10 ms·

Inside the Tragic, Obsessive World of Video Game Addicts

112 points by Thevet 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rl3 12y ago
One key distinction between video game addiction and many other forms of classic addiction is that it's incredibly cheap by comparison. A game purchased for $5 may net you hundreds of hours of gameplay. By contrast, that same $5 doesn't go nearly as far when spent on say, alcohol. It's also worth noting that video game addiction doesn't necessarily result in any sort of addictive exclusivity. I've seen plenty of video game addicts who are also alcoholics.
- KeytarHero 12y ago
  Incredibly cheap in terms of financial cost, but not in terms of opportunity cost of the time you lose. Admittedly I haven't read the article because Vice is blocked at work, but I imagine video game addiction is a lot different from other addictions since it has to do with something you do rather than a state you're in (not to say it's necessarily worse - just different). Serious addicts can play video games for several days straight, whereas I don't think doing drugs for several days straight (at least without doing anything else) is common among even the most serious addicts (though admittedly I'm not an expert in this). I think it would be very difficult to be a "high functioning" video game addict.
  - devindotcom 12y ago
    I think you'd be surprised on both counts. Chasing a dopamine hit in a game is seeking a "state" as much as a thing to do — after all, you do things because of the way they make you feel, right? And multi-day drug and/or alcohol binges are actually very common. But certainly you're right that the loss of time/opportunity is far from cheap. Although with someone who has the means to be addicted to something like a game - implying a computer, power, a place to stay - one might speculate that they have more to lose, materially speaking.
  - rl3 12y ago
    >I think it would be very difficult to be a "high functioning" video game addict. There's plenty of them, just like there are high-functioning alcoholics. Suppose you could define the degree of addiction as the amount of interference the addictive habit inflicts upon a person's life. By that logic, a busy, high-functioning person who plays 20 hours a week may in fact have a more damaging addiction than the person with tons of free time on their hands playing 80 hours a week. Of course, if the latter person has all that free time on their hands because addiction interfered with their life at a much earlier stage, then that's worth considering. I guarantee you there's a ton of high-functioning video game addicts though, probably even right here on HN. Founder depression in particular can play right into such things.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > whereas I don't think doing drugs for several days straight (at least without doing anything else) is common among even the most serious addicts Let's use alcohol as an example. For someone who has been drinking heavily for a while coming off alcohol can be dangerous, even fatal. This means that people have to permanently drink, or risk death. To qualify for a medically supervised in-patient detox in England you need to drink 40 units per day. That's one litre of spirits at 40% ABV. (34 US fluid ounces of 80 proof liquor). That's 9 cans of Special Brew per day. That level of drinking is not rare. But other drugs are similar. People addicted to opiates sometimes resort to acquisitive crime or prostitution. That suggests that they need, not just want, the money for drugs and that drug use is pretty much continuous.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Tragic. I played a lot of World of Warcraft when it came out, had the classic relationship challenges (wife didn't play but the kids did) and finally stopped playing seriously when I realized I had wasted a weekend working on materials for imaginary armor rather than building an actual robot or learning something new. Fortunately, Blizzard completely ruined the game with the Mists of Pandera expansion and I've never played since. But looking back at why I played so much, is touched on in the article. It simulates being very productive (which in a meta sense you are), and for me that represents "goodness" in my self image. It was only after I called out the lie I was telling myself about "getting stuff done" did I really lose the compulsion to go play for hours. I still enjoyed the social aspects, and the strategies for gaming the economy or finding a new way to solo a boss fight, but I no longer equated it with being productive. So for the same reason I don't sit in a movie theater for 8 hours straight, I stopped playing for those long stretches. And when I did have something I could get done, I chose not to play WoW.
- throwawaytime 12y ago
