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> The dangers he is referring to include exposure to harmful content like pornography, bullying from other kids, and perhaps worse of all, becoming addicted to

by norswap 12y ago

> The dangers he is referring to include exposure to harmful content like pornography, bullying from other kids, and perhaps worse of all, becoming addicted to their devices, just like their parents. I threw up a little bit while reading this. Prohibiting rather than engaging in meaningful discussion is a surefire way to cause harm (it's the same thing with alcohol, for instance); bullying is a fact of life, and learning to deal with it is a valuable life lesson. And yes, you can spend too much time on your device. Calling it addiction, with all it entails, is a step I wouldn't make. It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not.

jacquesm 12y ago
> I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. Is it really sillyness? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction
- norswap 12y ago
  You probably can get addicted to video games. You can also get addicted to about anything. The problem is that I've heard this video game addiction thing over and over and over from random people who know nothing about them. I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games. I've however personally heard of the ordeals of many young gamers whose hobby was being prejudiced against because of this silly notion.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Ok it does happen. I have a young friend, dead now, who spent 6 months playing video games and drinking beer. Nothing else, just those two things. Slept on the couch with the controller dangling from his hand. Died of liver failure. What do you call it, if not addiction?
    - meddlepal 12y ago
      Depression? Mental illness? Sorry to hear about your friend though.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Lots of things lead to addictive behavior, sure.
    - 67726e 12y ago
      First off, what was he really addicted to here, the video games or the alcohol? My girlfriends father died this past Spring because he holed himself up in his apartment, drinking himself to death and also died of liver failure. He would just drink and watch TV all day. In your case, I would call the video games incidental to the alcohol addiction just like I would call the TV binging incidental to my girlfriend's father's addiction. I'm sure there is a larger mental-health component to it all, but in the end, video games were probably not to blame here. And sorry to hear about your friend. Surely you can get addicted to video games, though I have a nagging feeling that rate of addiction is lower than any of your classical addictions like alcohol or narcotics. Of course I also recall reading an article about some poor kid in Korea dying after constantly playing video games and not sleeping or the case of the parents who neglected their own infant who later died due to their supposed addiction to video games. So then you have nicely packaged stories of "that one kid" or "those parents" in your head to pull up at a moments notice and the wonderful forces of logical fallacies cause some folks to think it's an epidemic of never-before-seen proportions. The point is that more "video game addiction" is just sensationalist bullshit. My mother surely thought I was addicted to video games in my teenage years. Of course I spent maybe an hour or two playing video games and the rest programming. In fact, even after I got a job as a software engineer right out of highschool and a full-ride scholarship, she was still convinced I was addicted to "those damn games" and I'm sure half of the folks here will one day be thinking kids are addicted to their Google Glasses or whatever technology we wind up with. It's no different than parents of yore thinking Rock n' Roll was corrupting their children. Parents, as a whole, can be some really sensationalist dumbasses.
      - 12y ago
  - iaskwhy 12y ago
    Well, I'm not sure I do suffer from video games addiction but whenever I start playing a game I have a really hard time to stop playing it. I feel like my brain gets extremely excited and so I stop thinking about basic things like eating, drinking or going to the toilet. It's like by playing I am overwriting this basic functionality of my brain. When this happens and I don't control myself, I can play for hours and hours, usually all night long (which is something I would never do in any other situation, I love resting in a bed). It's happened before being able to continuously play for almost 24h without that basic functionality I talked about. There's always a time when I actually get in control again and decide to stop, usually by uninstalling the game right away to avoid doing it again anytime soon. I then get a really big headache/hangover. As such, I avoid doing it but it still happens once every one or two years, it depends on Sid Meier's productivity, if you know what I mean. (Yeah, this November is going to be hard on me.) I'm ok with games with a small duration, casual games with a completion time of up to 5/10 minutes. I play chess or Carcassonne sometimes and when the game ends I'm done and just fine.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games. Is that because video game addiction would remove those peoe from the group of people you come into contact with? I hadn't met anyone with a severe OCD until I started visiting MH hospitals, and then I met a bunch.
    - norswap 12y ago
      Not especially, but I only speak from my own experience, and one should be wary of samples of size one.
  - killabeez23 12y ago
    > I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games Uhhh, what? There's a reason people called EverQuest 'Evercrack'. There was/is an entire website devoted to people who were addicted to WoW (wow-detox, no idea if it's still around) and had noticeable detrimental effects in their life from it. There are most definitely games that encourage addiction, and while the vast majority can handle it responsibly there's a sizeable minority who can't (much like gambling).
steverb 12y ago
I doubt he really meant addiction in the classical sense. I read it more as "Worst of all, becoming one of those assholes who can't put down their device and have a conversation like a normal human being". But I also limit my children's screen time, so I'm biased.
- Jare 12y ago
