

I used to think that I was addicted to video games when in high school I would get together with my friends and play Civilization all night long, every single day. Nowadays I keep hearing about younger brothers and sisters who are literally unable to get off their computers, consoles, and devices. I do relate to them a lot, but I don't know if it's becoming more serious over time, or if we are more attentive to it. I hope it's not the former; I made a lot of friends playing and making video games, but it's not a particularly productive pastime if you're only playing them. Of course, you can disagree, but I am personally a little regretful that I didn't end up picking up an instrument or spent more time on my drawing skills. My programming developed quite a lot during my teens, but I definitely could have toned it down and 'played outside.'

kypro 7y ago
> I made a lot of friends playing and making video games, but it's not a particularly productive pastime if you're only playing them. Of course, you can disagree, but I am personally a little regretful that I didn't end up picking up an instrument or spent more time on my drawing skills. Sounds like you had a very similar experience to me. I was addicted to MMORPGs from around age 14-18. Almost every moment of free time I had I was playing these games. I realised when I got to university how much time and potential I had wasted and I was becoming more interested in entrepreneurship which helped shift my addiction to something a little more productive. That said, I also regret spending most of my late teens and early twenties working on hopeless startup dreams fuelled by the delusionally over optimistic self-help books I was reading at the time. After going through a bit of a crisis in my mid twenties I finally feel I've reached a good balance between, but arguably I've wasted many of my best years. Even productive addictions can be bad. You often hear professional sports stars and business people echo these feelings about not prioritising the important things in life: family, friends, etc.
- tcbawo 7y ago
  Don't be so hard on yourself. Kudos for taking a chance. I know many successful people, but the happiest are those that found something they were passionate about and learned to excel at it, rather than chasing what they though would make them rich/famous. I've also seen many sacrifice relationships and experiences in their pursuit, such that I would never trade places with them.
- sammeboat 7y ago
  Ask me on my deathbed what I regret the most and I will say: everything (in hindsight).
dazzawazza 7y ago
It's a bit of both mixed in with games companies explicitly using techniques in honed in gambling industry to keep kids attached to their product. I've worked in videogames for 25 years and the industry is "oblivious" to the harm it is causing because it's very profitable. There has been little innovation in games for the last ten years compared to the innovation in the business model used by the industry which has seen rapid change to grab children attention for as long as possible.
- sjwright 7y ago
  On the contrary, there has been plenty of innovation around how to make games more addictive and profitable.
hrktb 7y ago
> but it's not a particularly productive pastime > picking up an instrument or spent more time on my drawing skills. As a pastime, I am not sure I see the "productive" part of playing an instrument or drawing. For the instrument part in particular, while any piece has an interpretation part, does it warrant a "productive" label, more than paying a game a specific way ? Drawing can have a commercial aspect, but then is it a pastime ? (we'd also then have to take pro gaming into account if we go into these length)
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Making art is about as productive as it gets. It's also the only thing that we still appreciate many years after the original was created. Playing a game is pure consumption, drawing or making music is pure production.
  - LunaSea 7y ago
    I doubt that hearing "Claire de Lune" being played badly on the piano for the 500th time is more productive or appreciated than a huge game of Civilisation or insane run in some other game. Creativity exists in different forms.
    - grenoire 7y ago
      I don't think practicing piano or performing alone is a creative endeavour unless you are either adding to or mutating the piece you are playing, or are using your piano skills to compose new pieces. "Making" art, as another commentor put it, is the productive action, not studying to make art. The distinction is different for visual arts and music.
  - hrktb 7y ago
    That would be composing music, which would match building games (or game artifacts for Minecraft or Mario Maker for instance) We get into muddy territories, but playing games (electronic or not) is doing something within rules, that’s not so far from making sounds or pictures with given tools.
  - 7y ago
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Twenty years ago games companies didn't employ psychologists and economists to ensure their game currencies and loot boxes were suitably addictive. You were addicted to Civ or old school Defender arcades because it was too much fun (for a while), not because they had a team exploiting every weak point. Somewhere along the line (f2p with premium currencies, maybe monthly subscriptions) it switched to cutting your fix with some heroin to ensure it's addictive enough. To me that's qualitatively different, and in need of regulation.
- benj111 7y ago
  What is the biological difference though? (genuine question) It's all well and good rationally formulating a difference between fun and addictive, but if our monkey brains can't tell the difference, should we really be treating them differently?
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    I'm no psychologist, so I'm sure someone could express this better. I don't think the addiction to early games, whether Civ or Tempest that we called "addictive" was a real addiction. It was just fun. No more than anyone was addicted to cycling or football as a kid. Loot boxes, with all the tricks of "almost" winning rolls, and currencies that intentionally distance you from actual money so you're not sure how much you're spending, or MMO's with the "Skinner box" grind. Those are pushing much more into real addictions exploiting people who know it's doing them no good. They're using the same addictive techniques as gambling, such as scratch cards that have 2 of 3 jackpot spaces when you scratch. They all cross the line into exploitative and need some level of regulation just like gambling. Particularly when it's pitched at minors. That UK gambling regulation has been liberalised in the last 25 years, and there's been a huge growth of problems stemming from that is no surprise.
  - Buttons840 7y ago
    From personal experience, it seems to me that "fun" results in good memories. You smile when looking back on "fun" memories. When you look back on "addictive" behavior, you sense the passage of time and energy (and resources/money) and feel neutral (at best) about the behavior. The hard part is in the moment where you don't especially want to perform the addictive behavior, but it's too uncomfortable to do anything else.