  I played a lot of World of Warcraft when it came out, had the classic relationship challenges (wife didn't play but the kids did) and finally stopped playing seriously when I realized I had wasted a weekend working on materials for imaginary armor rather than building an actual robot or learning something new. One whole weekend! :) You don't want to know how many weekends of mine that netflix or videogames have claimed. I think I turned out alright though. For me, it's mainly about whether I feel motivated. If I do, it's easy to avoid that other stuff. If not, then there's an endless stretch of time with nothing to do and no money to pursue hobbies. That stuff is a natural filler for the void of endless boredom. About the kids: I wanted to ask you, how did the kids handle it when you left? I guess you didn't get too into it, so maybe they didn't feel very strongly one way or the other about whether you played. But I think I'm going to try to cultivate a relationship with my kids over videogames, whether it's playing Minecraft with them or whatever MMO they want to play. It seems like hiking through the woods together, but virtual woods. But I'd imagine it's going to go like: They might get too into it at the expense of schoolwork, so I'll have to put my foot down and say no more, which will make them quite upset. And sure, that's the job of a parent. I'm their parent, not just their friend. But I can't help remember how misplaced my father's rules were, so I don't want to become like that. Yet I remember how much of a pushover my friend's dad was, which my friend took full advantage of; again, don't want to be like that. So I wonder how to strike a proper balance. It'd be great to hear from you and anyone else with children what your rules are regarding videogames. Is there an instruction manual that comes with each child? No? Hmmm....
Jtsummers 12y ago
I have friends that keep insisting I get back into gaming and frequently question my (apparent) lack of interest in current games. This sums up my reason for not going back to video games: But just as Patricia rematerialized, her AA recovery partner and husband of 43 years contracted a fatal illness. Patricia took care of him until the end. "I regret so much," she said. "I wasted all our time together. We could have been doing all kinds of things, but I was just gaming." I wasted almost a decade of my life, and who knows how many years off the end by the terrible condition I let my body fall into. I failed at graduate school, and nearly failed as an employee. I had no social life outside 3 or 4 friends at any time during that decade. I'm no longer in the head space where games are dangerous to me, but I can safely say that I'm enjoying playing sports, going outside, dating, hanging out with friends and the rest of the things I gave up for those years much more than playing the latest FPS or strategy game of the month.
- shadowwolf007 12y ago
  I don't think [many/most] gamers consider gaming to be "a real addiction" - especially FPS games. I definitely have friends that I don't want to play games, I don't talk to them about games, and when the subject of games comes up I actively try to move it elsewhere because when they gamed that's literally all they did. As someone who enjoys going out, it's so weird to ask someone "Hey, wanna go do XYZ" and have them be like "nah dude, let's just hit up ABC game like usual - I played all weekend to get us set up for tonight". People don't realize that it's like you wouldn't invite your now-sober alcoholic friend to the bar unless you knew they were absolutely comfortable with it. I'm glad you got outside of it. Games are awesome and a lot of fun, but there's a lot of other really awesome stuff out there too.
  - kylebrown 12y ago
    Will augmented reality games (eg. Ingress) be more healthy activities than flat screen stay inside games?
    - shadowwolf007 12y ago
angersock 12y ago
During one of the darkest periods of the last few years, I was working on a failing startup. All the front-end work was done and "good enough", and I was waiting on my cofounder to finish up a few last infrastructure tweaks so we could launch. I had less than a couple hundred in my bank accounts, was barely making rent, and was basically in a holding pattern. So, I started playing Fallout: New Vegas. I clocked like 120-140 hours in two weeks. I beat the game, I beat the expansions. I had a blast. I think the problem with the video games is that they often offer a certain kind of refuge. You're a hero, and more importantly, you make tangible progress. Playing CS or Quake or UT or Payday, you are playing a round, and everything lives and dies in that 12-20 minutes of your life. Everything is simple: strafe left, fire, reload, pickup, die, respawn. It's a beautiful three-dimensional puzzle in planning space, and at least for me is nearly a meditative state. I'm a big guy, and when I played Mirror's Edge, I quite literally cried because I was getting a chance to experience a freedom of movement only my skinny, small friends who practiced parkour could accomplish. I was free. Playing RPGs is similarly relieving: I'm the Courier, I'm some guy left for dead in a pit in the ground, and I've got to piece together how I got there and how to bring justice to the person that