  These "assholes" we see and are concerned about are, I think, mostly adults who did NOT grow up with such devices. Our kids are taking our screens and gadgets for granted as much as we did TV (or whatever is appropriate for your age). It is a mistake to think that the effect of early exposure is going to be the same as it is for people for whom at some point it has been a fascinating novelty.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    But careful not to conclude - TV was OK for me so these gadgets are OK for kids today. That's Pollyanna thinking. Every new gadget ups the ante on frantic messaging and addictive interaction. There's nobody looking for a sensible limit - they make the gadgets and we buy them, and one day off the cliff we will go like the lemmings.
- thathonkey 12y ago
  Whether that is what he meant or not, there is a very strong case to be made that certain forms of content consumption enabled by computers (mostly the internet but software in general) are addictive in the classical sense (I assume you mean in the medical/DSM sense).
cpwright 12y ago
Gambling addiction seems to be fairly common or recognized. It does not seem that it would be too far of a logical step for the same to happen with a mobile device. You can play on the thing for hours, in fact many games encourage you to play fairly constantly to advance in progress, and you get small but consistent rewards for doing so (which are ever harder to obtain). The analogy doesn't seem that far off to me. There are a certain subset of people who can easily throw themselves at things (games, hobbies, etc.) to the point where it negatively affects the rest of their life. I'm not so much a fan of calling all of them addictions, but I can see how some people feel that way.
fecklessyouth 12y ago
>It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. It's never going to be over, as long as young children have access to technology. HN seems to preach a perverse gospel about this subject: that you should never limit a child's technology access, because not only will nothing bad come out of, but in fact, it will make them more capable. It will turn them into developers and engineers! I'm guessing the reason HN thinks this way is because they themselves got into technology in the first place through such avenues: dicking around as a kid, sometimes with the help of their parents, sometimes contrary to their wishes. If THEY had been restricted, they wouldn't be where they are today. But this reason suffers from selection bias. While people like yourself (unless I'm misreading you. In which case, substitute the stereotypical HN user for yourself) may have used videogames and computer access as a spring board for your career, I'm willing to wager that you are minority among videogame and computer-saavy youth.* You are a bigger majority, however, on HN, and in the tech world in general, so such reasoning becomes canon without being subject to enough criticism. Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here. *I don't have any statistics on hand to support this. But since the videogame industry is as big (and growing) as it is, where are the rising mountains of developers and engineers that supposedly spring from it? Why aren't girls, who spend comparable time with technology, catching the wave as well? My little brother has been addicted to Minecraft for the past 2 years. I keep waiting for him to "discover" something else as a result of it. To get into programming, or design, or architecture, or something more constructive. Hell, even building things in Minecraft would be more productive than what he does now: go on PvP servers and throw snowballs at people--for 12 hours a day, if my parents let him. He's tried programming lessons a few times, but he usually gives up, because learning a new skill is harder than playing (even difficult) games. He lacks the trait of perseverance. And he's not going to learn it by playing videogames.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- graeme 12y ago
  >Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here. I was a gamer, and didn't become a technologist. I had no idea what a computer program was! (If that sounds silly, consider all the things you see every day without understanding) Mostly, my gaming experience was a write-off. It stunted my social development, blocked me from doing more interesting activities, and contributed very little to my well-being. I may have learned some strategic thinking from games like Starcraft, which I think has carried over to entrepreneurship. But oh, how I wish I could get that time back. Or, I wish someone had shown me a terminal and what it could do. One glimpse would have been enough.
graeme 12y ago
>It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. What makes you say computers are not addictive? Or video games? If we define addiction as being able to stop despite wanting to, then I've been addicted to both. I went cold turkey on video games. The computer I need for business, research and connecting to people so I've had to devise ways to minimize it's compulsive powers while still getting the upside of using them. I run an internet business. I am not a luddite. Computers are wonderfully useful machines, and I'm glad we have them. But just because something is good doesn't mean it's also bad. You can't dismiss the experience of millions with a trite statement. I once wrote an article on going without internet for a month on my personal blog, and it's by far the most popular. It even hit the top of Hacker News. From talking with friends, some seem immune to this distraction. Others clearly suffer from it. Perhaps you are one of the fortunate ones who can use computers and the internet without compulsion. That doesn't mean you can blithely ignore the testimony of others. If computers aren't compulsive, then why was this XKCD popular: http://xkcd.com/1411/ http://xkcd.com/1411/ And why did Paul Graham write these essays? http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
- DanBC 12y ago
  > If we define addiction as [not] being able to stop despite wanting to, That's not a poor definition for addiction. That's a definition of a habit. Addiction tends to include "drug seeking behaviour"; and tolerance; and perhaps withdrawal too.
  - lukifer 12y ago
    In practice, an addiction is merely a habit that is not wanted, whether by the self or others. We acknowledge that gambling can be an addiction, yet an addiction to a game or to internet browsing is taken much less seriously.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      I agree that people can be addicted to games. I say this even if we use the tighter more correct definition of addiction.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
Agreed. And calling pornographic content "harmful" without any further characterization clearly shows that the author has some deeply rooted, unjustified bias.

