Game Addiction: Myth or Reality? - Page 4

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Oh yeah. I assume he doesn't have a kid so he doesn't really have much room to talk on raising a kid. Whereas you do, thus you hold more credibility.

Yes pr anyone can comment but it comes down to personal choice and everyones own opinion im happy for you that it brings you and your son closer together.

Like i said everyone will have there own opinion i do think wow was to blame for how "£$% my life was but like i said
my opinion counts only for myself.

PR I used to let my Daughter sit on my lap when she was 4 and we would play Doom together...she pressed the shoot button and I steered, she got pretty good at it and learned which weapons worked best on what monsters....she called it "Hunting Monsters" Daddy lets go play "Hunting Monsters" was the mantra. So Im definately not against playing Games with the kids, even really young ones.
Still I read the guys post and didn't see it as an attack on how I raised my kids, just an expression of his thoughts....I definately didnt get the idea that he was saying you were harming your kid.

Spix sorry to hear that you had a self control issue but if you cannot tear yourself away from a game, drinking, smoking or any other activity then you really do have some deeper issues. This all falls under impulse control issues according to my Psych prof. (yeah yeah I know whats a 46 year old guy doing in college thats an issue about poor choices when I was younger) If you have those wonderful things in your life and yet still have amazingly hard times with choices, then do consider getting help. Not a lecture or being condescending, just honest concern for another human being.

I haven't read through the entire discussion (I do have limits on my time, unfortunately), but I have to say I just don't buy into the whole "game addiction" model. I tend to take a more classical view of addiction as physical dependence resulting in physiological changes and withdrawal if the addictive agent is removed, and I just don't see games doing that.

How a person spends his time is a choice, and those choices can lead to positive or negative outcomes. I have been an MMO player for better than 3 years now (Guild Wars and WoW), and while I sometimes feel pressure from my online mates to play more and engage in the occasional marathon session when the opportunity presents itself, I have chosen not to let games take priority over my job, my family, or anything important to my happiness. I can (and have) stopped playing for extended periods, and have not suffered any ill effects, nor have I felt a craving for anything other than contact with some of my online friends I don't communicate with through any other medium.

People who end up "addicted" to games have given up control of their lives and their priorities to other people, and doing so is a terrible idea both in-game and in real life - you become a sheep, subject to abuse by any shepherd you choose to follow.

Truly, I don't mean to be unsympathetic or overly harsh, and I am sure that some people are more likely to make bad choices and give up ownership of their own decisions than are others, but in the end no one is forcing you to play a game to the detriment of other facets of your life - you make the choice, and consequences follow as they inevitably do. The thesis that the game "forces" you to play longer is laughable; of course it takes more to time level up as you attain higher levels, but that doesn't mean that you MUST play more during a session. You just have to wait longer between rewards, a process that tends to make the reward feel more important, not less, and more closely mimics real life in the process.

Perhaps a better way to express my idea is to lose the idea of an "addictive game," and talk about susceptible people instead, and how best to help them fix whatever the root cause of that susceptibility is. As a teacher of teenagers in the US, I can tell you from firsthand experience that very few of the students I teach have anything close to the sense of personal responsibility they should; in fact, the majority of people in the US are prone to blame anyone but themselves for their problems and failures, and often wont to take too much rubbish as truth without examining it fully and carefully.

The games are much less to blame than our own culture, which I believe creates those susceptibilities instead of emphasizing the improtance of personal responsibility and accountability. I am reminded of an old Doonesbury cartoon, in which 2 professors are walking across campus, discussing the lack of responsibility of their students and lamenting the loss of the "good old days." In the final panel of the cartoon we see a young boy of 9 years or so sitting at the dinner table with his father, perusing his latest report card. Dad says, "Son, I am really disappointed in your teacher this term!" The son replies, "Yeah, Dad, I am too." People with a strong sense of responsibility are made, not born, and many parents seem to have misplaced those directions recently. The result? Susceptible people, ones who lack enough sense of cause and effect to protect themselves from the consequences of their own poor decisions, and let themselves off the hook by claiming addiction instead of exercising honest self-analysis and determining where things got out of hand, and most importantly how NOT to screw up that way again. Everyone makes mistakes - effective people figure out why and don't make the same ones again, susceptible people find something else to blame and go on making the same mistakes over and over again.

I'll get off my soapbox now - hopefully I haven't peed in anyone's Cheerios too much, and by no means do I mean to marginalize anyone's personal tragedies. Blaming the games by saying they are addictive just doesn't address root causes, though, and further trivializes people by taking away their responsibility for their own choices - and the consequences of those choices.

By saying the game was addictive, you agree that you were in fact addicted to the game. Being addicted to something means that you'll continue to use / play regardless of the consequences. (smoking anyone?)