put me there. I've got a neat little checklist of things to accomplish, fairly straightforward ways to check off those things, and a continual sense of "oh, okay, if I do this, then this happens, and then this." At a time in my life where things were most uncertain and the way most unclear, I could fire up New Vegas and see a logical progression of actions and accomplishments. What do we get in the real world? Well, it's not the people--it seems like pretty much everyone exists mainly in a state of consumption, alternating between work and home and social media or texting. It's not heroics--the only wars being fought are unjust and unending police actions against the third world or our own citizens, and even as experienced developers we, searching for ever-more professionalism, realize that a team is not made of a hero and ensemble cast but instead a group of cooperative individuals with humility. It's not even a clear causal universe: I write several KLOCS of code and deliver features, my sales don't increase. My friend doesn't take out ads, his sales increase. My cat plays outside, it gets hit by a car and dies behind a radiator waiting for me to come home. My other friend hangs outside in a parking lot, and a wild kitten appears. There's no sense to it, only random chance. And so, does it really surprise anyone that we'd prefer our virtual worlds to this situation?
- 12y ago
sighsigh_3 12y ago
There are only a handful of places where you can thoroughly crush a human competitor and be celebrated for it: Wall Street, court rooms, MMA, and video games. And since the former three require a significant amount of money to engage in... Additionally, in cultures where video games dominate, testosterone is either entirely illegal or extremely steered into market positions. (Production countries steer testosterone into conquest and expansion, consumption countries steer testosterone towards emasculation and shrewdness)
sliverstorm 12y ago
Tangential thought- Why does this seem to be tied so closely to online games? At least superficially it seems like it was never a problem anywhere close to this magnitude in the old days of single-player, and the addiction stories are always WoW, Starcraft, Warcraft, CounterStrike, Call of Duty, etc.
- liquidise 12y ago
  I attribute it to the social aspects. For all the introverted stereotypes assigned to gamers, many find comfort and enjoyment in the communities of online games. This, combined with the direct and quantifiable competition, allows for near endless gameplay. As long as others are playing, there is a reason to continue.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    More importantly is the sense of community and importance. I don't think people understand the responsibilities of a Guild Leader in your typical MMORPG. When you're a guild leader, dozens, hundreds... even thousands of people look up to you for guidance. Not virtual people, I mean real people. And the demands of a guild often demand dozens of hours of game-time. Either laying alliances with other guild leaders, setting up training schedules for the newbies, connecting newbies to veteran players who can show them the ropes. Etc. etc. For competitive games, like Starcraft, League of Legends, or CounterStrike... the "guild" is not part of the game but instead part of the online community. They are called "Clans" in these games. But the concept is simple, you're in charge of a team, usually dozens of people. You are expected to make practice, 8pm on Saturdays. You are expected to train certain maps, and make progress with skill. For WoW, you are expected to be ready an hour before the Raid. You are expected to play your role (tanking, healing, DPS, whatever) for the next 2 hours in the Raid, and you have at least 5 players at any time that are dependent on your success. People get "addicted" to the social connections, expectations, and in-game status. When you're a guild-leader in charge of a 10,000 person guild (_real_ people), it is a bit depressing to return back to the real world where you're a low-level junkie. Even at a low level, you're always happy for being able to contribute to your Guild or Clan, especially when your peers appreciate your efforts.
pointernil 12y ago
After having read all the "positive" stuff about gaming in "Reality Is Broken" by Jane McGonigal I remember thinking: To some children/adolescents games are the perfect (psychological) parents: providing all the endless, almost limitless attention and appreciation, perfectly dosed challenge and rewards, a sense of accomplishment and unconditional ... fun. I think this could be unique gateways for games to tip some effected ppl. into addiction, gateways not used by other potentially addictive stuff.
halfcat 12y ago
Minecraft is the only game that led me to a major life change. When I look around the real world, I realized it's the same thing, only more advanced. Once I made that realization, mining and crafting virtual resources became a lot less interesting, and mining and crafting something real became very intriguing and motivating. Then for a nice mind-f left turn, one day I wondered, what if we are living in a computer simulation?