watwut 7y ago
> play Civilization all night long, every single day [...] my programming developed quite a lot during my teens, but I definitely could have toned it down and 'played outside.' This on the whole is extremely unlikely. First, if you developed programming skills, you was not playing civilization all the time. You was playing civilization some and coding some. Second, if you would really literally spent playing all night long and then went to school and then spent all night playing etc, you would be extremely sleep deprived and you would not learned much - not in school and not coding. The distinction matter. The thing that distinguish addiction from playing a lot is consequences on rest of your life - school, work, relationships with family or friends or ability to find mate. I knew people who were in latter category - failing in college, going to work sleep deprived to the point of being drag on team, divorcing. It is different then high schooler wasting time.
- kache_ 7y ago
  For me it was playing video games all day while writing scripts for those video games to play them better. I learned some real skills from video games. For example, I was leading huge teams size 48 in real time, part of an organization with 300 people at 15 years old.
  - livueta 7y ago
    Yeah, no kidding. I did a fair amount of sysadmin and webdev stuff for my guilds, but in retrospect the interpersonal stuff was probably more valuable. Turns out that cajoling a geodistributed collection of high-strung egoists into cooperating over extended periods of time is a skill that's not only useful for games. Who'd have thunk.
mattlondon 7y ago
I was in a kind of similar situation. I perhaps wasn't "addicted" but I certainly messed about on computers a lot. But was it a waste of time? I don't think so. Granted there was a lot of brain-dead time spent in Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization, and other games, but that time triggered a general interest and curiosity in what is happening. That leap from just playing to wondering what is going on was invaluable IMHO, and you wouldn't have got it without some serious screentime. First you start poking around inside the *.cfg files for Doom and DN3D, and the next thing you know it is a couple of years down the line and you're a late-teen sitting up late into the early morning fiddling around with laser-pointers and webcams naively trying to write machine vision algorithms from scratch, or using Wireshark to to try and reverse engineer the server browser in the initial release of Steam, or strapping crappy wireless 9V cameras (1) into water bottle rockets and trying to process the video coming back via also-crappy USB video capture devices (2) (...some personal anecdotes for you there). Now fast forward a few more years and I've got a degree in computer science and a pretty well-paid job as a software engineer that means I don't really need to worry about money, and I still have some good headroom left in my career to grow still without too much effort. Would I have got here if I had stopped messing about on the computer and instead diluted that learning time with trying to play the violin or piano? I doubt it - that spark of curiosity as a teenager started a life-long (I presume) interest and set me on a path for a well-paid and desirable career. I wouldn't change any of that time at all. 1 - You can still buy similar things I was just amazed to see: https://uk.banggood.com/Wireless-Mini-Surveillance-Camera-Monitoring-Full-Kit-p-928266.html https://uk.banggood.com/Wireless-Mini-Surveillance-Camera-Mo... 2 - no-longer available apart from ebay it seems: https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/183280630638 https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/183280630638
- non-entity 7y ago
  The reason I got into programming was Runescape leaving stack traces on my Desktop circa 2010
- bdamm 7y ago
  Yes, I can relate! My first real reverse-engineering effort was hex-decoding font files for the Descent series. My first collaborate programming project was writing a cross-section editor for a guy writing an extrusion engine that could be used to create Descent levels. My first attempt at commercial software was a mission packaging program for the game. All that stuff was great cornerstones for the career that came afterwards.
thrower123 7y ago
At least in the 90s, trying to play PC games was a great way to figure out how computers worked and how to troubleshoot them when they went wrong. Things are so much easier now... You don't have to touch an autoexec.bat, or deal with extended memory. The amount of system tweaking you have to do to get decent performance is minimal. And installing a game almost never borks your computer so badly you have to madly try to do an OS restore, trying to preserve everything and make it look like you hadn't broken the family computer...
swiley 7y ago
I think games like civilization and openTTD are addictive but there's something different about it that results in the "addiction" naturally ending. These smartphone games are just so incredibly mindless in ways that those optimization games aren't. While you're not doing anything important you are actually doing things and solving problems.
tomatotomato37 7y ago
I wonder if a career in software engineering is the difference between a functional computer addict and nonfuctional addict. It really gives a new perspective to the concept of developers jamming out in a hackathon for 24+ hours while sleeping under desks and trying to stay in a flow stats as long as possible
- friendlybus 7y ago
  Can't help but agree. The health effects of computers are not really understood. We've been rushing to harness their power to great effect, but what is the cost of having a computer? I know some people in therapeutic sphere are terrified of technology, saying it replaces people. You only need to dip into some Baudrillard or philosophy in general to see arguments about the impact of computer use, and they basically mirror real life. I don't know how much of that is the deep dark truth, but there needs to be some separation between the harnessing of computing power for political, social & economic progress and living a normal life.
- thefounder 7y ago
  The main issue with games addiction is that at the end of the day/night/week you are poorer both socially and financially. The financial aspect is quite important and often makes the difference between a "devoted" worker/workaholic and a "junkie".
- benj111 7y ago
  Is there much difference between doing that and doing an ultra marathon or whatever? I suppose the marathon is 'healthier', but it's the same basic drivers, pushed to a somewhat unhealthy degree.
- chongli 7y ago
  It’s actually that. I would even go so far as to say “functional addict” is a bit of an oxymoron. People compulsively repeat all kinds of different behaviours. Some of those have a lot of people willing to pay you (programming), others less so (gaming), and some none at all (intravenous drugs).