by norswap 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago

> I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. Is it really sillyness? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction

norswap 12y ago
You probably can get addicted to video games. You can also get addicted to about anything. The problem is that I've heard this video game addiction thing over and over and over from random people who know nothing about them. I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games. I've however personally heard of the ordeals of many young gamers whose hobby was being prejudiced against because of this silly notion.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Ok it does happen. I have a young friend, dead now, who spent 6 months playing video games and drinking beer. Nothing else, just those two things. Slept on the couch with the controller dangling from his hand. Died of liver failure. What do you call it, if not addiction?
  - meddlepal 12y ago
    Depression? Mental illness? Sorry to hear about your friend though.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Lots of things lead to addictive behavior, sure.
  - 67726e 12y ago
    First off, what was he really addicted to here, the video games or the alcohol? My girlfriends father died this past Spring because he holed himself up in his apartment, drinking himself to death and also died of liver failure. He would just drink and watch TV all day. In your case, I would call the video games incidental to the alcohol addiction just like I would call the TV binging incidental to my girlfriend's father's addiction. I'm sure there is a larger mental-health component to it all, but in the end, video games were probably not to blame here. And sorry to hear about your friend. Surely you can get addicted to video games, though I have a nagging feeling that rate of addiction is lower than any of your classical addictions like alcohol or narcotics. Of course I also recall reading an article about some poor kid in Korea dying after constantly playing video games and not sleeping or the case of the parents who neglected their own infant who later died due to their supposed addiction to video games. So then you have nicely packaged stories of "that one kid" or "those parents" in your head to pull up at a moments notice and the wonderful forces of logical fallacies cause some folks to think it's an epidemic of never-before-seen proportions. The point is that more "video game addiction" is just sensationalist bullshit. My mother surely thought I was addicted to video games in my teenage years. Of course I spent maybe an hour or two playing video games and the rest programming. In fact, even after I got a job as a software engineer right out of highschool and a full-ride scholarship, she was still convinced I was addicted to "those damn games" and I'm sure half of the folks here will one day be thinking kids are addicted to their Google Glasses or whatever technology we wind up with. It's no different than parents of yore thinking Rock n' Roll was corrupting their children. Parents, as a whole, can be some really sensationalist dumbasses.
    - 12y ago
- iaskwhy 12y ago
  Well, I'm not sure I do suffer from video games addiction but whenever I start playing a game I have a really hard time to stop playing it. I feel like my brain gets extremely excited and so I stop thinking about basic things like eating, drinking or going to the toilet. It's like by playing I am overwriting this basic functionality of my brain. When this happens and I don't control myself, I can play for hours and hours, usually all night long (which is something I would never do in any other situation, I love resting in a bed). It's happened before being able to continuously play for almost 24h without that basic functionality I talked about. There's always a time when I actually get in control again and decide to stop, usually by uninstalling the game right away to avoid doing it again anytime soon. I then get a really big headache/hangover. As such, I avoid doing it but it still happens once every one or two years, it depends on Sid Meier's productivity, if you know what I mean. (Yeah, this November is going to be hard on me.) I'm ok with games with a small duration, casual games with a completion time of up to 5/10 minutes. I play chess or Carcassonne sometimes and when the game ends I'm done and just fine.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games. Is that because video game addiction would remove those peoe from the group of people you come into contact with? I hadn't met anyone with a severe OCD until I started visiting MH hospitals, and then I met a bunch.
  - norswap 12y ago
    Not especially, but I only speak from my own experience, and one should be wary of samples of size one.
- killabeez23 12y ago
  > I've never met or heard of anyone (except in sensationalist and hence untrustworthy news reports) who was addicted to video games Uhhh, what? There's a reason people called EverQuest 'Evercrack'. There was/is an entire website devoted to people who were addicted to WoW (wow-detox, no idea if it's still around) and had noticeable detrimental effects in their life from it. There are most definitely games that encourage addiction, and while the vast majority can handle it responsibly there's a sizeable minority who can't (much like gambling).

steverb 12y ago

I doubt he really meant addiction in the classical sense. I read it more as "Worst of all, becoming one of those assholes who can't put down their device and have a conversation like a normal human being". But I also limit my children's screen time, so I'm biased.

