After I get home, if this thread is still cooking, I'm going to see if I can gather up some citations and present an evidence-supported model for why gambling is addictive that will also demonstrate why MMOs are similarly addictive.
I could do it from memory right now but I'd get hit with a lot of [citation needed].
Okay.
Google Scholar was very helpful in finding articles available in full text for free.
I'm going to start with a quote from this because it seems particularly relevant:
Drug self-administration experiments have suggested that organisms try to maintain a homeostatic baseline level of dopamine in the ventral striatum, which in normal volunteers can be maintained by weak reinforcers found in everyday life. In contract, in pathological gamblers (who have reduced ventral striatal activation), natural reinforcers are not strong enough for dopamine to reach and maintain this homeostatic baseline level. At this stage, organisms seek additional, stronger reinforcers, such as drugs of addiction or gambling, to compenstate for the lack of activation.
This is important because it describes a mechanism by which pathological gambling can have a similar effect on the brain as drug abuse - increasing levels of dopamine in the ventral striatum. The notion that drugs are addictive because they affect dopamine levels while gambling does not is silly - dopamine is dopamine, regardless of how it gets there.
(By the way... that bit about pathological gamblers having reduced activation in the ventral striatum? We also see the same thing in smokers and alcoholics.)
That area of the brain called the ventral striatum is notable for two reasons. First, it's somewhat close to one of the "dopamine factories" of the brain, the substantia nigra. This means that anything that affects dopamine production or transport in the substantia nigra is going to have ripple effects in the ventral striatum. (This pathway is called the nigrostriatal connection.)
The second reason is that part of the ventral striatum is an area called the nucleus accumbens, frequently referred to as "the pleasure center." That's slightly misleading, though, because direct stimulation of a number of areas of the brain, not just the nucleus accumbens, can cause pleasure. The nucleus accumbens seems to have a particular role in that it stimulates action in response to a surge in dopamine.
But this all about gambling, so what about video games?
Well, there's evidence that video games can induce dopamine release in the ventral striatum. This is a very jargon-heavy article from 1998, but basically they bound a radioligand called raclopride to dopamine receptors to make the receptors visible during a PET scan, and then had the subject play video games. Basically, dopamine receptors "prefer" endogenous dopamine to raclopride, so the less raclopride you see, the more dopamine is hitting the receptors. Here are the relevant quotes:
The reduction in binding of raclopride in the striatum positively correlated with the performance level during the task and was greatest in the ventral striatum.
In the following quote, raclopride is abbreviated (C)RAC:
There was a significant correlation between performance level achieved and reduced [C]RAC-binding potential in all striatal regions (Fig. 2); the significance of this correlation was confirmed by an independent analysis using statistical parametric mapping (SPM). SPM revealed that this significant correlation mainly compassed the ventral striatum, predominantly the left side. These results further validate the putative link between the behavioural manipulation and dopamine release, and complement electrophysiological studies of behaviour in awake animals, in which dopaminergic neurotransmission was associated with sensorimotor functions related to rewarding, aversive and stressful stimuli. In monkeys, most dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area and pars compacta are activated by unexpected primary appetitive rewards and reward-predicting cues.
Now, I'd like to tie this back in to the first study I quoted (the Reuter study on pathological gambling). In it they say "reward-related responses in the ventral striatum can also be augmented by saliency." "Saliency" in this context means "how different is the stimulus from the surrounding environment?" In other words, saliency is how easily your brain can pick out one relevant stimulus from the barrage of other stimuli hitting our senses at all times.
I would argue that video games are intrinsically an exercise in saliency detection. You are constantly presented with simultaneous stimuli - sound effects, music, particle effects, lighting effects, HUDs, damage meters, HP meters, stats, enemy NPCs, friendly NPCs, and so forth - and it is up to you, the player, to shift your focus between these stimuli as they become relevant. Your health meter is irrelevant at the beginning of a Street Fighter IV match, but may become highly relevant when determining the risk of using a particular move. Your ammo meter is irrelevant during platforming levels but will suddenly be relevant when you encounter an enemy. This would imply that part of the attraction to video games involves the exercising of saliency-detection areas in the brain.
With that in mind, I'd like to draw your attention to the last line of the quoted text in the video game study:
unexpected primary appetitive rewards and reward-predicting cues
There are a few different hypotheses (another PDF link) on why dopamine in the striata (including the ventral striatum) has a such a profound influence on behavior, but the leading one is called the "reward prediction error" hypothesis. It goes a little like this:
1) Dopamine levels surge when you encounter an unexpected reward.
2) This triggers activity in the nucleus accumbens, which stimulates motor action.
3) These regions are further stimulated by looking for reward-predicting cues, with the most salient cues producing the most stimulation.
4) This induces a form of behavioral conditioning where unexpected rewards produces cue-seeking behavior, and finding salient cues themselves further reinforces the behavior.
5) The overall effect is to produce reward-seeking behavior that is out of proportion with the actual possibility of obtaining a reward.
There is a little controversy about the reward-error hypothesis - particularly, it happens very very fast, faster than behavioral modification seems to happen. But the controversy is not whether unexpected rewards and salient reward-predicting cues lead to release of dopamine, stimulating repetitive behavior, but how. We know it happens - that part is incontrovertible.
And we know it happens with drugs, gambling, and video games.
