While I love gaming, I appreciate its potential to negatively impact my mood and make others around me feel unimportant. As a psychotherapist working with many people for whom gaming is a central part of their lives, I see this awareness and experience as an asset of mine. I know the struggle – to some small extent I’m still working through it.
The Appeal of Video Games
In order to be able to work with any addiction, it is important to find a way to empathise with the appeal of the behaviour. With gaming, this means understanding the fundamental appeal of games and discovering the particular nature of them that draws people to take part in the first place. Being both a gamer and someone that has created games for a living, this is a subject that has fascinated me for years and tells me a lot about what it is to be human.
The gaming industry has grown from nothing to a majority pastime in less than 50 years: a relative blink of an eye. There are many parents and mental health professionals that managed to get through an entire childhood without playing a single digital game. For such people, it is a huge but by no means impossible leap of empathy to understand how ‘young’ people today can commit whole days to running around virtual worlds or find themselves packing every spare minute with repeated check-ins on their non-existent kingdoms.
Even for those that are deeply immersed in the hobby, it might be hard to capture what draws people to dedicate such vast amounts of their precious time. What follows is an outline of the core appeals of gaming, as it is understood within the industry itself. The bedrock for this comes from the work of Richard Bartle (Bartle 2009), who developed the Bartle Test of Internet Gaming. While Bartle’s ideas are broadly considered dated within the world of game development, they nonetheless form the foundation of how the business has come to recognize what players look for in games:
Socializing: The internet has opened up endless possibilities for meeting up with others in order to play video games. This has proved to have colossal importance for gamers. Much of the reason for this comes from our basic desire to be with others. Games can enhance this by allowing players to assist, gift and form guilds with one another, making their friendships tangible and measurable. An example of a game which relies heavily on socializing would be “ Second Life”.
Creativity: In games you are given characters to develop, worlds to build and cities to decorate. As a result players are able to use games as a powerful medium for both self-expression and self-exploration. This offers the chance to simultaneously engage in ultimately frivolous acts of design and creation while also enabling the deeper processing of unconscious fears and struggles. An example of a game that heavily relies upon creativity would be “Minecraft”.
Accomplishment: Typically all progress made in games is clearly documented and reported though feedback. As a result, games offer a way for players to see ‘constant measurable growth’, allowing them to persistently explore the game with a concrete sense of improvement, something we might struggle to find in the outside world. As a result, the surmountable difficulty that games provide is an immense proportion of their appeal. An example of a game that heavily relies upon accomplishment would be “The Legend of Zelda”.
Competition: Video games offer us a pure and safe way through which to gain superiority over others. Games that pitch us head-to-head come with the inherent excitement and fear of proving ourselves relative to someone else. Once again, this aspect of games has been greatly enhanced through the connectivity of the internet, which enables worldwide competitions and leagues to be accessible from our bedrooms. An example of a game that relies heavily upon competition would be “Tekken”.
Immersion: Out of all of these aspects of gaming, this is the one that is perhaps the most unique to video gaming. The others could be attributed to many games that existed thousands of years before the first computer, but digital games allow us to become immersed to a powerful new level. Whole worlds and histories can be explored and interacted with. Players are able to exist through alter-egos in environments that look and sound increasingly real, and where the narratives are becoming ever more compelling. An example of a game that heavily relies upon immersion would be “The Elder Scrolls Online”.
While video gaming has brought together these appeals in new and concentrated forms, they are all sources of enjoyment that we can understand on a broad, historic and human level. Where a child might turn to “The Elder Scrolls” to become immersed today, they might have used a novel a century ago. Where an adult might prove themselves in a game of “Fifa”, they might have once opted for an actual game of football.
A difference between these more time-honoured pastimes and video gaming is that the latter frequently ends up being played addictively. Whether, for any given individual, this propensity to addiction might have expressed itself in the absence of games remains unknown; as a society we have seen the power of video games to become addictive and we are, as a whole, concerned.
Discussion: The Fear of the New
Much accessible literature on the subject of gaming addiction presents the picture of a digital plague that is sweeping through our younger generations via modems. In 2010 the BBC ran a “Panorama” episode on the subject, arguably presenting games as a genuine danger to our youth. This is, admittedly, far sexier and news-worthy than the reality whereby, out of those people that game regularly, at least 9 out of 10 of them will do so with no adverse effects (Gentile et al 2009). Furthermore, what studies have been carried out imply that gaming addiction will tend to naturally resolve itself (King 2013a) with no lasting effects.
In more recent years, both The Sun and The Daily Mail have carried out articles that have compared gaming addiction to alcohol and hard drugs (Pafitt 2014). The former headline, in 2014, stated, ‘Gaming as addictive as heroin’. Not only are the bold claims made very questionable, they also run the risk, in my opinion, of alienating addicted gamers from getting help. If we are to exaggerate the dangers of gaming, we will not be taken seriously by those suffering from gaming addiction.
Historically, society has had a tendency to exaggerate the dangers of new technologies. Socrates decried the invention of writing, declaring that it would ‘create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls’, and that people would ‘appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing’ (Plato). Current fears about new technology are not limited to video gaming. As social media, the internet and mobile devices are all continuing their inexorable march toward the forefront of our lives, alarmist concerns for our mental wellbeing follow close behind. This is no surprise. Bad news sells – we are hardwired to prioritise being vigilant for things that might hurt us. Given a choice between a positive article and an article that contains a scare, we are almost always going to be more interested in the latter.
The historian Melvin Kranzberg rightly pointed out in his first law of technology that, “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” (Kranzberg 1986). To argue for games being a ‘bad’ or even a ‘good’ thing is to take part in a futile and never-ending debate. We are best off accepting the presence and importance of new technologies before establishing how best to make use of them.
The Evolution of Video Game Addiction
It is not enough for us to simply accept that some people will become addicted to games, regardless of the games themselves. There is plenty of evidence, both anecdotal and based in research that tells us that certain games lead to harmful play more than others. The absolute top suspect routinely comes out as being MMOs (see below for a definition). “Everquest”, one of the first and biggest such game, became widely known as ‘Evercrack’. Similarly “World of Warcraft” has, unfairly or fairly, earned itself the nickname of ‘World of Warcrack’. These references to the hardest of hard drugs go a long way to revealing the effect that games of this genre have had on users.