kypro 7y ago

> I made a lot of friends playing and making video games, but it's not a particularly productive pastime if you're only playing them. Of course, you can disagree, but I am personally a little regretful that I didn't end up picking up an instrument or spent more time on my drawing skills. Sounds like you had a very similar experience to me. I was addicted to MMORPGs from around age 14-18. Almost every moment of free time I had I was playing these games. I realised when I got to university how much time and potential I had wasted and I was becoming more interested in entrepreneurship which helped shift my addiction to something a little more productive. That said, I also regret spending most of my late teens and early twenties working on hopeless startup dreams fuelled by the delusionally over optimistic self-help books I was reading at the time. After going through a bit of a crisis in my mid twenties I finally feel I've reached a good balance between, but arguably I've wasted many of my best years. Even productive addictions can be bad. You often hear professional sports stars and business people echo these feelings about not prioritising the important things in life: family, friends, etc.

tcbawo 7y ago
Don't be so hard on yourself. Kudos for taking a chance. I know many successful people, but the happiest are those that found something they were passionate about and learned to excel at it, rather than chasing what they though would make them rich/famous. I've also seen many sacrifice relationships and experiences in their pursuit, such that I would never trade places with them.
sammeboat 7y ago
Ask me on my deathbed what I regret the most and I will say: everything (in hindsight).

dazzawazza 7y ago

It's a bit of both mixed in with games companies explicitly using techniques in honed in gambling industry to keep kids attached to their product. I've worked in videogames for 25 years and the industry is "oblivious" to the harm it is causing because it's very profitable. There has been little innovation in games for the last ten years compared to the innovation in the business model used by the industry which has seen rapid change to grab children attention for as long as possible.

sjwright 7y ago
On the contrary, there has been plenty of innovation around how to make games more addictive and profitable.