Think of the reward feedback loop of an MMO like WoW. You're told - "go retrieve 10 Wooly Mammoth Hides!" You go to the area where there are Wooly Mammoths. The Mammoth itself is a salient cue - it looks very different from the background. It predicts a reward - the hides only drop off of Mammoths. You go kill the Mammoth - no hide. Dopamine levels temporarily drop. So you kill a few more; maybe 2 more, maybe 5 more. The reward, when it actually happens, is unexpected. Dopamine levels rise. Eventually you learn to compensate for the temporary dopamine drop of failure by continuing the reward-seeking behavior. If the reward occurs too frequently, the rise and drop of dopamine isn't dramatic enough to stimulate repetitive behavior. If the reward occurs too rarely, there's the risk you're going to react to the lowered levels of dopamine with frustration and quit.
Casinos are finely tuned instruments of manipulating this cycle. The slot machine rewards you just frequently enough to keep you interested, but not too frequently. I see a similar cycle, though admittedly a less destructive one, in MMOs.
Is this feedback loop as strong as cocaine or heroin? Eh, I doubt it. These studies don't really compare the strength of the dopamine response in gambling to gaming to any particular drug. But that's a difference in degree, not of principle. The principle - alternating stimulation and reduction of dopamine levels in the ventral striatum - is the same whether it happens pharmacologically or through sensory stimulation.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
That begs the question: is Blizzard aware of these psychological studies? Maybe they have resident psychologists on the payroll who are advising their developers on how to design the game to be as addictive as possible?
Did you guys talk about how any case of extreme addiction can be noted by the switch from the dopaminergic pathway of the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens to the glutamatergic takeover of prefrontal cortex neurons directed towards the nucleus accumbens? I think the theory behind this is that the normal dopaminergic activities is a result of normal learned behavior, which diminishes over time with repetitive stimulation, and your brain, no longer willing to function under diminished dopamine, starts jerking itself off with the glutamate reacharound. Then again, I was pretty out of it when I learned that stuff so hey correct me if I'm wrong.
This event is highly correlated with severe addiction, and drugs that prevent glutamate release in the prefrontal cortex have been shown to help these severe addicts.
If any activity, drug related or not, can be puristically found to cause this takeover, that would be enough to make me believe that the activity is capable of being seriously addictive. That could actually be a good research paper if any of you are interested in getting published.
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
That begs the question: is Blizzard aware of these psychological studies? Maybe they have resident psychologists on the payroll who are advising their developers on how to design the game to be as addictive as possible?
Raises the question.
And they're designing the game to be less addictive. As people have said, they just need to keep people paying the 15 bucks. If anything, they want the game to be LESS addictive so that people don't tax their servers but still keep paying. They've made gear grinds easier, removed randomness from gear and are trying to reduce the need to log in every day.
And marketing is all about psychology, so they probably have people like that somewhere.
In any case, the psychological argument doesn't have much merit in the way it applies to video games. You can make the same argument for exercise, which also boosts dopamine levels. The bench is a salient cue as it looks different from the background, and the workout itself is very draining. At the end however, you are rewarded with a nice dose of dopamine.
This has nothing to do with being "predatory", but rather trying to offer as much entertainment as possible for those 10-15 bucks a month. This entertainment may be addicting for some people, but the problem is with those people because they usually have addicting personalities to begin with.
Man, if you think that grinding is "entertainment" I don't know what to say.
There are people who enjoy collecting coins and people who enjoy being whipped. I don't find those to be entertaining and yet whole communities are dedicated to such interests.
The absolute ideal for an MMORPG is actually to have the player play the game very little but constantly be forking over money to remain potentially in the game.
Unlike slot machines, which profit from continuous uninterrupted use, MMORPGs have server costs, infrastructure, staffing, etc. that actually makes profit decrease if the players are online 24/7.
Blizzard's current design direction with WoW is indicative of this realization. You don't need people to play sixteen hours a day. You need them to play two hours a day forever. Or even two hours a week. It doesn't matter! Just so long as the players get enough of a "hit" to keep them subscribing (or, in the case of games based on microtransactions, keep them buying more shit).
Hence, WoW is going in the direction of things like dailies and quest queues and other time-saving methods that are designed to let you go on and get as fast a satisfaction as possible, and then come back later to get more.
Did you guys talk about how any case of extreme addiction can be noted by the switch from the dopaminergic pathway of the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens to the glutamatergic takeover of prefrontal cortex neurons directed towards the nucleus accumbens? I think the theory behind this is that the normal dopaminergic activities is a result of normal learned behavior, which diminishes over time with repetitive stimulation, and your brain, no longer willing to function under diminished dopamine, starts jerking itself off with the glutamate reacharound. Then again, I was pretty out of it when I learned that stuff so hey correct me if I'm wrong.
I remember reading something like that, too, but I don't fully understand it yet. There are other functions of glutamates and GABA in addiction, even less severe ones, and I'm not sure what the difference is.
This event is highly correlated with severe addiction, and drugs that prevent glutamate release in the prefrontal cortex have been shown to help these severe addicts.
If any activity, drug related or not, can be puristically found to cause this takeover, that would be enough to make me believe that the activity is capable of being seriously addictive. That could actually be a good research paper if any of you are interested in getting published.
I'll file that one away in case I ever make it back to school.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The absolute ideal for an MMORPG is actually to have the player play the game very little but constantly be forking over money to remain potentially in the game.
Funny, because I would never describe Eve Online as "the absolute ideal for an MMORPG".
The absolute ideal for an MMORPG is actually to have the player play the game very little but constantly be forking over money to remain potentially in the game.
Unlike slot machines, which profit from continuous uninterrupted use, MMORPGs have server costs, infrastructure, staffing, etc. that actually makes profit decrease if the players are online 24/7.