yarrel 12y ago
Spending all day on social media and writing for clickbait sites about how evil games and gamers are is a particularly tragic addiction.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Obligatory link to an essay I wrote five years ago covering the larger picture, what drives this problem and some way forward: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is... It's freaking sad, and it's just getting worse. 1992 or so. I'm a computer guy, gamer (arcade and old Atari) and we've got this cool new thing called a Nintendo for my two boys, 6 and 4. Being a good dad, I sit down next to them and "help" them get started playing a game. We went through Super Mario, then started on Zelda. Wow! This was a lot better than those arcade games where you only got 3 or 4 minutes and had to pay. Here you could play, well, you could play forever. And then it hit me. You could play forever. That was the whole gimmick. I stood up and left the room. Never played another console game again, unless it was something very brief and involved having people over. During that time, I watched every other member of my family get involved in games that took literally hundreds of hours of their time. I'm still watching my second-youngest son struggle with online games and college work. It's depressing as hell. Today as I type this, I realize that I've spent 3 or 4 hours fucking around online that I should have been doing something useful. That's just Facebook, Twitter, G+, and so forth. This is not a coincidence. Every piece of tech I pick up is trying as hard as it can to be "sticky" Same shit, different platform. I'm still the big hunk of dumb meat I used to be. Computerized gaming just keeps getting better. The trajectory is not good.
MisterWalter 12y ago
As a game maker, this stuff terrifies me. I think that there are a lot of devs out there who string together compulsive elements in their games without realizing just how potent they can be.
- soup10 12y ago
  There are just as many who intentionally make the game as addictive as possible. It was bad enough before F2P, now it's getting out of hand.
pnathan 12y ago
I basically left off playing video games when I realized I could get the same high, for nearly the same level of social interaction, by writing code instead. And that would help me in many more ways than killing the top level boss in WoW. My "immersive alternate reality" approach is to use novels, which have a well-defined end.
- FLUX-YOU 12y ago
  I thought that would be a good replacement for WoW/EVE, but it turns out nothing kills that flame faster than an 8to5 job. Now I know how I'd feel as a goldfarmer.
  - pnathan 12y ago
    Yeah, some people find jobs to drain their coding desire. Pretty individual, I'm sure. For me, I have to hack at home to keep my enthusiasm for software.
beams_of_light 12y ago
These are failures to parent. At the end of the article, Dad laments his kid being the same after Wilderness Camp (which should have fixed everything!!!). What his kid really needs is some involvement.
- thret 12y ago
  Brett's father had retrofit a metal lock on his Celeron computer to prevent his son from gaming. (age 12) he was in the tenth grade .. he stopped bathing or brushing his teeth regularly. Basically these parents have 100k to shell out on rehab but they can't trust their 12 year old to be obedient, and they completely neglect his basic hygiene. This is parenting bordering on abuse.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
On the other hand, people who are that crazily obsessive about playing a popular sport are usually lauded by society, rather than being kidnapped and sent to rehab.
chipsy 12y ago
When I find myself getting addicted to a game now, I look for a way to cheat and rapidly progress to the end. The illusion dispelled, I only have to waste one hour of my life. Bonus: reverse engineering skills. Edit: But also, I never bother with MMOs because they're tedious to begin with. It's multiplayer FPS games that are the real trouble spot.
thret 12y ago
For the masses who spend the majority of their time watching sports, movies, tv, thinking about celebrities... How is gaming wasting their lives? What value do these other things have that gaming does not? I submit that hedonism is a purpose unto itself, that all recreational activities hold equal value to our species (~none), differing value to the individual, and that people should simply do whatever they enjoy, right now. Working towards a potentially better future that may never happen is not necessarily the right thing.
- tsomctl 12y ago
  It's not black and white. Many hobbies, which might appear useless for society in general, at least provide personal enrichment. Someone that spends their time programming video games is not helping feed people, but it is helping them become a better programmer. Also, it's well established that humans need rest and recreation to be productive workers.

