Game addiction redux

[robinturner]

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.

Comments

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

These contain plenty of opinions but no hard data, and certainly nothing to draw the conclusion that 40% of WoW players are addicted.

Especially since, as a therapist, her data are more certainly skewed!

[solri.livejournal.com]

You have a point. People who play online games for a couple of hours a week don't go and see a therapist about it.

[genhawk.livejournal.com]

There is some guy collecting MMORPG data at the Daedalus Project (www.nickyee.com/daedalus).

I don't know if there's anything about "addiction."

[solri.livejournal.com]

I just stumbled on that site after a student cited it. Interesting stuff (and a nice name).

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

It looks like there are articles about the development of scales to assess video game addiction. I don't have the time to look at the articles now, though, which is unfortunate since I do have considerable experience with tobacco addiction scales.

[vret.livejournal.com]

I think the whole idea of "game addiction" is ridiculous. I listened to a BBC programme earlier about social phobia, and the pressures doctors are under to think of it as a psychiatric disorder (so they can prescribe drugs to cure it), when it's actually an entirely psychological problem. I think game addiction is being similarly medicalised.

An addiction is where you get physically ill if you don't get the thing you are addicted to - you get cold, or feverish or get a headache, or whatever, and getting the thing you are addicted to brings you back to normality. That's nothing like what is happening with people who play games more than they want to. That's an obsession, a exaggerated form of something normal, and even necessary to get to be any good at most things. It's just that games aren't a particularly productive way to spend your time, and that's why it is seen as a problem, but it's not even remotely like an addiction.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

What you say makes intuitive sense, and yet it's been found that gambling "addicts" have the same kind of neurotransmitter issues as "real" addicts do. That is, they go through the same kind of physical withdrawal when they can't play as do people whose neurotransmitters have been messed up by drugs.

[vret.livejournal.com]

Two immediate questions come to mind. First, is addiction primarily about what is happening with neurotransmitters (probably is, but still), and are there other things definitely unconnected with addiction which also produce those changes?

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I'm not a neurologist, so I can't give definitive answers, but it's my understanding that this kind of neurotransmitter activity is in essence the physiological definition of addiction.

(I can also say, anecdotally, that the addiction experts I work with - who know more about the science of addiction than I do - used to assume that "addictions" to gambling and other non-drug activities were essentially somehow different from addiction to drugs but are now generally convinced that they're much the same.)

[vret.livejournal.com]

Interesting, mostly because of the change of mind.

I must ask my sister about this when I next see her. She no longer runs her county's addiction services, but she probably keeps up with it all. As far as I know they only treated drug addiction, but that might have been just because that was already more than they could cope with.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Our state uses video poker to help fund schools and parks (my fellow Oregonians are tax-phobic, it seems), so now apparently we've got people who wouldn't have become gambling addicts if the state hadn't facilitated it. The state health division has met numerous times with one of the senior researchers where I work, hoping to figure out what to do about it. I haven't been following the results, though.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Quite. Do you remember the panic about pen-and-paper RPGs well before the computer game era? OK, a lot of that was to with the idea that they were putting us in touch with Satanic forces, but the "addiction" argument was there as well. Yes, you, me and others used to sit up playing Dragonquest or Space Opera until 6 a.m.—shocking, wasn't it?

Jonas Linderoth

[fionnghuala.livejournal.com]

I saw Jonas Linderoth (http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=jonas+linderoth&hl=en&lr=&start=0&sa=N) give a talk over the Summer, about his work on videogame addiction. Or actually he uses the term 'problematic gamers', or something similar. He's very critical of notions of addiction, and is using ethnographic-y methods with very high users of Warcraft to talk about it. A quick search didn't come up with anything on that topic, but I'm sure there must be some about.

thank you

[(Anonymous)]

well done, man

thanks much

[(Anonymous)]

favorited this one, dude