Blizzard's current design direction with WoW is indicative of this realization. You don't need people to play sixteen hours a day. You need them to play two hours a day forever. Or even two hours a week. It doesn't matter! Just so long as the players get enough of a "hit" to keep them subscribing (or, in the case of games based on microtransactions, keep them buying more shit).
Hence, WoW is going in the direction of things like dailies and quest queues and other time-saving methods that are designed to let you go on and get as fast a satisfaction as possible, and then come back later to get more.
Exactly.
Thankfully, I think this happens to be healthier than the Everquest model, which was basically "if you're not going to be here for at least four hours, don't fucking bother."
Capitalism and human well-being coinciding! Yay!
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The absolute ideal for an MMORPG is actually to have the player play the game very little but constantly be forking over money to remain potentially in the game.
Unlike slot machines, which profit from continuous uninterrupted use, MMORPGs have server costs, infrastructure, staffing, etc. that actually makes profit decrease if the players are online 24/7.
Blizzard's current design direction with WoW is indicative of this realization. You don't need people to play sixteen hours a day. You need them to play two hours a day forever. Or even two hours a week. It doesn't matter! Just so long as the players get enough of a "hit" to keep them subscribing (or, in the case of games based on microtransactions, keep them buying more shit).
Hence, WoW is going in the direction of things like dailies and quest queues and other time-saving methods that are designed to let you go on and get as fast a satisfaction as possible, and then come back later to get more.
Right, and that makes it less addictive if anything. If they pull it off, then WoW is more of a hobby and has less potential to wreck a person's life.
What we really need to worry about is creative marketing tactics that have the accidental effect of making addicted customers better customers. Daily quests were actually introduced as a method of curbing abusive gaming by spacing rewards, just like instance timers, but they had the end result of creating a periodic obligation that I for one am repelled by. I'm still not sure I'd like to go back to the bad old days when "camping spawns" was the most vital phrase in the MMO lexicon, though.
I worry that EA, for instance, would develop a game with role-playing character development, no initial or periodic cost, and items sold for cold, hard USD. Well, "gold" or "points" or whatever, but it amounts to the same thing. The end result of this is a property whose most avid (I would say addicted, but if the word eclipses the concept it represents in contentiousness then whatever terminology suffices) patrons are the most profitable to EA. They would be irresponsible to their shareholders if they failed to recruit B.F. Skinner's head in a jar.
The absolute ideal for an MMORPG is actually to have the player play the game very little but constantly be forking over money to remain potentially in the game.
Funny, because I would never describe Eve Online as "the absolute ideal for an MMORPG".
That's because you (and many others) hate the PVP environment. It is close though - the danger is you simply fall off the bandwagon however when you realize all you do is change skills.
Shattered Galaxy is another one which had a model which was moving in the right direction.
EDIT: One would note this is also all simply talking about the ideal business outcome for an MMO.
I remember back in the Everquest days writing a giant thing about how they're making colossal mistakes in their design decisions from a business standpoint.
EQ's game mechanics essentially encouraged you to sit there as much as humanly possible in order to benefit from the game, to camp spawns, spend five hours getting a party together to kill a single dragon, etc.
I was like "This is insane! EQ would be so much smarter to design the game so that people could get their fill out of a couple hours a day or even every other day, with incentives for you to take breaks between play and that".
People flamed the shit out of that post. They were like "thats stupid no 1 would play and eq would fail in a month ur dumb what kind of company would make a game that is designed to get you to not play it all the time"
I remember back in the Everquest days writing a giant thing about how they're making colossal mistakes in their design decisions from a business standpoint.
EQ's game mechanics essentially encouraged you to sit there as much as humanly possible in order to benefit from the game, to camp spawns, spend five hours getting a party together to kill a single dragon, etc.
I was like "This is insane! EQ would be so much smarter to design the game so that people could get their fill out of a couple hours a day or even every other day, with incentives for you to take breaks between play and that".
People flamed the shit out of that post. They were like "thats stupid no 1 would play and eq would fail in a month ur dumb what kind of company would make a game that is designed to get you to not play it all the time"
What kind of company, indeed.
Man, I remember having exactly the same conversations.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I remember back in the Everquest days writing a giant thing about how they're making colossal mistakes in their design decisions from a business standpoint.
EQ's game mechanics essentially encouraged you to sit there as much as humanly possible in order to benefit from the game, to camp spawns, spend five hours getting a party together to kill a single dragon, etc.
I was like "This is insane! EQ would be so much smarter to design the game so that people could get their fill out of a couple hours a day or even every other day, with incentives for you to take breaks between play and that".
People flamed the shit out of that post. They were like "thats stupid no 1 would play and eq would fail in a month ur dumb what kind of company would make a game that is designed to get you to not play it all the time"
What kind of company, indeed.
Man, I remember having exactly the same conversations.
May I offer the observation that this conversation on any type of official forum is automatically selecting for...you know I don't know why those people are dumb.
Also, I don't think we are going to see a pure cash-driven gaming system become very popular and prevalent any time soon.
There are "games" (more online social environments) that do that, like Second Life and Entropia Universe, which are purely real-money driven.
I don't think they're going to turn into the next WoW any time soon.
Or even the next Mass Effect.
However, microtransactions even in your single-player games are the future. ME2's "Cerberus Network" uses a pretty amazing business model, from a marketing and commodity perspective. I am in awe at the brilliance and elegance of it, and I think it's a pretty clever model for future success.
It seems pretty clear, from Feral's posts, that there's not a significant difference between video game addiction any any other sort of addiction, (especially gambling addiction, which most people would agree is a serious medical condition, and not something where you should just laugh at the poor guy for being such a loser). I can definitely recognize some signs of video game addiction in myself. Last weekend I had plans to go out with some friends, but I got sucked into a game instead, so I just... didn't go. The game wasn't even very fun, but I kept telling myself "just one more turn... just one more turn..." until it was too late to go.