112 points by Thevet 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rl3 12y ago

One key distinction between video game addiction and many other forms of classic addiction is that it's incredibly cheap by comparison. A game purchased for $5 may net you hundreds of hours of gameplay. By contrast, that same $5 doesn't go nearly as far when spent on say, alcohol. It's also worth noting that video game addiction doesn't necessarily result in any sort of addictive exclusivity. I've seen plenty of video game addicts who are also alcoholics.

KeytarHero 12y ago
Incredibly cheap in terms of financial cost, but not in terms of opportunity cost of the time you lose. Admittedly I haven't read the article because Vice is blocked at work, but I imagine video game addiction is a lot different from other addictions since it has to do with something you do rather than a state you're in (not to say it's necessarily worse - just different). Serious addicts can play video games for several days straight, whereas I don't think doing drugs for several days straight (at least without doing anything else) is common among even the most serious addicts (though admittedly I'm not an expert in this). I think it would be very difficult to be a "high functioning" video game addict.
- devindotcom 12y ago
  I think you'd be surprised on both counts. Chasing a dopamine hit in a game is seeking a "state" as much as a thing to do — after all, you do things because of the way they make you feel, right? And multi-day drug and/or alcohol binges are actually very common. But certainly you're right that the loss of time/opportunity is far from cheap. Although with someone who has the means to be addicted to something like a game - implying a computer, power, a place to stay - one might speculate that they have more to lose, materially speaking.
- rl3 12y ago
  >I think it would be very difficult to be a "high functioning" video game addict. There's plenty of them, just like there are high-functioning alcoholics. Suppose you could define the degree of addiction as the amount of interference the addictive habit inflicts upon a person's life. By that logic, a busy, high-functioning person who plays 20 hours a week may in fact have a more damaging addiction than the person with tons of free time on their hands playing 80 hours a week. Of course, if the latter person has all that free time on their hands because addiction interfered with their life at a much earlier stage, then that's worth considering. I guarantee you there's a ton of high-functioning video game addicts though, probably even right here on HN. Founder depression in particular can play right into such things.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > whereas I don't think doing drugs for several days straight (at least without doing anything else) is common among even the most serious addicts Let's use alcohol as an example. For someone who has been drinking heavily for a while coming off alcohol can be dangerous, even fatal. This means that people have to permanently drink, or risk death. To qualify for a medically supervised in-patient detox in England you need to drink 40 units per day. That's one litre of spirits at 40% ABV. (34 US fluid ounces of 80 proof liquor). That's 9 cans of Special Brew per day. That level of drinking is not rare. But other drugs are similar. People addicted to opiates sometimes resort to acquisitive crime or prostitution. That suggests that they need, not just want, the money for drugs and that drug use is pretty much continuous.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Tragic. I played a lot of World of Warcraft when it came out, had the classic relationship challenges (wife didn't play but the kids did) and finally stopped playing seriously when I realized I had wasted a weekend working on materials for imaginary armor rather than building an actual robot or learning something new. Fortunately, Blizzard completely ruined the game with the Mists of Pandera expansion and I've never played since. But looking back at why I played so much, is touched on in the article. It simulates being very productive (which in a meta sense you are), and for me that represents "goodness" in my self image. It was only after I called out the lie I was telling myself about "getting stuff done" did I really lose the compulsion to go play for hours. I still enjoyed the social aspects, and the strategies for gaming the economy or finding a new way to solo a boss fight, but I no longer equated it with being productive. So for the same reason I don't sit in a movie theater for 8 hours straight, I stopped playing for those long stretches. And when I did have something I could get done, I chose not to play WoW.

