‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
In the old days you could just exit out to the pause menu or save so you could go to the toilet or answer the phone or talk to your family and your in-game activities were safe. You could pick and chose when and how you wanted to play.
Now you cant stop when you want, because if you do you'll just be left "idle" in-game. This means that you're prey for other players or NPCs in game, and you risk losing your character's progress and you're back to the start (sometimes there is a significant time-investment to this progress so understandably you dont want to risk it). You can only stop when you get to some sort of safe-place in-game, which means you have to play longer than you want to.
So you get situations like where if I am playing a game and my wife asks me to come and see something or make a cup of tea or something, I have to ask her to wait until it is "safe" for me to stop. I feel like I am prioritising the game over my wife (and I guess I am to an extent).
I dont like this.
I really wish games would allow you to just quit whenever you want without risking your in-game progress.
It is essentially a single-player experience but on a shared playing area.
If that makes sense!
Its kinda cool, but this forced you-can-only-quit-when-we-say-so thing is not cool. Why you cant just safely despawn when you pause or exit I don't know. I guess it is there for "realism"
Just because you personally have a problem with the way some games work doesn't mean every single game designer needs to shape their programs to your preference. If you don't like it, play a different game.
It's not that I hate it or the developers for implementing the mechanic. It's that it's not always conducive to a person in a relationship or with children. You can always dismiss the person as the problem by telling them to play something else, but clearly those people don't want to play something else.
We understand why (in some cases) you can't just quit at any time. Like you said, that means someone can avoid a PvP fight or a lopsided ranked match by disconnecting without repercussion. It sucks sometimes when you can't help but disconnect at the drop of a hat, and I don't necessarily think that those types of mechanics are the fault of the developers.
For example, I was playing a ranked match when my partner fell ill. They were making it fine for a while, but I was asking if we should go to urgent care. They flip-flopped multiple times on going over the course of 10 minutes. Then I plainly asked, "Do you definitely think that you need to go? I don't mind disconnecting to take care of you, but if I do and you decline, I'll get penalized for no reason." It makes sense that I would incur a penalty for dropping the match, but it still sucks.
The point is that if the developing company can find a way for quick disconnect that doesn't interrupt the spirit of gameplay, it would be a boon for a lot of players. I know that competitive/ranked modes are pretty much off limits for me during most of my play time, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to play against people who are trying their best.
That's too much stress for me, I don't want games to interfere with my real life.
Every game in the 3DS pauses when the player closes the lid. It should be the same with the Switch.
I would equate trying to regulate against "sustained gameplay" to trying to regulate/force timeouts in all basketball games, tennis games, etc. It's absurd.
I think vice laws aim to accomplish good but needlessly limit freedom. More importantly, I think comparing gaming to addictive substances seems very naive.
If excessive sports and exercise were a problem on any large scale, I would advocate for regulation, too. My feeling however is that people rather tend to need incentives for exercising at all, so I’m not holding my breath on that one.
Freedom is not absolute if you are living as part of a society.
For example, if I compare the amount of advertisement that TV channels are allowed to show in Germany vs. in the US, I am certainly for regulation... (back when I still cared about television)
The same episode on german TV has three ad interruptions. One 5 minute one in the middle, a overlay ad about 5 minutes before the end and a zoom out during the credits showing ads to the side (the later two circumvent the normal limit of ads per hour and spacing requirements.)
Regulating length of ads is silly too. You can just purchase the show and watch it with no ads. Or don't watch the channel. Or watch different content.
Seems the above comments are generalizing to justify controlling media consumption. Regardless of which side regulation comes down on. I see a very slippery slope.
The slippery slope has been going down the opposite hill, actually, in America: It's amazing how much less rights a consumer has in the US compared to, again for example, in Germany.
The "well just don't do/consume/choose X then" argument is extremely shortsighted. If X is provided by commercial entities, then those commercial entities will, together, converge towards maximum profits with no regards for the consumer at all. Regulation is necessary as a counteractive force. A prime piece of evidence actually comes from your own post: "Don't watch the channel". Ok, I switched the channel on my cable box, now what? Ah, still the same.
You act as if the only media you can consume is via cable. There's virtually unlimited options in our age for media. The majority of it is free, not counting cost of internet.
X(media) is not provided by solely corporate entities. If someone wants to have a half hour ad(or infomercial) in their content, people will watch something else. It's shortsighted if there's a monopoly on X so your choices are limited. But that's the furthest thing from the truth in today's age in regards to media.