I don't know what conclusions to draw from that. I certainly don't think video games should be illegal, or that video game companies are evil. I guess the main thought I have is to be aware that our bodies are FRAGILE, and that they can be affected in very strong ways by any number of things which might not be obvious. Stress, sunlight, dehydration, diet, clothes, all of that will affect your life much more than you might think. Maybe kids need to be educated more about video game addiction. That seems a lot more relevant for a grade school health class, comparing to scaring kids with horror stories about heroin.
If I keep going with that train of thought... I start to seriously question the idea that humans have free will. For example, there's all sorts of things that can mess up a computer. It's not really the computer's fault if it gets a virus, or burns out a circuit. Likewise, if you are entirely the result of external factors then... yeah, you're pretty much helpless. Everything in your life is an addiction, and there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to hope that your addictions are relatively healthy ones.
Anyway, I personally think that people going all "poopsock" on a game is not a problem that will ever truly go away on its own, because some people will just do that.
But, I think that we are moving away from companies deciding that is sound business strategy. They aren't motivated by ethical concerns, but by money-making.
And, from a money-making stance, designing your game (especially online games) to be a constant revenue stream that doesn't require constant time investment from the end consumer is an ideal.
Which means, as companies move in the direction of encouraging regular, but not constant, play by its userbase, the amount of people who are addicted to continuous play will decrease. They will still be addicted, they might still orient their lives around the game, but it may be less severe an addiction than the current "digital hermits".
I got theories on business opportunities, marketing vectors, and gameplay mechanics that companies could utilize to maximize profits while minimizing social impact on the end consumer. This latter component is an essential part of a new wave of digital entertainment marketing, because positive public perception of the product will result in a vast net increase in consumer subscription and regular microtransaction buy-in.
This sort of stuff gives me a big, turgid capitalism boner, but that's neither here nor there.
It's a thing that will work itself out, because there's so much money to be made off the regular-but-casual gamer.
I start to seriously question the idea that humans have free will.
Well, I have to admit that I have a very cut-and-dried, cause-and-effect view on behavior and I use a lot of mechanical metaphors. That's kind of off-putting to some, and certainly colors my arguments a great deal.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
It'd be a great startup...if the startup costs weren't so high and the competition so vicious.
I guess as WoW moves to dailies, the people who do the more time-consuming content will become smaller. I wonder if the 5/10man instances fill a middle ground well.
It seems pretty clear, from Feral's posts, that there's not a significant difference between video game addiction any any other sort of addiction, (especially gambling addiction, which most people would agree is a serious medical condition, and not something where you should just laugh at the poor guy for being such a loser). I can definitely recognize some signs of video game addiction in myself. Last weekend I had plans to go out with some friends, but I got sucked into a game instead, so I just... didn't go. The game wasn't even very fun, but I kept telling myself "just one more turn... just one more turn..." until it was too late to go.
I don't know what conclusions to draw from that. I certainly don't think video games should be illegal, or that video game companies are evil. I guess the main thought I have is to be aware that our bodies are FRAGILE, and that they can be affected in very strong ways by any number of things which might not be obvious. Stress, sunlight, dehydration, diet, clothes, all of that will affect your life much more than you might think. Maybe kids need to be educated more about video game addiction. That seems a lot more relevant for a grade school health class, comparing to scaring kids with horror stories about heroin.
If I keep going with that train of thought... I start to seriously question the idea that humans have free will. For example, there's all sorts of things that can mess up a computer. It's not really the computer's fault if it gets a virus, or burns out a circuit. Likewise, if you are entirely the result of external factors then... yeah, you're pretty much helpless. Everything in your life is an addiction, and there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to hope that your addictions are relatively healthy ones.
I believe that the general addiction rule of thumb is, if you admit you have a problem and are seeking treatment, then abstinence is probably the best recourse rather than stepping down. That's guidelines for alcohol, though. If you have a really serious problem that's drastically affecting your lifestyle so that normal activities no longer excite you at all, that's where medicine steps in.
I wouldn't bother with all this free will stuff. For all practical purposes, this nucleus accumbens thingamajig is akin to looking at tea leaves as far as the state of neurology is concerned. I don't remember much about psychology at all, but I think that if you maintain the locus of control on yourself, even an illusory confidence gained will cause you to take action. But then again I haven't taken psychology in a while, so don't call your lawyer.
Uh, I guess you can try to see how much your discipline has regressed by promising someone or yourself that you'll only do so and so amount of x recreational activity a day and see how that works out for you. In all controversially addictive activities, there is biological evidence that sensory stimulation even slightly related to the activity (for my own example, eating dinner makes me yearn to watch a movie on my computer, maybe a druggie who shoots up in a back alley will get drug yearnings every time he walks by it) (oh, and the munchies when you do cannabis is an entirely different thing, but is fascinating and entirely explained) will trigger the old YOU MUST DO X ACTIVITY drug-seeking behavior, so try to disrupt as many routines as possible in order to avoid anything that you have previously linked to I dunno video games or whatever.
But then again, this is all documented advice for drug use. Drugs are pretty great for medical studies because you can pretty much follow them into the brain and see what happens from there. There is no WoWoid or grindamate that makes for neat, short, grant-magnet publications.
