I started reading a book by Ryan Van Cleave about his personal battle with video game addiction, Unplugged: My Journey into the Dark World of Video Game Addiction. I'm currently on the chapters where he describes his school years, but the story apparently culminates with his addiction to World of WarCraft, which nearly costs him his marriage and his life.
The book's foreword, written by Mark Griffiths, lists six criteria for identifying addictive activites:
- Salience: The activity becomes the most important activity in your life and dominates your thinking, feeling, behavior.
- Mood modification: The activity gives you a high or mellows you out.
- Tolerance: You need increasing amounts of the activity over time.
- Withdrawal symptoms: You experience unpleasant effects when the activity drops.
- Conflict: The activity creates conflict with other people, other activities, work, life generally.
- Relapse: You invariably revert to old, problematic patterns after periods of control.
Do any of you appear to fit all six criteria? Is there a possibility that you are addicted to video games?
It's nice to know that, according to these criteria, I am NOT addicted to video games, because there are times (like when I'm strategizing exactly how to get all the achievements in Plants vs. Zombies) when I do wonder… :) Although I do spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about games, and games affect my mood, and I kinda go into withdrawal when I don't play for a while, my tolerance for gaming hasn't increased over time, and games don't cause much conflict in my life. Also, I've never relapsed, but only because I've never tried to stop playing games in the first place.
The book's a good read so far. It's clear that the author has had many issues aside from overgaming (e.g. with drinking, sex, self-esteem). I'm looking forward to reading about how he ultimately manages to overcome his addiction.
Until then, to everyone out there on GameSpot: Happy gaming! I hope that we all continue to play video games because we want to, and never because we need to. Much love to you all.