Jare 12y ago
These "assholes" we see and are concerned about are, I think, mostly adults who did NOT grow up with such devices. Our kids are taking our screens and gadgets for granted as much as we did TV (or whatever is appropriate for your age). It is a mistake to think that the effect of early exposure is going to be the same as it is for people for whom at some point it has been a fascinating novelty.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  But careful not to conclude - TV was OK for me so these gadgets are OK for kids today. That's Pollyanna thinking. Every new gadget ups the ante on frantic messaging and addictive interaction. There's nobody looking for a sensible limit - they make the gadgets and we buy them, and one day off the cliff we will go like the lemmings.
thathonkey 12y ago
Whether that is what he meant or not, there is a very strong case to be made that certain forms of content consumption enabled by computers (mostly the internet but software in general) are addictive in the classical sense (I assume you mean in the medical/DSM sense).

cpwright 12y ago

Gambling addiction seems to be fairly common or recognized. It does not seem that it would be too far of a logical step for the same to happen with a mobile device. You can play on the thing for hours, in fact many games encourage you to play fairly constantly to advance in progress, and you get small but consistent rewards for doing so (which are ever harder to obtain). The analogy doesn't seem that far off to me. There are a certain subset of people who can easily throw themselves at things (games, hobbies, etc.) to the point where it negatively affects the rest of their life. I'm not so much a fan of calling all of them addictions, but I can see how some people feel that way.

fecklessyouth 12y ago

>It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. It's never going to be over, as long as young children have access to technology. HN seems to preach a perverse gospel about this subject: that you should never limit a child's technology access, because not only will nothing bad come out of, but in fact, it will make them more capable. It will turn them into developers and engineers! I'm guessing the reason HN thinks this way is because they themselves got into technology in the first place through such avenues: dicking around as a kid, sometimes with the help of their parents, sometimes contrary to their wishes. If THEY had been restricted, they wouldn't be where they are today. But this reason suffers from selection bias. While people like yourself (unless I'm misreading you. In which case, substitute the stereotypical HN user for yourself) may have used videogames and computer access as a spring board for your career, I'm willing to wager that you are minority among videogame and computer-saavy youth.* You are a bigger majority, however, on HN, and in the tech world in general, so such reasoning becomes canon without being subject to enough criticism. Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here. *I don't have any statistics on hand to support this. But since the videogame industry is as big (and growing) as it is, where are the rising mountains of developers and engineers that supposedly spring from it? Why aren't girls, who spend comparable time with technology, catching the wave as well? My little brother has been addicted to Minecraft for the past 2 years. I keep waiting for him to "discover" something else as a result of it. To get into programming, or design, or architecture, or something more constructive. Hell, even building things in Minecraft would be more productive than what he does now: go on PvP servers and throw snowballs at people--for 12 hours a day, if my parents let him. He's tried programming lessons a few times, but he usually gives up, because learning a new skill is harder than playing (even difficult) games. He lacks the trait of perseverance. And he's not going to learn it by playing videogames.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
graeme 12y ago
>Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here. I was a gamer, and didn't become a technologist. I had no idea what a computer program was! (If that sounds silly, consider all the things you see every day without understanding) Mostly, my gaming experience was a write-off. It stunted my social development, blocked me from doing more interesting activities, and contributed very little to my well-being. I may have learned some strategic thinking from games like Starcraft, which I think has carried over to entrepreneurship. But oh, how I wish I could get that time back. Or, I wish someone had shown me a terminal and what it could do. One glimpse would have been enough.

graeme 12y ago

>It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not. What makes you say computers are not addictive? Or video games? If we define addiction as being able to stop despite wanting to, then I've been addicted to both. I went cold turkey on video games. The computer I need for business, research and connecting to people so I've had to devise ways to minimize it's compulsive powers while still getting the upside of using them. I run an internet business. I am not a luddite. Computers are wonderfully useful machines, and I'm glad we have them. But just because something is good doesn't mean it's also bad. You can't dismiss the experience of millions with a trite statement. I once wrote an article on going without internet for a month on my personal blog, and it's by far the most popular. It even hit the top of Hacker News. From talking with friends, some seem immune to this distraction. Others clearly suffer from it. Perhaps you are one of the fortunate ones who can use computers and the internet without compulsion. That doesn't mean you can blithely ignore the testimony of others. If computers aren't compulsive, then why was this XKCD popular: http://xkcd.com/1411/ http://xkcd.com/1411/ And why did Paul Graham write these essays? http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

DanBC 12y ago
> If we define addiction as [not] being able to stop despite wanting to, That's not a poor definition for addiction. That's a definition of a habit. Addiction tends to include "drug seeking behaviour"; and tolerance; and perhaps withdrawal too.
- lukifer 12y ago
  In practice, an addiction is merely a habit that is not wanted, whether by the self or others. We acknowledge that gambling can be an addiction, yet an addiction to a game or to internet browsing is taken much less seriously.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    I agree that people can be addicted to games. I say this even if we use the tighter more correct definition of addiction.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

Agreed. And calling pornographic content "harmful" without any further characterization clearly shows that the author has some deeply rooted, unjustified bias.