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
It seems pretty clear, from Feral's posts, that there's not a significant difference between video game addiction any any other sort of addiction, (especially gambling addiction, which most people would agree is a serious medical condition, and not something where you should just laugh at the poor guy for being such a loser). I can definitely recognize some signs of video game addiction in myself. Last weekend I had plans to go out with some friends, but I got sucked into a game instead, so I just... didn't go. The game wasn't even very fun, but I kept telling myself "just one more turn... just one more turn..." until it was too late to go.
I don't know what conclusions to draw from that. I certainly don't think video games should be illegal, or that video game companies are evil. I guess the main thought I have is to be aware that our bodies are FRAGILE, and that they can be affected in very strong ways by any number of things which might not be obvious. Stress, sunlight, dehydration, diet, clothes, all of that will affect your life much more than you might think. Maybe kids need to be educated more about video game addiction. That seems a lot more relevant for a grade school health class, comparing to scaring kids with horror stories about heroin.
If I keep going with that train of thought... I start to seriously question the idea that humans have free will. For example, there's all sorts of things that can mess up a computer. It's not really the computer's fault if it gets a virus, or burns out a circuit. Likewise, if you are entirely the result of external factors then... yeah, you're pretty much helpless. Everything in your life is an addiction, and there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to hope that your addictions are relatively healthy ones.
I believe that the general addiction rule of thumb is, if you admit you have a problem and are seeking treatment, then abstinence is probably the best recourse rather than stepping down. That's guidelines for alcohol, though. If you have a really serious problem that's drastically affecting your lifestyle so that normal activities no longer excite you at all, that's where medicine steps in.
I wouldn't bother with all this free will stuff. For all practical purposes, this nucleus accumbens thingamajig is akin to looking at tea leaves as far as the state of neurology is concerned. I don't remember much about psychology at all, but I think that if you maintain the locus of control on yourself, even an illusory confidence gained will cause you to take action. But then again I haven't taken psychology in a while, so don't call your lawyer.
Uh, I guess you can try to see how much your discipline has regressed by promising someone or yourself that you'll only do so and so amount of x recreational activity a day and see how that works out for you. In all controversially addictive activities, there is biological evidence that sensory stimulation even slightly related to the activity (for my own example, eating dinner makes me yearn to watch a movie on my computer, maybe a druggie who shoots up in a back alley will get drug yearnings every time he walks by it) (oh, and the munchies when you do cannabis is an entirely different thing, but is fascinating and entirely explained) will trigger the old YOU MUST DO X ACTIVITY drug-seeking behavior, so try to disrupt as many routines as possible in order to avoid anything that you have previously linked to I dunno video games or whatever.
But then again, this is all documented advice for drug use. Drugs are pretty great for medical studies because you can pretty much follow them into the brain and see what happens from there. There is no WoWoid or grindamate that makes for neat, short, grant-magnet publications.
Yeah that's some good advice. And I don't really worry about having free will, that was just some idle thinking. I think part of the problem for me is that I do so much of my work on a computer. So it's a pretty slippery slope from "I'll get some work done!" to "I'll just check my email real quick..." to "maybe i'll check out that browser game for a few minutes..." and then "well that game sucked, but I've got enough time for just one game of starcraft..."
try working on a different, vastly suckier computer
yeah I dunno dude
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
this is the real reason why software engineers have such crappy jobs
they think "hey, maybe I should do something about this" but then
they're all fragmenting CS source binaries and snorting them through USB ports
intravenous firewire with peer transmitted viruses
porn
edit: actually, the number one downfall of software engineers is probably krispy kreme
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
well, sex is a classic example of the evolution of addiction in that it can be tied together with previously innocuous stimuli. That's where fetish comes from. In actuality, there are entire pathways devoted to sex, so our bodies could be said to be built for the addiction.
Also, on an unrelated note, I now have zero sympathy for IT guys. Take note: not backing up years of accumulated web interactive course material and losing an unprecedented amount of that data in a server wipe will not only get you fired, it will make a thousand students and educators take to the streets desperate for your blood. BACK IT UP.
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I remember back in the Everquest days writing a giant thing about how they're making colossal mistakes in their design decisions from a business standpoint.
EQ's game mechanics essentially encouraged you to sit there as much as humanly possible in order to benefit from the game, to camp spawns, spend five hours getting a party together to kill a single dragon, etc.
I was like "This is insane! EQ would be so much smarter to design the game so that people could get their fill out of a couple hours a day or even every other day, with incentives for you to take breaks between play and that".
People flamed the shit out of that post. They were like "thats stupid no 1 would play and eq would fail in a month ur dumb what kind of company would make a game that is designed to get you to not play it all the time"
What kind of company, indeed.
Even WoW really takes way too much time to be optimal from a server standpoint though. If you could somehow get people to pay say 5 bucks a month for some facebook game that used only minimal bandwith, that would be the way to really make the megabucks. Every minute someone playing your game is lost money, so you'd want to make it appealing enough to get people to spend money but put in incentives for people to pace themselves as much as possible.
The real golden goose would be the non-addictive addictive game.
Alternatively you could figure out some way to offset the server load to user's computers, while still providing enough of a service to justify a small monthly fee. For example, a racing game that allows you to practice on your own computer or run custom races, but has official tournament races, downloadable content, etc, that require you to be subscribed. Or some kind of Civ style massive TBS where you play out the game on your computer and send in your turn once per day, etc.
I'm going to ask again what we're using as a meaningful definition of addiction. I mean, you can't just call anything you do a lot daily addiction. Does it need to be harmful?
If Bob handles all his obligations and exercises and maintains hygiene and spends time with his loved ones, then plays WoW for six hours at the end of the day*, is he addicted? Or does he just really fucking love WoW?
