Gamers hired by father to 'kill' son in online games
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
My family acquired broadband in early 2005 after having dial-up for the previous few years which I wasn't allowed to use for anything but playing Checkers and Chess on Windows XP, so when I started using the internet around March 2005 I was in this wonderful world that I'd never seen before and I was instantly hooked. For Christmas 2005 my parents bought me a Dell Dimension 3100 and the internet became my life, I didn't have to share our family computer with my siblings and parents any more, I have exclusive access from my bedroom whenever I was awake.
For the entirety of 2006 and 2007 I would wake up, go to high school, come home and play Call of Duty 1 and post on internet forums until 10pm when I had to turn my computer off so my brother could go to bed. I played over 1,500 hours of Call of Duty 1 in those ~16 months (and was pretty good[1]), posted over 10,000 times across many different forums and had some interesting social experiences. School wasn't much fun, people didn't like me and I didn't enjoy "learning" subjects that I didn't care for. An hour spent on the internet was an hour I loved, an hour spent at school was an hour I hated.
From my very first internet experience (signing up for Newgrounds.com) I knew I wanted to make things, at the time I wasn't making anything of substance just dumb things (claymation[2], animation[3], simple flash games) and the majority of my time was taken up by video games. Eventually I got tired of video games and I found that I wasn't very good at drawing or animating so I moved on to making websites, video games were still a part of my life but website development was a noticeable portion. I would wake up and make websites that would improve the experience of people using the same forums I used, websites that would solve dumb problems I and my friends had.
I left high school in 2008 and I left with no qualifications (because I spent the previous years enjoying the internet and ignoring my school work) and I've been so fortunate that my interest in website development led me to start 2 websites in 2009 that went on to be very popular and generate enough revenue to give me a very good life.
The problem is the majority of my teenage life experience isn't a rarity, I know many people that I went to school with that had the exact same experience as me except (and this is the important part) they didn't find enjoyment in creating things and they haven't been lucky enough to have their "addiction" to the internet work out in their favour. They would wake up, get through the school day and go home and have fun playing video games and browsing the internet, more fun than they could get anywhere else.
If you consider how life is for the average person (go to school -> graduate -> get a job that pays enough for you to live but never really enjoy life -> retire) it's... well, to put it bluntly, it's shit. Now imagine you present these people (that know their life is never going to be anything special) with something that they find fun, something that affords them these great social opportunities and requires no real hard work on their part. They're going to inevitably sink their lives into it... most people in their 20s have parents that work for their retirement, that sort of long term thinking is fine when there's no alternative, but why would anyone today spend 40 years working menial jobs so they can retire when they can get instant gratification on the internet instead?
This problem is going to get worse and worse over the years to come, I know so many people in their early 20s like myself that grew up using the internet but unlike me are still living their lives as they were at 15. One person specifically that comes to mind is unemployed (exactly as the guy in the linked article) living with his parents, he has no job and spends all day playing MMOs. Why wouldn't he? He has no skills, nothing better than he wants to do, the world has nothing to offer him that the MMOs he sinks his life into can't.
The addiction to gaming isn't an addiction to the gaming, it's an addiction to the easy gratification. The world is shit and doesn't offer anything better for most people so there's no reason to do anything but play video games all day. I genuinely fear the day I lose interest in developing websites because there will be nothing left in the world for me, besides consuming the internet and playing video games.
Every generation has had this problem (the world not really offering that much to people) but the newer generations are finding an alternative to sticking to the path we have laid out for us, an alternative that provides instant gratification: the internet (and video games are a large part of that for most).
If you were born 50 years ago and you were told "work hard in school, get a job for 30 years and then retire and enjoy life!" you'd do it, because why not, there's no alternative. If you're told that now you can just browse the internet instead, all you need are parents willing to let you remain in your childhood bedroom. Why would you work for 40 hours a week making $8/hour just so you can rent a shitty apartment when you could just... not work? and get more enjoyment from the internet?
I'm not particularly smart (spending high school playing video games will do that to you) so I could be way off the mark, but it will not surprise me if unemployment continues to rise (and is high right now) because, in part, young people have no real reason to work. The gratification you get from the money associated with a minimum wage job cannot compete with the gratification the internet provides. If your parents aren't willing to kick you out (took mine 3 years to finally commit to it, by which point I was finally making money and could show I wasn't wasting my life) you're fine sitting at home all day.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cALs2RLivJ8
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exiTcRnOCEk
[3] http://citricsquid.deviantart.com/art/Ian-the-elephant-48945... (warning: auto playing sound)
Going into college, some of my friends started playing LoL. At first casually. Then more, then more, until there were three of us playing 8-12 hours a day. We got very good, stopped playing with our other friends, joined a pro team (what is now Fear). Those 8-12 hours a day became almost mandatory to "keep your edge".
I did this for two years. I spent an incredibly small percent of my time on schoolwork (Perhaps an hour a week), failed a class in my minor that I had a natural talent for (Calc II), skipped classes, and was generally lazy. All because I knew I could just forget whatever pressing problem was there and hop on LoL and get sucked up in it and have fun with my friends.