hrktb 7y ago

> but it's not a particularly productive pastime > picking up an instrument or spent more time on my drawing skills. As a pastime, I am not sure I see the "productive" part of playing an instrument or drawing. For the instrument part in particular, while any piece has an interpretation part, does it warrant a "productive" label, more than paying a game a specific way ? Drawing can have a commercial aspect, but then is it a pastime ? (we'd also then have to take pro gaming into account if we go into these length)

jacquesm 7y ago
Making art is about as productive as it gets. It's also the only thing that we still appreciate many years after the original was created. Playing a game is pure consumption, drawing or making music is pure production.
- LunaSea 7y ago
  I doubt that hearing "Claire de Lune" being played badly on the piano for the 500th time is more productive or appreciated than a huge game of Civilisation or insane run in some other game. Creativity exists in different forms.
  - grenoire 7y ago
    I don't think practicing piano or performing alone is a creative endeavour unless you are either adding to or mutating the piece you are playing, or are using your piano skills to compose new pieces. "Making" art, as another commentor put it, is the productive action, not studying to make art. The distinction is different for visual arts and music.
- hrktb 7y ago
  That would be composing music, which would match building games (or game artifacts for Minecraft or Mario Maker for instance) We get into muddy territories, but playing games (electronic or not) is doing something within rules, that’s not so far from making sounds or pictures with given tools.
- 7y ago

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Twenty years ago games companies didn't employ psychologists and economists to ensure their game currencies and loot boxes were suitably addictive. You were addicted to Civ or old school Defender arcades because it was too much fun (for a while), not because they had a team exploiting every weak point. Somewhere along the line (f2p with premium currencies, maybe monthly subscriptions) it switched to cutting your fix with some heroin to ensure it's addictive enough. To me that's qualitatively different, and in need of regulation.

benj111 7y ago
What is the biological difference though? (genuine question) It's all well and good rationally formulating a difference between fun and addictive, but if our monkey brains can't tell the difference, should we really be treating them differently?
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  I'm no psychologist, so I'm sure someone could express this better. I don't think the addiction to early games, whether Civ or Tempest that we called "addictive" was a real addiction. It was just fun. No more than anyone was addicted to cycling or football as a kid. Loot boxes, with all the tricks of "almost" winning rolls, and currencies that intentionally distance you from actual money so you're not sure how much you're spending, or MMO's with the "Skinner box" grind. Those are pushing much more into real addictions exploiting people who know it's doing them no good. They're using the same addictive techniques as gambling, such as scratch cards that have 2 of 3 jackpot spaces when you scratch. They all cross the line into exploitative and need some level of regulation just like gambling. Particularly when it's pitched at minors. That UK gambling regulation has been liberalised in the last 25 years, and there's been a huge growth of problems stemming from that is no surprise.
- Buttons840 7y ago
  From personal experience, it seems to me that "fun" results in good memories. You smile when looking back on "fun" memories. When you look back on "addictive" behavior, you sense the passage of time and energy (and resources/money) and feel neutral (at best) about the behavior. The hard part is in the moment where you don't especially want to perform the addictive behavior, but it's too uncomfortable to do anything else.

watwut 7y ago

> play Civilization all night long, every single day [...] my programming developed quite a lot during my teens, but I definitely could have toned it down and 'played outside.' This on the whole is extremely unlikely. First, if you developed programming skills, you was not playing civilization all the time. You was playing civilization some and coding some. Second, if you would really literally spent playing all night long and then went to school and then spent all night playing etc, you would be extremely sleep deprived and you would not learned much - not in school and not coding. The distinction matter. The thing that distinguish addiction from playing a lot is consequences on rest of your life - school, work, relationships with family or friends or ability to find mate. I knew people who were in latter category - failing in college, going to work sleep deprived to the point of being drag on team, divorcing. It is different then high schooler wasting time.

kache_ 7y ago
For me it was playing video games all day while writing scripts for those video games to play them better. I learned some real skills from video games. For example, I was leading huge teams size 48 in real time, part of an organization with 300 people at 15 years old.
- livueta 7y ago
  Yeah, no kidding. I did a fair amount of sysadmin and webdev stuff for my guilds, but in retrospect the interpersonal stuff was probably more valuable. Turns out that cajoling a geodistributed collection of high-strung egoists into cooperating over extended periods of time is a skill that's not only useful for games. Who'd have thunk.