throwawaytime 12y ago
I played a lot of World of Warcraft when it came out, had the classic relationship challenges (wife didn't play but the kids did) and finally stopped playing seriously when I realized I had wasted a weekend working on materials for imaginary armor rather than building an actual robot or learning something new. One whole weekend! :) You don't want to know how many weekends of mine that netflix or videogames have claimed. I think I turned out alright though. For me, it's mainly about whether I feel motivated. If I do, it's easy to avoid that other stuff. If not, then there's an endless stretch of time with nothing to do and no money to pursue hobbies. That stuff is a natural filler for the void of endless boredom. About the kids: I wanted to ask you, how did the kids handle it when you left? I guess you didn't get too into it, so maybe they didn't feel very strongly one way or the other about whether you played. But I think I'm going to try to cultivate a relationship with my kids over videogames, whether it's playing Minecraft with them or whatever MMO they want to play. It seems like hiking through the woods together, but virtual woods. But I'd imagine it's going to go like: They might get too into it at the expense of schoolwork, so I'll have to put my foot down and say no more, which will make them quite upset. And sure, that's the job of a parent. I'm their parent, not just their friend. But I can't help remember how misplaced my father's rules were, so I don't want to become like that. Yet I remember how much of a pushover my friend's dad was, which my friend took full advantage of; again, don't want to be like that. So I wonder how to strike a proper balance. It'd be great to hear from you and anyone else with children what your rules are regarding videogames. Is there an instruction manual that comes with each child? No? Hmmm....

Jtsummers 12y ago

I have friends that keep insisting I get back into gaming and frequently question my (apparent) lack of interest in current games. This sums up my reason for not going back to video games: But just as Patricia rematerialized, her AA recovery partner and husband of 43 years contracted a fatal illness. Patricia took care of him until the end. "I regret so much," she said. "I wasted all our time together. We could have been doing all kinds of things, but I was just gaming." I wasted almost a decade of my life, and who knows how many years off the end by the terrible condition I let my body fall into. I failed at graduate school, and nearly failed as an employee. I had no social life outside 3 or 4 friends at any time during that decade. I'm no longer in the head space where games are dangerous to me, but I can safely say that I'm enjoying playing sports, going outside, dating, hanging out with friends and the rest of the things I gave up for those years much more than playing the latest FPS or strategy game of the month.

shadowwolf007 12y ago
I don't think [many/most] gamers consider gaming to be "a real addiction" - especially FPS games. I definitely have friends that I don't want to play games, I don't talk to them about games, and when the subject of games comes up I actively try to move it elsewhere because when they gamed that's literally all they did. As someone who enjoys going out, it's so weird to ask someone "Hey, wanna go do XYZ" and have them be like "nah dude, let's just hit up ABC game like usual - I played all weekend to get us set up for tonight". People don't realize that it's like you wouldn't invite your now-sober alcoholic friend to the bar unless you knew they were absolutely comfortable with it. I'm glad you got outside of it. Games are awesome and a lot of fun, but there's a lot of other really awesome stuff out there too.
- kylebrown 12y ago
  Will augmented reality games (eg. Ingress) be more healthy activities than flat screen stay inside games?
  - shadowwolf007 12y ago

angersock 12y ago

During one of the darkest periods of the last few years, I was working on a failing startup. All the front-end work was done and "good enough", and I was waiting on my cofounder to finish up a few last infrastructure tweaks so we could launch. I had less than a couple hundred in my bank accounts, was barely making rent, and was basically in a holding pattern. So, I started playing Fallout: New Vegas. I clocked like 120-140 hours in two weeks. I beat the game, I beat the expansions. I had a blast. I think the problem with the video games is that they often offer a certain kind of refuge. You're a hero, and more importantly, you make tangible progress. Playing CS or Quake or UT or Payday, you are playing a round, and everything lives and dies in that 12-20 minutes of your life. Everything is simple: strafe left, fire, reload, pickup, die, respawn. It's a beautiful three-dimensional puzzle in planning space, and at least for me is nearly a meditative state. I'm a big guy, and when I played Mirror's Edge, I quite literally cried because I was getting a chance to experience a freedom of movement only my skinny, small friends who practiced parkour could accomplish. I was free. Playing RPGs is similarly relieving: I'm the Courier, I'm some guy left for dead in a pit in the ground, and I've got to piece together how I got there and how to bring justice to the person that put me there. I've got a neat little checklist of things to accomplish, fairly straightforward ways to check off those things, and a continual sense of "oh, okay, if I do this, then this happens, and then this." At a time in my life where things were most uncertain and the way most unclear, I could fire up New Vegas and see a logical progression of actions and accomplishments. What do we get in the real world? Well, it's not the people--it seems like pretty much everyone exists mainly in a state of consumption, alternating between work and home and social media or texting. It's not heroics--the only wars being fought are unjust and unending police actions against the third world or our own citizens, and even as experienced developers we, searching for ever-more professionalism, realize that a team is not made of a hero and ensemble cast but instead a group of cooperative individuals with humility. It's not even a clear causal universe: I write several KLOCS of code and deliver features, my sales don't increase. My friend doesn't take out ads, his sales increase. My cat plays outside, it gets hit by a car and dies behind a radiator waiting for me to come home. My other friend hangs outside in a parking lot, and a wild kitten appears. There's no sense to it, only random chance. And so, does it really surprise anyone that we'd prefer our virtual worlds to this situation?