It's not really. The limited amount of adspace, about 10 minutes full screen and 4 or 5 minutes side, some banners, have greatly increased the value of ads on TV.
More expensive ads also means the ads are of much higher quality and less annoying than the US ads.
Buying the content is of course always an option but this is largely form an era before buying content was even an option or required extremely expensive VHS players.
Like you said, we live in a new era. I think the idea of that regulation feels antiquated with the near unlimited choices now.
Regardless, this is off topic. My extreme tl;dr - keep lawmakers grubby paws off my video games!
I love how the Nintendo Switch allows you to pause any game, any time immediately. Even during load screens! And you can suspend the console. Although I don't know what happens when the battery runs out.
I which they would enforce something like this for PC/steam games. But of course it won't help much with online "real-time" games.
What you'd expect- you lose any unsaved progress. Some games have autosave, though, so it's not like you usually lose a huge amount. Also, the battery life in suspend mode is pretty long, IME. Generally several days at least.
There are games like the Dark Souls/Bloodborne series, where you can "quit" anytime, and if you restart, you are in the exact same spot as before. In the worse case, you get killed by roaming enemies/other invading players (it's mainly a single player game with multiplayer elements) - but I die in these bloody games anyway, so I don't care so much. I rationalize it by saying that all you lose are some in-game "souls" (currency) - so yeah I go make that tea for the missus.
In games like The Division/Battlefield 4, where you are part of a multiplayer team and trying to complete a "mission/quest", it's a bit more difficult. It's annoying for the other players if you bail out or go AFK (Away From KBD). So you have to pre-book your game time in short batches ("I'm doing this mission - 45 minutes"). Of course you can leave if you are playing with strangers. Usually the games automatically pull another online player in.
Most other games I play are single-player RPG's (e.g All Bioware / Bethesda RPG's e.g Dragon Age, Skyrim etc) allow you to save or pause.
I can't remember anymore, but even in WoW it wasn't that big a deal to just bail out when needed.
Getting the shopping out of the car when my wife gets back is not more important, but not helping my wife is perceived as rude, and that is important.
I'm trying to teach my boy this. Fortnite is absolutely gaming crack designed by psychologists. Powerful shit.
My big issue is multiplayer games (namely FIFA and Rocket League). If I just stop mid-game I lose rank, which means I may be stuck in a match longer than I would like to be.
Today it's always online games, if you're in the middle of a level/mission the only option you have is to quit which if it's a competitive game leaves your team at a disadvantage, plus some games penalize you if you habitually quit early. In some games, like BF1 or the recent CoDs someone can immediately come back in to take your place if you are playing in a casual game mode, but the more competitive game modes won't allow someone else to join (Breakout in Halo 5 for example).
This needs to be further qualified, such as by "over extended periods of time". If you spend a weekend prioritizing gaming over other life interests/activities, it's no different than having a crunch week at work and prioritizing work over life interests/activities, neither of which should be considered a disorder.
Edit: This is shoddy reporting on TechCrunch's part, the official WHO ICD listing [0] qualifies it thus:
> The behaviour pattern is of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning [...] The gaming behaviour and other features are normally evident over a period of at least 12 months in order for a diagnosis to be assigned, although the required duration may be shortened if all diagnostic requirements are met and symptoms are severe.
[0]: https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en#/http://id.who.int/icd/e...
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/18/health/video-game-disorder-wh...
Except these people voluntarily spend what is essentially their free time working to improve skills and the economy of the country
As crazy as these articles have been about gaming addiction being a medical condition are, I believe it. I'm in my early 20s, ever since I was in my mid teens I was addicted to video games. All through grade school and in college now, I struggle to put the controller down. I routinely don't get enough sleep because I can't stop playing. As soon as I come home I am on, and I won't get off until the early hours of the morning. It's a mixture of reasons why I guess; it keeps my mind off of reality, I enjoy the satisfaction of winning frequently, and it fulfills my desire of being in a progression based system. Achievements, knowing that my actions will eventually unlock achievements and level-ups, it keeps me going. I can't play games that don't have progression systems of some sort because I feel like without progression, it's a waste of time. Sure you can kind of get that in the real world, but it's harder and takes so much longer. Why do that when I have an easy alternative sitting on my desk? I really want to break my addiction to gaming as it really does affect some parts of my life, especially academic.