*maybe he even plays with his girlfriend or wife. Would that change it?
I have yet to see a person like this whom also plays WoW.
It's like looking for a Phish fan that doesn't smoke pot.
Well, let's take the CAGE questionnaire for alcohol, which I guess is better than AUDIT-C for trans-application.
1. Have you ever felt you should CUT down on drinking?
2. Have people ANNOYED you by criticizing your drinking habits?
3. Have you ever felt GUILTY about your drinking?
4. Have you ever needed to drink an EYE-OPENER the first thing in the morning to get rid of the shakes?
2 or more yes responses implies an alcohol problem, and 3 means alcohol abuse for sure.
Now with the exception of the last question, which is fairly specific to alcohol, the questionnare can be applied to any addiction. Applying it to video games makes for an interesting point. What we're really trying to find out with these four questions is actually an additional 2 questions:
Has <drinking> affected your life? (Scale of 1 to 10)
Would you be interested in cutting down on <drinking>? (Scale of 1 to 10, basically a mirror of the first question).
When an activity interferes with the enjoyment and progression of your daily life and health, it is considered to be in need of medical intervention. Whether it is classified as an addiction or not, treatment (which may or may not include medication) will be recommended by a physician. That's just from a medical standpoint, though: if you're doing something unhealthy, your doctor will tell you to quit it, but it's still up to you as long as your life isn't in danger ... of death.
But since this is such a cut and dry issue that avoids all controversy, as real medicine often tries its best to do, you're probably not interested. Addiction will only be truly socially defined by various levels of politics, and when I say that word I'm no longer interested in continuing so I'll stop
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I'm going to ask again what we're using as a meaningful definition of addiction. I mean, you can't just call anything you do a lot daily addiction. Does it need to be harmful?
If Bob handles all his obligations and exercises and maintains hygiene and spends time with his loved ones, then plays WoW for six hours at the end of the day*, is he addicted? Or does he just really fucking love WoW?
*maybe he even plays with his girlfriend or wife. Would that change it?
I have yet to see a person like this whom also plays WoW.
That's a pretty insulting generalization.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
1, 2, and 3 of that CAGE questionnaire could be easily explained by living in Utah. It's very difficult to squarely nail down what is and is not an addiction when the word means "an activity whose compulsory nature has caused problems in the actor's life." It would be very easy to (and I'm sure it's been done) describe something like homosexuality in this way, and it would even be accurate if we made the caveat that the "problems" in question arise from a sick society, not a sick individual.
I can't help but draw a parallel to the casual marijuana user who gets picked up on felony possession, then loses his job, his family, and 18 months or however long the mandatory minimum is in whatever backwards state is prosecuting him. I think that, if he feels a compulsion to use marijuana in a situation where this is a plausible consequence, it's reasonable to call that compulsion an addiction (by the "causes problems" definition) even if we were to pretend for the sake of argument that there are no other adverse effects than the external, socially-ordained prison sentence. Certainly it's fair to say that this hypothetical guy is suffering adverse consequences as a result of his compulsion to use marijuana, even if these negative consequences (personal, as well as costs to the State in loss of production, correctional maintenance, legal fees) don't arise from the drug abuse itself. In the US, we call this guy a felon. In Amsterdam, they would call him Steve.
I would prefer a framework for defining addiction that focused on the individual, and the degree of interference that their addiction applies to their material aspirations, considering only the moral framework of the individual addict rather than the wider views (and penal code) of society. The problem you run into there is the (real, if not so common) people whose primary material aspiration is amassing an unlimited supply of drugs with which to flee the phenomenal world for an internal fantasy that has more kaleidoscopes and walruses... or XP and Gold, as it were. But I think this is actually a real problem for the treatment of addiction; I don't honestly believe that a psychologist or psychiatrist or any other kind of doctor can, utilizing only the discipline of medicine, distinguish between an addiction of this magnitude and the sort of bizarre, socially-discouraged obsession that is historically associated with some of the greatest minds of all time.
Hold on now, I only said they can't make the distinction using medicine... but they can and do make that distinction every day, on the eminently reasonable basis that a Tony Montana-style pile of coke isn't the product of a great mind, but of a socially undesirable degenerate. And I can't imagine that it's common to find someone who remains quite so enthusiastic about cocaine after detoxing from it for a couple months. But the consequence of this is that social values - for instance, the relative social value of a man obsessed with solar panels to a man obsessed with crack pipes - have always played a major role in the determination of addiction. The pretense that addiction is a purely medical phenomenon is about as accurate as the pretense that our news media is unbiased.
Perhaps the value of keeping society rolling on well-oiled treads is ultimately even greater than the value of providing internally-consistent mental health care service to individuals, though. I'm not actually decrying this as an usurpation of power by a cabal of cloaked, dagger-wielding mental health professionals; on the contrary, I'm arguing for a shift of focus from addiction as a medical issue to be addressed on an individual basis to addiction as a systemic issue to be addressed on a societal basis. We're already dealing with it as if it were a societal issue, if we take a few moments to really evaluate the medical distinction between a fixation, an obsession, and an addiction. I'm afraid that too often this distinction is made in the same way as the colloquial distinction between insanity and eccentricity: wealth.
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read): If an unemployed patient can't pay off his credit cards, but maintains his raid schedule in lieu of a more aggressive job-search, a reasonable doctor would rightly diagnose addiction. Would it still be addiction if the same patient used his generous trust fund to play the same amount of WoW (and with the same degree of compulsion) while maintaining exceptional physical fitness thanks to a rigorous personal training regimen? If he (remember, trust fund, gobs of spare time here) has a vibrant social life that the pursuit of subsistence denied his penniless alter-ego? Distinguish, using only the tools of medicine, the apparently-mad fixation displayed by this guy from that of a WoW addict.