mattlondon 7y ago

I was in a kind of similar situation. I perhaps wasn't "addicted" but I certainly messed about on computers a lot. But was it a waste of time? I don't think so. Granted there was a lot of brain-dead time spent in Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization, and other games, but that time triggered a general interest and curiosity in what is happening. That leap from just playing to wondering what is going on was invaluable IMHO, and you wouldn't have got it without some serious screentime. First you start poking around inside the *.cfg files for Doom and DN3D, and the next thing you know it is a couple of years down the line and you're a late-teen sitting up late into the early morning fiddling around with laser-pointers and webcams naively trying to write machine vision algorithms from scratch, or using Wireshark to to try and reverse engineer the server browser in the initial release of Steam, or strapping crappy wireless 9V cameras (1) into water bottle rockets and trying to process the video coming back via also-crappy USB video capture devices (2) (...some personal anecdotes for you there). Now fast forward a few more years and I've got a degree in computer science and a pretty well-paid job as a software engineer that means I don't really need to worry about money, and I still have some good headroom left in my career to grow still without too much effort. Would I have got here if I had stopped messing about on the computer and instead diluted that learning time with trying to play the violin or piano? I doubt it - that spark of curiosity as a teenager started a life-long (I presume) interest and set me on a path for a well-paid and desirable career. I wouldn't change any of that time at all. 1 - You can still buy similar things I was just amazed to see: https://uk.banggood.com/Wireless-Mini-Surveillance-Camera-Monitoring-Full-Kit-p-928266.html https://uk.banggood.com/Wireless-Mini-Surveillance-Camera-Mo... 2 - no-longer available apart from ebay it seems: https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/183280630638 https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/183280630638

non-entity 7y ago
The reason I got into programming was Runescape leaving stack traces on my Desktop circa 2010
bdamm 7y ago
Yes, I can relate! My first real reverse-engineering effort was hex-decoding font files for the Descent series. My first collaborate programming project was writing a cross-section editor for a guy writing an extrusion engine that could be used to create Descent levels. My first attempt at commercial software was a mission packaging program for the game. All that stuff was great cornerstones for the career that came afterwards.

thrower123 7y ago

At least in the 90s, trying to play PC games was a great way to figure out how computers worked and how to troubleshoot them when they went wrong. Things are so much easier now... You don't have to touch an autoexec.bat, or deal with extended memory. The amount of system tweaking you have to do to get decent performance is minimal. And installing a game almost never borks your computer so badly you have to madly try to do an OS restore, trying to preserve everything and make it look like you hadn't broken the family computer...

swiley 7y ago

I think games like civilization and openTTD are addictive but there's something different about it that results in the "addiction" naturally ending. These smartphone games are just so incredibly mindless in ways that those optimization games aren't. While you're not doing anything important you are actually doing things and solving problems.

tomatotomato37 7y ago

I wonder if a career in software engineering is the difference between a functional computer addict and nonfuctional addict. It really gives a new perspective to the concept of developers jamming out in a hackathon for 24+ hours while sleeping under desks and trying to stay in a flow stats as long as possible

friendlybus 7y ago
Can't help but agree. The health effects of computers are not really understood. We've been rushing to harness their power to great effect, but what is the cost of having a computer? I know some people in therapeutic sphere are terrified of technology, saying it replaces people. You only need to dip into some Baudrillard or philosophy in general to see arguments about the impact of computer use, and they basically mirror real life. I don't know how much of that is the deep dark truth, but there needs to be some separation between the harnessing of computing power for political, social & economic progress and living a normal life.
thefounder 7y ago
The main issue with games addiction is that at the end of the day/night/week you are poorer both socially and financially. The financial aspect is quite important and often makes the difference between a "devoted" worker/workaholic and a "junkie".
benj111 7y ago
Is there much difference between doing that and doing an ultra marathon or whatever? I suppose the marathon is 'healthier', but it's the same basic drivers, pushed to a somewhat unhealthy degree.
chongli 7y ago
It’s actually that. I would even go so far as to say “functional addict” is a bit of an oxymoron. People compulsively repeat all kinds of different behaviours. Some of those have a lot of people willing to pay you (programming), others less so (gaming), and some none at all (intravenous drugs).