For a lack of a better word, modern video games are increasingly "manipulative" when it comes to incentivizing players to play more, and without sounding conspiratorial, gaming companies probably benefit a whole lot from gaming addictions fueled by progression systems like you mentioned.
Compare that to classic games like Earthbound where an in-game character will bug you repeatedly to take a break if you play for too long. An extreme and nostalgic example, but mostly my point is that developers are much better at developing "hooks" in a gameplay loop that keeps a player going now in addition to games being way more stimulating.
I appreciate that you're sort of equivocating here to preemptively deter the critics, but I'll take a stronger stance. Gaming is indisputably "addictive" in the layman's sense, even if people seem to get grumpy over using the term "addiction" for anything other than substance abuse. Regardless of what we call it, the detriment to daily life is similar.
I myself experience some minor form of game addiction: I played World of Warcraft about a decade ago, and even though I only played for two years and even though I was the furthest thing from a hardcore player (I never even got a character to max level, I just loved making alts), to this day I still get occasional and inexplicable cravings to play it. These episodes aren't prompted by anything I can perceive. It feels like a tugging in my heart, the same sort of ache you might feel when you watch a loved one suffering yet are powerless to help them. I've played a whole damn lot of games in my life, but that's the only one that I've ever jonesed for.
When I gave up social media (although I've since relapsed and am now back on it), I didn't have cravings for it after a while.
But with WoW.... I literally have a craving every couple months, without fail, even though I only played for about 2 years from 2004 to 2006.
Games can be a fantastic story-telling medium, a competitive environment where you can test your skill and intellect against real human opponents, a lot of pure fun, or a way to spend time playing cooperatively with friends. All of these can be worthwhile activities in different ways.
Grinding mindlessly to make some numbers go up is not worthwhile at all. Playing a game just for the progression that you wouldn't play otherwise is a sign of addiction and can have a substantial negative impact on your life. I love games, but some self-awareness about what they are actually doing for you goes a long way to making them a part of a healthy, productive life rather than something that destroys it.
That might be clear for you, but it's not for everyone. The way the OP describes his motivation for gaming sounds extremely similar to people with gambling addictions.
Self-awareness isn't enough for everyone. Some people are just wired to respond to that dopamine hit from progression systems in an especially strong, self-reinforcing way. They need more help and one of the first steps to that is endorsing more ethical game design that doesn't go so heavily into building addictive feedback loops.
- a competitive environment where you can test your skill and intellect against real human opponents
- playing cooperatively with friends.
- Grinding mindlessly to make some numbers go up
All of those are different things that it's possible to enjoy. I would hesitate to say any one is more "correct" than the others, other than how socially acceptable they are.
Whereas, with autisms, we don't yet know how to analyze symptoms well enough for there to be a bijection between set-of-symptoms and underlying-autism-variant; indeed, we can barely even separate autism's causes and effects, if at all.
No, it doesn't. There seem to likely be some similar key mechanisms involved, but the shared mechanisms aren't the whole story, otherwise someone addicted to something would be addicted to everything.
We give different diagnoses for different allergies, even though allergies have a common key mechanism.
Especially when comparing video poker machines, it's just like a video game.
Video games don't have that risk/reward in as nearly as a tangible sense. Though you could argue that games like EVE Online, where in game resources have a direct comparison to hard cash. Ie, you can grind up a capital ship in game, or you can theoretically purchase enough ISK (in game currency, about $11,000 USD in this case) to buy one outright.
Video games have less risk/reward, are focused internally, and have more greed and achievement. If I'm able to clear this raid, I'm able to get X, which will allow me to do Y in the same game, which will make it easier to attempt Z, etc. No one plans to play 5 dollar blackjack so they can play 100 dollar blackjack.
Because diagbostic criteria need to be different for different subject matter, and no suitable generalization had been identified.
> also lumps every variety of autism under the same umbrella term.
Because there is a continuum of manifestations and not clear differentiated kinds with crisp, clinically meaningful boundaries or subject matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber#C...
Someone here must know a little more about the process by which new things are added to the ICD.
There's a good reason why many psychologists and psychiatrists were against the inclusion of this in ICD-11 and why the DSM5 does not list it as an officially recognized disorder either.
There's a somewhat grey area between "Gaming" and "Gambling", but I think it's fair to consider "Gambling" a subset of "Gaming" where the games actually pay out money (or something of monetary value). This probably doesn't match the WHO definition though.
Not really, we call them workaholics (e.g. work-addicts) if they're so compelled to work that they can establish boundaries between it and the rest of their lives.
