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

[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.