12y ago

sighsigh_3 12y ago

There are only a handful of places where you can thoroughly crush a human competitor and be celebrated for it: Wall Street, court rooms, MMA, and video games. And since the former three require a significant amount of money to engage in... Additionally, in cultures where video games dominate, testosterone is either entirely illegal or extremely steered into market positions. (Production countries steer testosterone into conquest and expansion, consumption countries steer testosterone towards emasculation and shrewdness)

sliverstorm 12y ago

Tangential thought- Why does this seem to be tied so closely to online games? At least superficially it seems like it was never a problem anywhere close to this magnitude in the old days of single-player, and the addiction stories are always WoW, Starcraft, Warcraft, CounterStrike, Call of Duty, etc.

liquidise 12y ago
I attribute it to the social aspects. For all the introverted stereotypes assigned to gamers, many find comfort and enjoyment in the communities of online games. This, combined with the direct and quantifiable competition, allows for near endless gameplay. As long as others are playing, there is a reason to continue.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  More importantly is the sense of community and importance. I don't think people understand the responsibilities of a Guild Leader in your typical MMORPG. When you're a guild leader, dozens, hundreds... even thousands of people look up to you for guidance. Not virtual people, I mean real people. And the demands of a guild often demand dozens of hours of game-time. Either laying alliances with other guild leaders, setting up training schedules for the newbies, connecting newbies to veteran players who can show them the ropes. Etc. etc. For competitive games, like Starcraft, League of Legends, or CounterStrike... the "guild" is not part of the game but instead part of the online community. They are called "Clans" in these games. But the concept is simple, you're in charge of a team, usually dozens of people. You are expected to make practice, 8pm on Saturdays. You are expected to train certain maps, and make progress with skill. For WoW, you are expected to be ready an hour before the Raid. You are expected to play your role (tanking, healing, DPS, whatever) for the next 2 hours in the Raid, and you have at least 5 players at any time that are dependent on your success. People get "addicted" to the social connections, expectations, and in-game status. When you're a guild-leader in charge of a 10,000 person guild (_real_ people), it is a bit depressing to return back to the real world where you're a low-level junkie. Even at a low level, you're always happy for being able to contribute to your Guild or Clan, especially when your peers appreciate your efforts.

pointernil 12y ago

After having read all the "positive" stuff about gaming in "Reality Is Broken" by Jane McGonigal I remember thinking: To some children/adolescents games are the perfect (psychological) parents: providing all the endless, almost limitless attention and appreciation, perfectly dosed challenge and rewards, a sense of accomplishment and unconditional ... fun. I think this could be unique gateways for games to tip some effected ppl. into addiction, gateways not used by other potentially addictive stuff.

halfcat 12y ago

Minecraft is the only game that led me to a major life change. When I look around the real world, I realized it's the same thing, only more advanced. Once I made that realization, mining and crafting virtual resources became a lot less interesting, and mining and crafting something real became very intriguing and motivating. Then for a nice mind-f left turn, one day I wondered, what if we are living in a computer simulation?