To say the game it self is addictive isn't right. I or many others may find the game boring and repetitive, it all comes down to personal taste and choices. If you're a very goal oriented person, or just "have to get one more level!" then, of course, you will be addicted to game of this type / genre. You can apply this to anything / everything in life.

To Rgeist: You bring up a good point about what addiction really is. When these people say "I was addicted, and it was ruinning my life, but then I quit and everything is good now", they're are totally ignorant of what addiction is. This is kind of what I was getting at in my little rant but I think my point was totally lost. I know real addicts. It takes getting real help to break a real addiction, not just ceasing to play the game. If you were really addicted to say WoW recovery would have to include not using a computer/internet for a very long time. A newly recovering alcohalic could not go to a bar nor good a gambling addict hang out in a casino. Also quitting an addiction does not make you feel better, if anything it would make you feel worse. Addictions, especially psycological ones, are usually brought on by pre-existing afflictions like depression. Quitting alone will not help you, you also need to seek help for the underlying issue that lead you to getting so sucked into such unhealthy habits. I think a lot of these people who claim to have suffered from game addiction just simply over did something that started out really fun and eventually got burned out.

To immagikman: Smoking less then a pack of cigarettes won't get anybody addicted. It takes months to really develope a dependancy. But once you do it's one of the post powerful and hardest to break. Heroin on the other hand can get you hooked on the first use, but can be over come just by de-toxing over short period of time. However most heroin addicts will relapse not because of the chemical urge, but due to the other psycological reasons that lead them to heroin in the first place.

So, this topic made it into 2008. Place your bets now whether it will go on into 2009.

I'm not just reacting to the quoted post but also to some of the stuf I've read just now since I last visited and posted here.

I think it was you, guruofchem, who did not yet buy into the potential addictive quality of games, because of a lack of physiological addiction. What makes you think there is no physiological addiction? The simple fact you do not take in any substance, does not rule out the possibility that people become addicted to something they already have inside of them. I recommend you take a look at that cult flick "What the bleep" or "down the rabbit hole" if you want to know what I'm talking about. People can become addicted to adrenaline rushes, purely generated by the human body itself.

I think addiction comes into play (regardless if it is a physical addiction to a foreign substance, or something chemical inside your own body (socalled "mental" addictions are a result of chemical processes within the brain) once it start dominating your life, taking over in making your own choices etc.

In all of my posts I hopefully made it clear that every individual has his/her own responsibility in letting an addiction get the better of them: here we have to exclude something called hard drugs (exactly the reason why these are "hard" ) as you can become addicted to a hard drug after only using it once. Even then there is the responsibility of the individual to start using such a substance but also consider the possibility that someone is being tricked into using it once, or it being forced on a person. Exactly the reason why these substances are banned (doesnt stop it from being used but meant to contain the proliferation of these substances).

But I digress. If we force liquor advertising to be labeled with health warnings (like it is being done where I live) then I do not consider it out of proportion to provide some warning information with the packaging of MMO's.

I will not let my kids start playing MMO's without supervision until they are old enough (and I will be the judge for my kids what old enough is) and I will teach them about the risks associated to such games when they're old enough to understand. But no two kids are the same so I will not judge beforehand others that will make their own choices, as long as they are making conscious choices. Negligence due to being uninformed is inexcusable in my eyes.

I've just started playing an MMO myself because I got it as a birthday present from my brother who is an avid MMO player. I know of myself that I am (somewhat?) susceptible to that kind of addiction so I am carefully monitoring myself not to become too involved in the game, keeping to solo play as much as possible and my wife is also aware and will certainly tell me when I start losing it. For me this is a kind of self learning experience in how much control I can maintain. So far I'm doing ok, i'm not playing every night, and I'm not playing for long stretches at a time, and I will stop with the game if it is no longer enjoyable under those conditions (not every night and no long stretches).

I'll keep you all posted in this topic on how it goes.

This is in part what I was getting at. If an individual's own brain/body is creating these chemicals in response to a stimuli in a way that is not normal and is not usual of use of said stimuli then the issue is with the individual and not the stimuli. Simply taking away the stimuli is not really an answer because the defect is in the individual and is likely to keep on recurring in response to various different situations. Blaming the item that simply triggers a response, but is not the cause, not only has an unfair impact on those who are normal but it is also denying real help to those who suffer. If you really do suffer from video game addiction and do manage to stop playing, but don't seek profesional help you are almost guaranteed to fall into the same pattern again, although it may be something different and possibly more dangerous.

That's pretty deep, lol. I didn't know where you were going with it at first either.

***impossing self censorship in response to the previous post***