Gambling is negative sum for all participants. The house is always going to win. The jackpots are just a user acquisition expense to trick even more participants into playing.
For some people it's a job that generates income for others it's an addiction that impairs proper functioning.
What I heard on the radio was "do you lose your job, lose your wife/family, yet continue to play?"
So what about the case where playing the game IS your job (which is a growing field?) What about the case where your wife/family is playing it with you?
I'm not denying there might be some underlying destructive problem, but to my layman ears it sounds more like something someone is interested in that contradicts what another believes to be "properly functional."
IE, instead of helping your wife do important things, you play a game. Instead of going to bed so you can wake up for work, you play another round, and as a result of not getting enough sleep, your performance suffers. Addiction is basically a mis-prioritization of resources due to abuse of brain chemistry. Worse, it is typically a feedback loop: "She left me, now I am sad, but the game activates my dopamine response, providing some semblance of happiness"
That was my personal wake-up call. Now I only play MAME games that require, max, 10 or 15 minutes of investment .. and then I simply stop.
I sort of miss the arcades of the 80's, which didn't seem to really propagate this addiction as readily as the current madness does.
In a classical arcade, you walk into a darkened room filled with animated CRTs and strange noises. They literally have blinders, designed to shut out your peripheral vision so the game is the only thing in your consciousness. When you die, you have 30 seconds to insert more coins and continue, otherwise you have to start all over from the beginning. Pretty much everything about this is designed to trigger your adrenalin-based threat-and-reward reflexes.
If modern computer games are more addictive, it's only because they've figured out how to trigger even more powerful primal instincts. MMORPGs and MOBAs add a social aspect, and very often a cumulative acquisition aspect (experience, gold, credits, etc). Simulations and worldbuilders like SimCity, Minecraft & Factorio engage our higher brain centers like planning and optimization. Mobile & casual games have figured out how to squeeze gaming into even smaller timeslots within our lives.
It's also interesting how gaming & gambling have converged. It used to be that a slot machine was a machine where you pulled a lever and tried to match up dials. Now you walk into a casino and it basically looks like an arcade, with lots of computerized gambling games on backlit LCD displays, while Internet games like CryptoKitties let you play & trade with real (well, fake) money.
However in the modern era, once you start - there is nothing stopping you.
Games these days are far far more interesting than most movies, TV shows or other forms of entertainment. With photorealistic rendering coming combined with AR they might even override the need for exploratory travels outside pure relaxation stays (i.e. if you can visit Alaska/Antarctica/Japan/Petra/whatever with photorealistic graphics, would you really want to travel there? I guess you'd rather go to some beach or clubbing place to unwind instead)
In fact, I'd say that the "I'm here now and I can't be anywhere else for a while, I'm really stuck in it and everything is exciting and new" aspect of traveling really cannot be emulated by a medium that you know you can stop consuming at will, at any time.
And sure the case can be made for personal willpower, and it's my own fault for being too weak to play it without becoming invested. But as others have pointed out these games are made to addict us. They are custom talored crack for the brain. I've seen so many friends lose jobs, friendships, all kinds of relationships... and I've seen the same with literal drugs such as alcohol, crack and heroin. I hate to advocate for regulation but we need at least some protections here because when a gaming company's bottom line depends on how much time we spend in a game you can be sure they are going to milk us for every second they can,for the most part.
When I started university, I was renting a house with a guy who basically sat inside playing WoW all day, didn't socialize much (other than us and our friends at the house) and didn't study much at all. Meanwhile, for the first time, I started being social outside the world of computers.
That year my grades took a hit from socializing and drinking instead, but I don't regret that. They recovered the next year and stayed good.
WoW really felt like a big threshold for gaming to me. I'd seen the same problems with Anarchy Online and other games, but nothing was close to the scale of popularity and level of addiction that WoW had.
I don't think we know the effects of modern video games on younger (aka developing) minds yet. Many of these games hire psychologists [0] to help engineer game play to keep people wanting to play because if they get bored and move onto another game it could be a loss. I don't think old school games like Zelda or Mario were engineered this way.
Think about a game like Tic-Tac-Toe and how after a certain age it becomes boring. Now add leaderboards, points for certain types of wins, customizable X's and O's, customizable game boards, avatars, seasons, etc. The game is the same but now you have multiple games encompassing the game of popular 'skins', points, 1-upping competitors, etc.
[0]http://theconversation.com/the-business-of-addiction-how-the...