yarrel 12y ago

Spending all day on social media and writing for clickbait sites about how evil games and gamers are is a particularly tragic addiction.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

Obligatory link to an essay I wrote five years ago covering the larger picture, what drives this problem and some way forward: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is... It's freaking sad, and it's just getting worse. 1992 or so. I'm a computer guy, gamer (arcade and old Atari) and we've got this cool new thing called a Nintendo for my two boys, 6 and 4. Being a good dad, I sit down next to them and "help" them get started playing a game. We went through Super Mario, then started on Zelda. Wow! This was a lot better than those arcade games where you only got 3 or 4 minutes and had to pay. Here you could play, well, you could play forever. And then it hit me. You could play forever. That was the whole gimmick. I stood up and left the room. Never played another console game again, unless it was something very brief and involved having people over. During that time, I watched every other member of my family get involved in games that took literally hundreds of hours of their time. I'm still watching my second-youngest son struggle with online games and college work. It's depressing as hell. Today as I type this, I realize that I've spent 3 or 4 hours fucking around online that I should have been doing something useful. That's just Facebook, Twitter, G+, and so forth. This is not a coincidence. Every piece of tech I pick up is trying as hard as it can to be "sticky" Same shit, different platform. I'm still the big hunk of dumb meat I used to be. Computerized gaming just keeps getting better. The trajectory is not good.

MisterWalter 12y ago

As a game maker, this stuff terrifies me. I think that there are a lot of devs out there who string together compulsive elements in their games without realizing just how potent they can be.

soup10 12y ago
There are just as many who intentionally make the game as addictive as possible. It was bad enough before F2P, now it's getting out of hand.

pnathan 12y ago

I basically left off playing video games when I realized I could get the same high, for nearly the same level of social interaction, by writing code instead. And that would help me in many more ways than killing the top level boss in WoW. My "immersive alternate reality" approach is to use novels, which have a well-defined end.

FLUX-YOU 12y ago
I thought that would be a good replacement for WoW/EVE, but it turns out nothing kills that flame faster than an 8to5 job. Now I know how I'd feel as a goldfarmer.
- pnathan 12y ago
  Yeah, some people find jobs to drain their coding desire. Pretty individual, I'm sure. For me, I have to hack at home to keep my enthusiasm for software.

beams_of_light 12y ago

These are failures to parent. At the end of the article, Dad laments his kid being the same after Wilderness Camp (which should have fixed everything!!!). What his kid really needs is some involvement.

thret 12y ago
Brett's father had retrofit a metal lock on his Celeron computer to prevent his son from gaming. (age 12) he was in the tenth grade .. he stopped bathing or brushing his teeth regularly. Basically these parents have 100k to shell out on rehab but they can't trust their 12 year old to be obedient, and they completely neglect his basic hygiene. This is parenting bordering on abuse.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

On the other hand, people who are that crazily obsessive about playing a popular sport are usually lauded by society, rather than being kidnapped and sent to rehab.

chipsy 12y ago

When I find myself getting addicted to a game now, I look for a way to cheat and rapidly progress to the end. The illusion dispelled, I only have to waste one hour of my life. Bonus: reverse engineering skills. Edit: But also, I never bother with MMOs because they're tedious to begin with. It's multiplayer FPS games that are the real trouble spot.

thret 12y ago

For the masses who spend the majority of their time watching sports, movies, tv, thinking about celebrities... How is gaming wasting their lives? What value do these other things have that gaming does not? I submit that hedonism is a purpose unto itself, that all recreational activities hold equal value to our species (~none), differing value to the individual, and that people should simply do whatever they enjoy, right now. Working towards a potentially better future that may never happen is not necessarily the right thing.

tsomctl 12y ago
It's not black and white. Many hobbies, which might appear useless for society in general, at least provide personal enrichment. Someone that spends their time programming video games is not helping feed people, but it is helping them become a better programmer. Also, it's well established that humans need rest and recreation to be productive workers.