A year and a couple months ago, after coming back from a paid tourney, I stopped and thought about my life, after one of the many comments my parents made to me about spending all of my time playing video games. I had made a couple thousand dollars (re: in an entire year, probably $2k), but all of my creativity, my interests? I hadn't spent any time on a personal project in years. How long could I sustain this? What would happen when I moved out and started working full time? I didn't like how my current lifestyle answered these questions.
So I quit. Played catchup on the things that didn't stick in school, started writing a lot of software, cooking, exercising, just doing things. Going out. One of my other friends quit too because he was failing school and was forced to by his parents. All of this was difficult: I knew I wasn't going to be hanging out with them 2-3 times a week, playing games. It was very hard. If I wasn't a "creatively-motivated" individual, so to speak, I wouldn't have been able to do it. And even though I was, I still wasted 2 years of my life on video games.
What did we all have in common? Parents who gave us free rent, paid for our school, gave us free food, paid for our insurance, phone bills, etc.
My other friend ended up playing again and is on a different pro team now. "Pro" being word for "top 8, known team", not "pro" as in "making any kind of livable money".
It's way too easy to end up getting sucked into the instant-gratification that video games offer you if you have an addictive personality. Slightly less easy if you don't. The instant gratification is there regardless.
I have a great girlfriend that I can see myself marrying and having kids with in a few years. I'm stumped as to how to handle video games with my kid. And it's a problem that needs answering.
Once again, great post.
Nothing works better than the old fashioned way: spend time with them. I can only assume that your parents and your friends parents were like mine - too busy with their own things to really guide you through life.
All I needed was to be enabled to do something different and get good at that instead. This sounds trite but it isn't if you are a kid. Simple things like encouragement goes a long way. Help them research what is out there. Make them feel like a priority - I never explored anything else because I felt like I couldn't, for example something that required my parents to drive me around.
I never got as serious as you but I played an ungodly amount of Halo throughout high school and college. Tournaments etc. Thankfully not enough to really hurt my life. Once I got into web development it's taken a backseat. In really stressful times I still return to games to be able to escape. I'm very very undecided on what my overall take is and how I'm going to handle it when I have kids.
Thanks for sharing your story. I got into LoL when my friends moved to new towns since it was a way for us to "hang out" while being physically separated. Although I stopped playing, I still like to follow competitive LoL. It's kind of interesting because only now I can relate to how other people follow pro-sports.
I think it's natural that people like to play games. Our mind is wired for it, which is a whole subject in itself. We want to feel the things that games provide, like the classic purpose, mastery, and autonomy. It's just that games provide a much easier way to get there than modern America does. Our primal mind is geared towards daily survival tribal life, not long term investment.
That said, what was said about the rock concert in real life vs YouTube is true. That's what gets me to play the game of life instead, even if I have to delay gratification. I've got a taste of the good stuff (money, girlfriend, etc.) and I'm not going back.
To me the solution for young people is to help them to taste the same gratification, the feeling that life can be fun and promising. And that could mean something as simple as introducing them to a sport, a path outside of school, or just getting them to a place where they can meet new people.
Hanging out with other unemployed friends is fun. Getting high and going to the beach is fun. How is a 1970s slacker fundamentally different from 2005 slacker? I'd argue they are not.
Life has always been hard. Slackers have been around for ever. Are there fundamentally more today? Adjusted for unemployment levels? I don't think so.
They're not, they're just a lot easier. The effort that it takes to get high and go to the beach with friends is massive compared to the effort it takes load a video game and join a server.
When I was an aimless teenager type in the late 80s/early-mid 90s, people would eventually stop hanging out due to fatigue, and the idea that getting a job and going to work every day might be easier than running the streets hustling up something to break the boredom of existence. The notable exceptions to this were binge drinkers and drug addicts, who, if they had a steady way to score, would end up stuck in that life for the next 20 years.
>Slackers have been around for ever. Are there fundamentally more today?
Who knows? Sounds like a research question rather than just an opportunity for handwaving.
You sound depressed.
It's weird having to say that, but there is more to life than video games.
That said, I don't quite understand how the internet supplies one with the type of enjoyment s/he would get from retirement. Retirement, in the traditional sense, means having some kind of freedom from financial burdens, for many, the ability to travel the world and see things, and time to do other things besides work.
The internet provides many kinds of information and entertainment, but I would never say that it's a substitute for traditional retirement. If you're stuck working a crappy job flipping burgers and spending the rest of your time doing things online, there's nothing wrong with that, but you're going to have to go a long way to convince me that this is a viable alternative to being free from work, able to travel where I want, etc.
I spent high school and college playing video games as well, and I've spent a lot of time online in my life (we got the internet back ~1996), but I see the internet as more of another thing among many things to do, and not really as the only thing there is to do. At the risk of sounding like an old man (I'm 31), I would say, don't underestimate the value of real-world experiences. Watching a YouTube video of a concert, for example, is nothing compared to being there... and even with all the crazy VR tech that will be here in the near future (or even now), we're still a long way away from replacing real experiences with virtual ones.