Next up...
Guitar disorder
Karate disorder
Baseball disorder
Fast forward 10 years...
Someone coins the term "hobby disorder" after detecting numerous patterns of people wasting their life away on doing things they enjoy.
Fast forward 20 years...
Being passionate about anything is a thing of the past. Everyone works a corporate job at 1 of 5 companies in the world (people stopped innovating and a few large tech companies took over everything).
<tinfoilhat>
Sounds like a good way to begin the journey towards even more income disparity between the 1% and the rest of us.
</tinfoilhat>
Dumb question here: why is not having to feign passion for every single corner of technology (just to even get a chance at a foot in the door at each particular company) a bad idea?
The same thing happens with any skill based activity. Like learning a 120 move form in Karate, or pitching a no hitter (where every single time you prevent a hit, you get that hit of dopamine), etc..
Or programming where you might spend 15 hours a day consumed with it, forgetting to eat, etc., where you might get hundreds of dopamine hits during that time frame. Each one being triggered by your app doing what you wanted it to do.
Some people have a ridiculous amount of determination and will not give up until they do what they set out to do. It doesn't matter if it's a video game or not, the activity will consume them. Video games just make it easier for more people to get addicted, but that deeply rooted dopamine cycle will affect you no matter what you do. If video games didn't exist, you would find something else.
> Being passionate about anything is a thing of the past. Everyone works a corporate job at 1 of 5 companies in the world
And they play videogames to relax. And think life is good this way. Maybe today is the right time to avoid your dystopia.
So you spend a few hours playing games and you have nothing to sell or shill on Hackernews. Is that a problem?
Did you enjoy yourself playing those games? Yes? Then why isn't that enough?
Downtime is important.
You mean Starcraft II?
Bad times.
But it's just like any hobby. If it's not your profession, you need to make sure you're not putting your long-term health or the health of your relationships or other responsibilities aside just for quick shot of pleasure or adrenaline.
I actually am trying to cut out games, however, since I find the stress on the wrists/hands that comes with coding + piano + gaming to be too much. So, when push comes to shove, I just end up watching some SC pro matches these days, as opposed to putting my wrist health in jeopardy.
The high intensity, unreachable skill ceiling, and quick feedback loop of Starcraft really taught me how improving a skill needs to be an active process. You don't just get better by grinding out games (at least not efficiently); you need to study your own play, find weaknesses in it, and work on them methodically. Having that background has helped me in other kinds of skill acquisition.
(I know "curing the side effects" sounds bad, but it's basically what we want).
Addiction occurs when a pattern of exposure to an acute stimulus activates our reward system in such a way that our attentional and motivational systems are subverted to cause us to seek out more of that short term reward, at the expense of our long-term happiness.
The "satisfaction", as you put it, is the subjective experience of that overwhelming, system-breaking reward signal. To get that experience without the resulting behavioral consequences would require us to fundamentally augment how reward affects the brain. It's doubtful it's possible to do that with addictive stimuli without causing wide-reaching effects on general learning and adaptation.
There's an inflection point beyond which "[he] doth protest too much, methinks" becomes at least as parsimonious an explanation, if not moreso.
EDIT: Not to say that's happening here, specifically, but ... gestures around there's definitely some emotionally-driven reaction to this idea, amongst (and probably also behind) some of the criticism.
I've seen this behavior in my peers and in myself. Almost always among the addicts like myself you get two responses. "Yea no doubt lmao" or an exhaustive list of other addictions like television, cigarettes, Facebook, etc. trying to rationalize it to you and themselves. I'd like to point out in these cases it is far beyond a hobby. It is self-destructive. Going a day or more without eating or sleeping. Pulling an all-nighter because you just cant seem to get away from it. I've literally seen league of legends ruin a friends future because he couldn't study over getting in just-one-more-match. In my perspective video game addiction is an undeniable truth. And those vehemently opposed usually have a self-image interest in opposing it.
On top of that, as someone who has gaming as their primary hobby, seeing questionable armchair diagnosis brings back to memory shades of the anti-game hysteria that plagued the late 80s into the 90s. The feeling is decidedly “oh god not this shit again”. I’d be willing to wager a lot of the “Nintendo generation” that grew up on games is going to have a visceral reaction to what appears at first glance to be another attempt at demonizing them and what they do for fun, let alone the developers.
Put another way, if Tetris had been released today, I’d expect people to start banging on about addiction and how the developers are doing something wrong by releasing something so "adddictive". That deeply annoys me.
