Once again the headlines rage about a man in China who died after a gaming marathon, and so once again I am compelled to revisit this subject.
Internet and gaming addictions are fast becoming media targets of choice, particularly with the World of Warcraft phenomenon. My personal opinion is that the causes and effects of gaming addictions are poorly understood, and thus I think that, while generally well-intentioned, reports on these matters will always be incomplete and only manage to vilify either the addicted or the medium, or both.
I'm not inclined to discuss whether or not CNN's or any media outlet's coverage of the gaming community is biased or not -- as any such discussion lends itself to a tedious examination of stories with sides being chosen based on one's own biases rather than an objective examination; nor am I going to discuss whether or not Internet and/or gaming addiction is a pervasive or serious problem -- again, the discussion would be overly lengthy and not appropriate for this format.
Instead what I want to talk about is how I believe the gaming community should respond to gaming addicts, pervasive or otherwise.
On the one hand, there are the appeals of Internet-based gaming. You're exposed to a wide array of challenges in the form of human players at multiple skill levels, you can network with existing friends without being near them by sharing a common experience, and you can develop additional friendships with people whom you otherwise wouldn't have met. In short, Internet gaming allows one to basically engage in a social forum while at the same time participate in an entertainment venue.
On the other hand, however, is that the social experience is incomplete -- it's virtual and emotionless. Our human experience is defined from birth onward by our physical interactions with others: first our parents, then other children, adolescents, adults, coworkers, spouses, and ultimately our own children. It's why neglected or abused children can and do so often grow up to be something of deviants in society; their interactions are perversions of the social development that the rest of us experience.
We understand our world through our senses, of which only two, audio and visual, are satisfied by the Internet or gaming, and in no small part by our proximity to and interactions with others; and technology alone will never satisfy the very human need to be in touch, quite literally, with other humans.
I'm not denying the networking power that the Internet has, nor am I trying to undermine the bonds that can form among friends during gaming sessions. All I'm saying is that these experiences are incomplete, and one of the driving factors behind an addiction, any addiction, is the flawed understanding on the part of the addict that further exposure to that which they are addicted will satisfy his or her ever-growing deficiency, physical or psychological, when in fact they're just furthering their own destruction.
I'm not here to get into the nuances of defining addiction or dependency. All I mean to establish is that it is perfectly plausible that someone could become addicted to gaming as a perceived way of satisfying the need for social interaction.
The question then is: How should the gaming community respond to this phenomenon? Browsing the GameSpot forums, I was somewhat disturbed to see how people responded to the topic of gaming addiction. It seemed as though people largely took the idea as a joke, as though anybody who was addicted, or even thought that he or she was addicted, was either off-kilter to begin with or was trying to be funny; and the comments were, therefore, dismissive.
I haven't seen any reliable studies about how prevalent gaming addiction is among self-described gamers or Internet users in general, much less recent studies to be sure, but even if the prevalence is low, I think this is a topic which the community should be casting a more serious eye to. Whether it's a rare event or widespread, for me the pivotal point is this: The presence of gaming addicts in the community means that we are at some point deriving our entertainment at the very physical and psychological expense of someone else, while at the same time we may be just as susceptible to becoming addicted ourselves.
I believe we're past the time for outreach on this issue. If any community has the resources on hand to create a means by which gaming addicts or at-risk persons can go to be brought away from their dependencies, it's the gaming community. We number in the millions, we're spread over the globe, and we've absolutely utilized the infrastructural capabilities of the Internet.
Quite frankly, I think it incumbent upon us, the gaming community, to launch this outreach rather than end up having it dictated to us by either misguided legislation or a biased media blitz. If we don't take the steps now to address this issue, then we're going to be subjected to one "Shocking expose!" after another about our beloved hobby and story after story about gamers so far gone that they died after week-long gaming sessions; and true or not, sensationalized or not, those are going to have a cumulative effect which will only damage the industry's reputation and, by extension, the gaming community's.
We don't need to run out and build a gaming wing to the Betty Ford Center, we can handle this matter very simply: take a break for a while and go for a walk; call someone you haven't seen in a while and arrange a lunch; go out and meet some other gamers. Make the effort to be with people physically rather than virtually. Whether through informal, regional get-togethers or attendance at the major conventions, a person-to-person encounter and check-up can go a long way to head off an addiction that is based on a social deficiency.
The bottom line is that if we are going to use in our defense that Internet gaming is not a destructive hobby because it allows us to build friendships across the globe, then we need to start cashing in on those friendships and reach out to those among us who are in need of a helping hand. To do no less is irresponsible and exploitative of other people's problems, it is the antithesis of friendship, and to that end it will be difficult for the mainstream to not vilify us.
At least, that's where *I* thought the bottom line should be. A friend of mine and avid gamer pointed out to me after I originally aired this complaint that there are more issues at work, though, that could each be a blog post in and of themselves. Specifically she raised concerns about parenting, and a person's drive for gratification.
On the first issue, she contended that those who engage in gaming marathons to the point of fatal overdose might be the results of bad parenting. While that is a contention which is near impossible to prove or disprove, I am inclined to disagree with it carte blanche. There comes a point in a person's life where he or she is old enough to gauge for him or herself what is beneficial and what is harmful behavior. While these determinations might in part be influenced by one's upbringing, it strikes me that most healthy people -- however they were raised -- would be able to determine that sitting in front of a computer for days on end is harmful behavior. Those who can't, in my opinion, have an illness which requires outside influence to correct.
There one might find evidence of negligent behavior on the part of a parent in not recognizing the problem early on, but what if the symptoms didn't show until later in life? In the cases I have examined, the victims have been 26- and 30-year-old men from China. Whereas in Western society it could be expected that a 26- or 30-year-old man could have displayed signs of gaming addiction in his youth due to the proliferation of electronic games in our society, could the same be said for China? Or even removing the cultural aspect, what if the symptoms didn't manifest themselves until after these men moved out of their homes (as we gamers know, contrary to popular belief, we don't all live in our parents' basements)? Who is to blame under these circumstances?
On the second point my friend brought up, I do have to admit that it is a driving force of the human experience to want to feel a sense of purpose, more specifically validation and gratification. We want to know that our lives mean something not merely to ourselves but to other people. Some people might satisfy this desire by achieving a high profile on the Internet, and in so doing fin themselves caught in a web of gaming addiction. But this, to me, only reaffirms the point I have made that the community has an obligation to identify these people and help bring them back from the brink, an obligation to show them that they can find validation by other means.
A slight aside here, I am a fan of zombies. I love them. So I was quick to buy World War Z when it came out, in which there is a character who illustrates the point I am trying to make here. He is from Japan, and he defines "l33+," as he spends every waking our hacking into government networks and spilling their contents out onto the Internet. He admits that he does this in order to feel a sense of worth. However, as his friends are one by one consumed by the zombie horde, he can only feel anger that there is nobody around to congratulate him on uncovering the secrets of the government's evacuation plans. Only by luck does he end up escaping the zombie menace, but not after taking out no small amount of rage on his laptop.
What that illustrates to me in the context of this conversation is that those Internet personas we admire for their skills in games might well display other traits we could, and should, just as readily celebrate, and in so doing might help a friend come back from the brink of a fatal addiction.
Again, the points my friend raised could themselves be very long posts, but if you have read this far, I will thank you by sparing you from reading more.