I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't be content with how things are though. If you like to spend time online doing things, and that's all you want to do, then by all means - have at it. Just adding my own two cents worth here. :)
> Watching a YouTube video of a concert, for example, is nothing compared to being there... and even with all the crazy VR tech that will be here in the near future (or even now)
Definitely, but is being there worth spending your life doing a job you hate when you could not do that job and get the same thing (the concert) but with a not as great experience (via Youtube, not in real life)?
As for the rest, I don't think that you are required to work crummy jobs just so you can go out and have experiences in person. And I don't think that personal experiences are all life is about either.
I just think it's important to remember that for all the great things the internet provides us, it is no more a replacement for experiences than television is. It's just one way, among many, to do things. And not the only way.
The old vices are still here, before the internet, TV, before that, music, dancing, books. Fun in general was never considered a productive pursuit.
Casting a long shadow over all our notions of modern malaise, alcohol. This is not a new problem.
Kid says his dad over reacted, mistaken his gaming ways as an addiction. Claims he only played heavily for a few days and it was a misunderstanding between them. Wants time to find a suitable job - he can either play or don't play, just that he hasn't found a suitable job and plays to kill time.
It seems to me like denial/avoidance - I've personally experienced issues like this - you play heavily not to kill time but to delay the inevitable, delay the decisions you will have to face. You don't want to ask the hard questions and you simply put it off and procrastinate. If you're still in highschool, then it wouldn't mean much but once you graduate and in your mid twenties (and beyond), you have to shape up and not delve into activities that doesn't help build your character (heyoo).
I was unemployed/underemployed for nearly a year in 2009-2010 when companies (especially here in Michigan, with at-the-time highest in the nation unemployment) just weren't hiring. I don't know what the situation is like in this man's region of China, but I played Guild Wars (free to play minus the initial cost, I couldn't afford a monthly fee) after I had put in a set number of applications per day. When I did find a job, it was only between 10-15 hours per week, leaving me still plenty of time to keep applying and play Guild Wars.
It wasn't an addiction in my case, it was that there was literally nothing else going on in my life of any value. Of course I had friends and family telling me I was wasting my life playing this game rather than working. But no company was hiring anyone in my profession for any price, and even Wal Mart and McDonalds had 1000 people lined up to get an interview.
These days with a full-time job and a girlfriend, I find only my lunch break offers time for a little bit of Angry Birds and Wordament. That's as much gaming as I can get in.
Personally I've played about 2 hours in the past 9 months (thanks Steam for tracking that), because I rank gaming lower in importance than work (which has been a lot lately) and offline social life, however if I decided to leave (or was kicked out of) my job, or even if I just happened to free up a bunch of time, I'd have no problem spending a few days playing solidly, but equally I'd have no problem going straight back to no gaming again. Is this an addiction? (I've been addicted to a few different things and based on those experiences I'd answer the question with a no.)
It doesn't have to be gaming - it can be Reddit, Facebook, Drinking, etc.
(It's also different than, say, a new game is released and we all go on a 3 day gaming binge. Work/Career/Paying Rent/Job >>>> Leisure Activities. Prioritizing.)
Original quote. "I've come across very excessive players - playing for 10 to 14 hours a day - but for a lot of these people it causes no detrimental problems if they are not employed, aren't in relationships and don't have children."
If you simply force the gamer to quit, the underlying problems persist, and may continue to manifest themselves in similarly harmful/unconstructive/however-you-choose-to-describe-it behaviour such as a 100-hour-a-week TV habit.
A gaming habit is frequently (usually?) a symptom rather than the root cause of the problems, although poor life decisions can exacerbate depression making it hard to disentangle the two.
Btw, I hold a full time job and played over 8 hours of Prototype 2 yesterday(just to get the platinum trophy). On days I work I still end up playing 2-3 hours a day, I don't spend 5-6 hours playing games though because it would get in the way of my programming.
Certainly sounds like someone has a problem
That doesn't sound like it would calm concerned parents...
This might be a secondary issue in the way of some underlying problem, or it could be the main problem itself. It's a problem either way, and one that has to take priority.
If you are questing you are forced into non-secure zones, but as I said, people playing end-game can avoid this completely.
I never met my paternal grandfather, as he died in 1935, when my father was only 10.
But, my father reported that his father used to pay the neighborhood bully a nickel -- which of course would be $1-$2 in purchasing power today -- each time the bully beat up my father. I suppose the theory was that when my father learned to put up more than 5¢ of resistance, the bully would stop.
I suppose it worked; my father survived and thrived. The story left me suitably aghast that it put my own issues with bullies in perspective: at least my own father wasn't subsidizing them!
I wasn't wise enough to ask for more details -- like, how much did the bully make through this incentive program? -- either as a child, or later as an adult before my father died.
But let it serve as a parable to another generation: parenting strategies vary widely, across people, cultures, and eras. Your parents could be worse! And your worst nemesis as a child, in the playground or MMORPG, might just be an agent of your own parents.