I've been "diagnosed" with all sorts of things. ADHD, ODD (obsessive defiance disorder), asperger's (ASD 1), GAD (generalized anxiety disorder), and I'm sure I qualify for others. The thing is, there was always this search like that to look for what was the ultimate cause for my distress. And then, after all that searching, nothing came of it because I grew as a person. And I think there's a small thing there, which is that if you have a diagnosis, you have an excuse, and oh, you'll have loads of friends with similar diagnoses who will encourage you to whine and wallow in it and make excuses, and there will even be competition as to who is the worse for it.
I think the system is very wrong.
We used to call jokingly call it being an 'information junkie', but it's real, not a joke.
Ehhh... no thanks. I'll stick to my games. Nothing against Football or sports, but DAMN those things are huge timesinks I don't personally want to be a part of. I generally just spend a few minutes reading the scores / major plays so that I can continue to have conversations with my coworkers (I do see the importance of smalltalk and being able to keep up socially, so that's the level I try to stay at with sports).
Spoiler alert: pretty much every hobby eats up a lot of time. I'm not convinced any particular hobby is better or worse for you, aside from health-mandated fundamentals (ie: a bit of exercise and time in the sun).
They are rarely seriously angry, excited and annoyed after watching TV, possibly with exception really involved sport match. That have impact to other people in the room, who shockingly, dont particularly enjoy dealing with that.
I like games, but gamers often feel entitled to behave the way that is considered rude in pretty much everybody else.
- Programming Disorder. For those weirdos always spending a huge chunk of their spare time before their desktops and laptops, hacking on something.
- Engineering Disorder. A superset, including the hardware-obsessed folks (e.g. electronic/radio engineering).
I feel like there's not much that would separate a gaming disorder from addictive behavior in general. So much so, actually, that to grant a special term for a video game related illness comes off as a little ridiculous.
Doesn't seem like "addiction" alone communicates what's happening there.
Credentials in most systems are useless outside of those systems (and even within them in certain cases). Some can be used to gain employment or other things but even those can be abstract and "virtual" in a sense.
As another poster (always_good) observes, there is a huge observable difference between video game addicts and substance abusers. I would not expect nerds to be substance abusers, and I would not expect substance abusers to be video game addicts, but everything about video games, in their construction of alternative realities and virtual goals and online communities, is like a glove tailored to the hand of nerd-dom.
You callin me a nerd, Tycho?
So, broadly, I can agree that a tendency towards escapism is what would make someone develop a "gaming disorder". And perhaps video games are the pinnacle of what our culture can offer as the richest form of escapism.
But I still don't think that's enough to draw a categorical line between the vices through which escapist tendencies become pathologized. It seems to me the solution to the mentation of escapism is to reinforce what you appeal to as "anti-nerdiness": pursuing meaning in a world you can (and do) fully occupy with the senses. And I agree there too.
Noting the bit at the end of the article about how terribly few people manifest a "gaming disorder" is what I'm not pleased to hear. Calling it a "gaming" disorder makes it seem like if you get rid of games, you've solved the problem. But obviously that's not necessarily the case, and so I think it's a useless distinction which potentially obscures the real issue.
If the WHO is making an indictment against the entertainment industry to formally warn against the ethical risks of making games which exploit escapist tendencies, that's fine. But I don't think there's actually much of a problem here that couldn't already be meaningfully identified as an addictive tendency.
In terms of marketing and supporting affected gamers, sure. But from a medical perspective, it's as arbitrary as classifying behaviors on Monday as somehow being qualitatively different from behaviors on Tuesday.
Showing how this parallels the exact same dopamine addiction patterns as gambling, porn, and social media provides greater insight and understanding.
The addiction research (especially with gambling) is more developed and provides much needed context and background.
People are going to think oh, it's just video games, no big deal. When they understand they are behaving exactly the same as a gambler, that might trigger something in them.
From a chemical / psychology perspective the brain operates the same no matter the domain.
If you achieve a world first in an MMO, that achievement is as real as winning a sports championship. Even if you don't do something with a competitive component, some gaming achievements are as real and can be meaningful to the individual as something like climbing a mountain that everyone has climbed before. I don't agree that it is any way helpful to just characterize games as some kind of fake activity that requires special attention. Other nerd-like activities would be anime watching and book reading. I would argue both of those have examples of extreme addiction.
