Drool

I think am getting shallow. Nerdy shallow, but shallow all the same. Following on from my "I love Dexter" post, here is the latest object of my desire:



Yes, that is a DVD boxed set of various Dalek episodes with Doctors William Hartnell, Tom Baker and Colin Baker (no Patrick Troughton or Jon Pertwee though, which is a hell of an omission). But the really groovy thing? Embossed rubber Dalek bumps!

hfx_ben recently accused me of having swallowed the blue pill and opted into consumer society. I guess he's right, but come on, embossed rubber Dalek bumps! Forget Cypher, even Morpheus would have chosen to be re-inserted into the Matrix if Agent Smith had offered him a special collectors' edition Dalek DVD boxed set with embossed rubber Dalek bumps.

Game addiction redux

It had to happen: one of the students in my "virtual worlds" course has decided to do his term paper on game addiction (specifically World of Warcraft addiction). In my last ENG 102 course (which was on games in general) I banned the topic of gaming addiction because I didn't want to get a load of badly written papers based on personal prejudice, popular journalism and anecdotal evidence. But this guy is bright and has a reasonable knowledge of his subject, so I'll let him try it.

The problem seems to be that either very few people are doing serious work based on quantitative data, or their methodology is kooky, or their work just isn't getting out to the public. This is odd, considering that for obvious reasons it is a lot easier to collect quantitative data on online gamers than, say, mountain climbers. If you search the web for "game addiction", you'll keep finding references to the factoid that 40% of WoW players are addicted (to WoW, that is—I'm sure a lot of them are also addicted to caffeine, but we don't have stats on that). This figure turns out to have originated in an interview with Maressa Orzack, a psychotherapist specialising in treating computer game addicts, who says "I'd say that 40 percent of the players are addicted." Mmmm, now how's that for strict experimental protocols? I checked her list of publications and found an article in Psychiatric Times, a brief piece in Harvard Mental Health Letter and a letter to Clinical Psychiatry News. These contain plenty of opinions but no hard data, and certainly nothing to draw the conclusion that 40% of WoW players are addicted.

In the absence of quantitative data, it's the anecdotal evidence that draws attention. Teenager dies while playing WoW. Girl sells her body to pay WoW subscription. Boy murdered in argument about magical sword. All of those are real, believe it or not, but they mean absolutely nothing, except that people sometimes do really stupid things, which is something we all knew. Substitute online gaming for some more popular activity, and they become mundane: Teenager dies while mountain climbing. Girl sells her body to buy jewelry. Boy murdered in argument about football. Not stuff that would make headlines outside the local paper.

Anyway, that's enough blogging for now—I really need to get my Guild Wars fix read some more research proposals.