I've recently heard of a game that I thought were pushing things a bit too far. It's a Dinsey web browser game aimed at younger kids called Club Penguin. They get the kids hooked up to that thing by letting them make make a little penguin avatar to play and interact with all their friends for free.
But soon the kids realize that most of the game's content is blocked off and requires a membership. Of course the kids don't want to be second class citizens in the wonderful world of Club Penguin so they harass their parents until they get what they want.
I guess some people would think this isn't much different than kids begging their parents for the latest cool toy everyone else has but I feel the social aspect makes the kids much more likely to get hooked completely and for a longer period of time.
1, 2, and 3 of that CAGE questionnaire could be easily explained by living in Utah. It's very difficult to squarely nail down what is and is not an addiction when the word means "an activity whose compulsory nature has caused problems in the actor's life." It would be very easy to (and I'm sure it's been done) describe something like homosexuality in this way, and it would even be accurate if we made the caveat that the "problems" in question arise from a sick society, not a sick individual.
I can't help but draw a parallel to the casual marijuana user who gets picked up on felony possession, then loses his job, his family, and 18 months or however long the mandatory minimum is in whatever backwards state is prosecuting him. I think that, if he feels a compulsion to use marijuana in a situation where this is a plausible consequence, it's reasonable to call that compulsion an addiction (by the "causes problems" definition) even if we were to pretend for the sake of argument that there are no other adverse effects than the external, socially-ordained prison sentence. Certainly it's fair to say that this hypothetical guy is suffering adverse consequences as a result of his compulsion to use marijuana, even if these negative consequences (personal, as well as costs to the State in loss of production, correctional maintenance, legal fees) don't arise from the drug abuse itself. In the US, we call this guy a felon. In Amsterdam, they would call him Steve.
I would prefer a framework for defining addiction that focused on the individual, and the degree of interference that their addiction applies to their material aspirations, considering only the moral framework of the individual addict rather than the wider views (and penal code) of society. The problem you run into there is the (real, if not so common) people whose primary material aspiration is amassing an unlimited supply of drugs with which to flee the phenomenal world for an internal fantasy that has more kaleidoscopes and walruses... or XP and Gold, as it were. But I think this is actually a real problem for the treatment of addiction; I don't honestly believe that a psychologist or psychiatrist or any other kind of doctor can, utilizing only the discipline of medicine, distinguish between an addiction of this magnitude and the sort of bizarre, socially-discouraged obsession that is historically associated with some of the greatest minds of all time.
Hold on now, I only said they can't make the distinction using medicine... but they can and do make that distinction every day, on the eminently reasonable basis that a Tony Montana-style pile of coke isn't the product of a great mind, but of a socially undesirable degenerate. And I can't imagine that it's common to find someone who remains quite so enthusiastic about cocaine after detoxing from it for a couple months. But the consequence of this is that social values - for instance, the relative social value of a man obsessed with solar panels to a man obsessed with crack pipes - have always played a major role in the determination of addiction. The pretense that addiction is a purely medical phenomenon is about as accurate as the pretense that our news media is unbiased.
Perhaps the value of keeping society rolling on well-oiled treads is ultimately even greater than the value of providing internally-consistent mental health care service to individuals, though. I'm not actually decrying this as an usurpation of power by a cabal of cloaked, dagger-wielding mental health professionals; on the contrary, I'm arguing for a shift of focus from addiction as a medical issue to be addressed on an individual basis to addiction as a systemic issue to be addressed on a societal basis. We're already dealing with it as if it were a societal issue, if we take a few moments to really evaluate the medical distinction between a fixation, an obsession, and an addiction. I'm afraid that too often this distinction is made in the same way as the colloquial distinction between insanity and eccentricity: wealth.
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read): If an unemployed patient can't pay off his credit cards, but maintains his raid schedule in lieu of a more aggressive job-search, a reasonable doctor would rightly diagnose addiction. Would it still be addiction if the same patient used his generous trust fund to play the same amount of WoW (and with the same degree of compulsion) while maintaining exceptional physical fitness thanks to a rigorous personal training regimen? If he (remember, trust fund, gobs of spare time here) has a vibrant social life that the pursuit of subsistence denied his penniless alter-ego? Distinguish, using only the tools of medicine, the apparently-mad fixation displayed by this guy from that of a WoW addict.
There is a distinction between addiction, fixation, and obsession and it's called a psychiatrist referral, where you get one if you land anywhere between the commas. If you're rich and you spend your money on video games you'll probably get multiple referrals AND tons of test which will get the referring physician lots of nice kickbacks.
Medicine protects itself from this kind of drama by first stating that if you are unworried about your situation, then treating it's a zero to low grade priority. The individual provides their own framework in that regard. If you do lots of cocaine and you lose 90 lbs in a month, and you're still unwilling to admit that the cocaine is a problem, then the weight loss will be treated and then you're back out on the street. Well, that's actually not what would happen, but that's the protocol for situations of less hyperbole. Drugs making you broke, but you hate money? Super. By the way, you do have insurance, right?
And yes, in nation-states with less impositions on drugs, their use results in substantially less stress and life impact. As a result, it is reasonable to say that these regions with more lax drug laws also have a higher threshold of substance abuse (how many drugs you can take before you burn out on them). But that's one of many other factors like biology, which is always the same.
Therefore, addiction is seen not only as biological, but social and cultural as well. Not even medicine overlooks sources of addiction that should have no obvious neurobiological basis or follow general drug addiction/tolerance trends.