The diagnosis criteria makes clear that the problem is when you start sacrificing normal life functions to get your fix. Lots of marriages have fallen apart while one partner was out playing golf. It doesn't matter how much time you spend on something, what separates a disorder from a hobby is when you are letting other responsibilities suffer.
Being world No 1 in an MMO may be a real achievement, but for the millions of mediocre players, being a mediocre but persistent sportsman is likely to lead to far greater life outcomes as side effects. (And, again, physical limits stop the temptation becoming all consuming.)
dis·or·der
noun
- a disruption of normal physical or mental functions; a disease or abnormal condition.
verb
- disrupt the systematic functioning or neat arrangement of.
- disrupt the healthy or normal functioning of.So, we all have a code and/or computer disorder. gg guys, lets get on dem zombie pillz ...
'gaming addiction' would be better term. and then even ,the problem is being addicted, not gaming.. people get addicted to all kinds of shit. having a interest in something more than other things is normal. and call that a disorder is criminal.
Yes, if the increasing priority begins to affect other aspects of your life negatively it's a disorder, like any other addiction, don't get defensive because you can relate to the description of the symptom.
Loads of people that have a passion for something, whether it be music, painting, coding, cooking, etc.. are experiencing a negative impact on their lives in some way. This seems very obvious to me. I play guitar and for many years I've practiced more than 10 hours a day. This had a very negative impact on my income to the point I had to stop to avoid becoming homeless. Is my passion a disorder because I don't make enough money with it? Are all successful musicians suffering a passion disorder? Should they quit making great music for the world and work for McDonalds living a depressed, and above all pointless life?
Some years later I started coding and a new passion arose. For years, and still today I code often more than 10 hours a day. Only now it positively impacts my income. Do I have a disorder? Do I need to stop and get treatment for being a passionate coder? I honestly think I'm quite lucky to have a passion for something that renders income.
I've played World of Warcraft for years, sometimes a real lot too. I have great memories of great times with my online friends. It is not something I will regret when my life comes to an end. I cannot play as much as I want because it will negatively impact my income. Should I regret now because I possibly have a 'gaming disorder', should I feel bad about the good times I had? Should I prevent others from having the time of their life? Should we not better ban eSports completely because too much gaming is bad? All pro players back to poverty, doing a stupid depressing job, but totally enjoying their 'disorder free' life?
Oh, and btw, I love coffee :)
There are a bunch of human behaviors, many of which are destructive, for which we don't really have insight into the underlying bio-physical explanation. Without that understanding, we should not be turning them into medical diagnoses.
Edit: found it https://youtu.be/of1k5AwiNxI?t=1150
That means that those few people that have serious consequences because of excessive gaming will have the right to get treatment covered by insurance.
I usually get bored pretty easily, and there are no games that can really make me play for a long enough time because there is something that frustrates me about the game mechanics.
It's actually very satisfying to think about game design as a programmer, and to spot what can be improved in games i like so i might better enjoy playing and sharing them in the future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/health/25iht-25money.1647...
As for career, workaholism is certainly considered a dysfunction.
You meant a pre-requisite for a promotion, right?
Workaholism is praised by our culture. In fact, it's probably necessary for capitalism to function at all. Without that societal impetus I imagine everything would crumble.
The addiction was very real.
Or did this merely replace 500 hours that would have been spent watching TV, Netflix or other types of entertainment?
The word addiction has a real meaning with some clinical ways for a trained person to diagnose somebody as having it.
I think of addiction more like alcoholism. Sure video games are engineered these days to be huge time sinks but that doesn't make it an addiction. If you can drop it (like you did) and it doesn't impact your life, its not an addiction.
I looked at PUBG videos very often, sometimes live streams, at the office during the day.
I was thinking about PUBG all day long. It was bad.
I was just pointing out there is a difference between an actual clinical addiction vs. a really bad habit.
I know the feeling about gaming and have been in similar shoes. I actually stop myself and check if I am doing something out of habit or because I want to... and have found I want to do other hobbies more, its just the inertia to get over the habitual actions that is the problem sometimes.
- the classical "neurotic player who doesn't like distractions and spends hours on VoIP getting angry at the game" is the reflection of a lot of the people who get into real-time multiplayer in MMORPGs or now games like Fortnite. This isn't quite how it stands for a lot of games, genuine one-and-done experiences like God of War or going back a bit to the Wii didn't have this continuous "one more" feedback or ridiculous length of content (3 hours a night raiding is tiresome and stressing for some people)
- The fighting game community has the oddity of gathering in large tournaments, building community on them and treating their games with immense discipline in learning to the point where others complain the barrier of entry to being "good" is too high. More than any other genre, fighters offer real-life experiences. E-sports is picking up on this*.
- Something to consider when determining the "why" of prolonged play is also the community or social aspect of the game. I play a lot of videogames, I admit, and one of the things that makes me commit a lot of hours into a game is when I can talk about it, talk to people in it, build a common interest and execute it. I live in a country where I speak my second language more than my first and hopping online to play in English is definitely some strong escapism. This is my experience, but so many people get online these days for the strong community tools (Discord, subreddits). It's primarily this aspect that makes me question any attempt to compare it to gambling/watching sports/binge watching movies or what have you. Gaming is built on a huge internet infrastructure because social features build long-time users.
I totally appreciate the definition of gaming disorder being sacrificing other healthy parts of life to continue feeding your need to play videogames but maybe this made sense if everyone was still playing the Super Nintendo (and even then we mocked it) but the world, and maybe it's just because enough huge corporations threw enough money at marketing to make it happen, has managed to genuinely change real-life because of videogames. This is far too dismissive.
Other posters mention this and I'd probably say that they refused to consult people in the game development industry/competitive gaming organizations/prominent players because they'd like to poison the well by assuming they'd never admit they have a problem (Although I suppose that might have to do with EA and the like refusing to have ethical debate instead of filtering us through an endless marketing machine, taking notes from Hollywood)
Side note: First post on HN after long time browsing. Feel free to rip this apart.
Something like this should not exist in the ICD. There should be a general addiction disorder that puts forth general criteria for showing that a person has an addiction for something.
This just looks like a scapegoat to me.
Absolutely ridiculous. The entire point of identifying a disorder and defining the mechanisms for diagnosis is so that we can create treatment plans to help people overcome these issues. You don't treat gaming addiction the same way you would heroine, alcohol, or gambling.
That's just as true of lots of diagnoses of physical and mental conditions and injuries. (bone fractures and PTSD are obvious examples.) The fact that bad parenting can cause a condition doesn't invalidate the diagnosis of the condition.
> Something like this should not exist in the ICD. There should be a general addiction disorder that puts forth general criteria for showing that a person has an addiction for something.
The inherent differences between different subjects of addiction require some source specific variation, but various addictive disorders in either the ICD or the DSM do have generally similar criteria.
> This just looks like a scapegoat to me.
A scapegoat for what?
You misunderstood me. The bad parent causes it by being there. If you removed the bad parent then there would be no problem.
One of the criteria (although not mentioned in this article) is that the person is having negative consequences happen in a family situation because of their gaming. A bad parent could cause these negative consequences by simply being a bad parent and as a result the kid could withdraw into gaming. With this disorder around the parent can simply blame the kid playing games without looking at their own behavior.
>A scapegoat for what?
For people who alienate those close to them, so that they can blame something else other than their behavior. If a kid wants to interact with their family then they will.
Everybody goes on little sprees of one kind or another during their lives.
Up next, "sudden love syndrome" ...the symptoms are about the same, aren't they? No, in fact they are exactly the same if you replace "your new serious romantic interest" with "video game".
And also, I remember being pretty addicted to D&D for awhile in my teen years, so we clearly need "RPG disorder" and better throw in "Board Game Disorder" for people hooked on Scrabble or Risk.
WHO, GTFO!
And who made you the authority on what constitutes a real disease? When I vanished from real life to exist almost exclusively within the confines of a virtual world, I surely would have appreciated professional help and the recognition that I'm not just weak but that I have a clinically diagnosable problem with clear steps on how to improve.
I am sure that there are many things one can criticize about this, from the diagnostic criteria to how our society generally handles what the majority considers abnormal behavior.
But calling this a bullshit disease is probably the most offensive way of making people who are dealing with it (however you define it) even more discouraged.
> goes on little sprees of one kind or another
Educate yourself before you post. From http://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/
> For gaming disorder to be diagnosed, the behaviour pattern must be of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning and would normally have been evident for at least 12 months.
Have you actually read what the WHO have said? They're not talking about about 'little sprees', they're talking about sustained patterns of behavior that stretch over at least 12 month and "result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas". This is not about people who occasionally blow off some social engagement so they can spend the weekend playing Counterstrike for 20 hours straight.
If it's not negatively affecting your life then, per definition, you're not covered by this.