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Posts
Okay.
Google Scholar was very helpful in finding articles available in full text for free.
I'm going to start with a quote from this because it seems particularly relevant:
Pathological gambling is linked to reduced activation of the mesolimbic reward system. J Reuter, et.al. Nature Neuroscience Vol. 8, No. 2, 147-148, 2005 (PDF link)
This is important because it describes a mechanism by which pathological gambling can have a similar effect on the brain as drug abuse - increasing levels of dopamine in the ventral striatum. The notion that drugs are addictive because they affect dopamine levels while gambling does not is silly - dopamine is dopamine, regardless of how it gets there.
(By the way... that bit about pathological gamblers having reduced activation in the ventral striatum? We also see the same thing in smokers and alcoholics.)
That area of the brain called the ventral striatum is notable for two reasons. First, it's somewhat close to one of the "dopamine factories" of the brain, the substantia nigra. This means that anything that affects dopamine production or transport in the substantia nigra is going to have ripple effects in the ventral striatum. (This pathway is called the nigrostriatal connection.)
The second reason is that part of the ventral striatum is an area called the nucleus accumbens, frequently referred to as "the pleasure center." That's slightly misleading, though, because direct stimulation of a number of areas of the brain, not just the nucleus accumbens, can cause pleasure. The nucleus accumbens seems to have a particular role in that it stimulates action in response to a surge in dopamine.
But this all about gambling, so what about video games?
Well, there's evidence that video games can induce dopamine release in the ventral striatum. This is a very jargon-heavy article from 1998, but basically they bound a radioligand called raclopride to dopamine receptors to make the receptors visible during a PET scan, and then had the subject play video games. Basically, dopamine receptors "prefer" endogenous dopamine to raclopride, so the less raclopride you see, the more dopamine is hitting the receptors. Here are the relevant quotes:
In the following quote, raclopride is abbreviated (C)RAC:
Now, I'd like to tie this back in to the first study I quoted (the Reuter study on pathological gambling). In it they say "reward-related responses in the ventral striatum can also be augmented by saliency." "Saliency" in this context means "how different is the stimulus from the surrounding environment?" In other words, saliency is how easily your brain can pick out one relevant stimulus from the barrage of other stimuli hitting our senses at all times.
I would argue that video games are intrinsically an exercise in saliency detection. You are constantly presented with simultaneous stimuli - sound effects, music, particle effects, lighting effects, HUDs, damage meters, HP meters, stats, enemy NPCs, friendly NPCs, and so forth - and it is up to you, the player, to shift your focus between these stimuli as they become relevant. Your health meter is irrelevant at the beginning of a Street Fighter IV match, but may become highly relevant when determining the risk of using a particular move. Your ammo meter is irrelevant during platforming levels but will suddenly be relevant when you encounter an enemy. This would imply that part of the attraction to video games involves the exercising of saliency-detection areas in the brain.
With that in mind, I'd like to draw your attention to the last line of the quoted text in the video game study:
There are a few different hypotheses (another PDF link) on why dopamine in the striata (including the ventral striatum) has a such a profound influence on behavior, but the leading one is called the "reward prediction error" hypothesis. It goes a little like this:
1) Dopamine levels surge when you encounter an unexpected reward.
2) This triggers activity in the nucleus accumbens, which stimulates motor action.
3) These regions are further stimulated by looking for reward-predicting cues, with the most salient cues producing the most stimulation.
4) This induces a form of behavioral conditioning where unexpected rewards produces cue-seeking behavior, and finding salient cues themselves further reinforces the behavior.
5) The overall effect is to produce reward-seeking behavior that is out of proportion with the actual possibility of obtaining a reward.
There is a little controversy about the reward-error hypothesis - particularly, it happens very very fast, faster than behavioral modification seems to happen. But the controversy is not whether unexpected rewards and salient reward-predicting cues lead to release of dopamine, stimulating repetitive behavior, but how. We know it happens - that part is incontrovertible.
And we know it happens with drugs, gambling, and video games.
Think of the reward feedback loop of an MMO like WoW. You're told - "go retrieve 10 Wooly Mammoth Hides!" You go to the area where there are Wooly Mammoths. The Mammoth itself is a salient cue - it looks very different from the background. It predicts a reward - the hides only drop off of Mammoths. You go kill the Mammoth - no hide. Dopamine levels temporarily drop. So you kill a few more; maybe 2 more, maybe 5 more. The reward, when it actually happens, is unexpected. Dopamine levels rise. Eventually you learn to compensate for the temporary dopamine drop of failure by continuing the reward-seeking behavior. If the reward occurs too frequently, the rise and drop of dopamine isn't dramatic enough to stimulate repetitive behavior. If the reward occurs too rarely, there's the risk you're going to react to the lowered levels of dopamine with frustration and quit.
Casinos are finely tuned instruments of manipulating this cycle. The slot machine rewards you just frequently enough to keep you interested, but not too frequently. I see a similar cycle, though admittedly a less destructive one, in MMOs.
Is this feedback loop as strong as cocaine or heroin? Eh, I doubt it. These studies don't really compare the strength of the dopamine response in gambling to gaming to any particular drug. But that's a difference in degree, not of principle. The principle - alternating stimulation and reduction of dopamine levels in the ventral striatum - is the same whether it happens pharmacologically or through sensory stimulation.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This event is highly correlated with severe addiction, and drugs that prevent glutamate release in the prefrontal cortex have been shown to help these severe addicts.
If any activity, drug related or not, can be puristically found to cause this takeover, that would be enough to make me believe that the activity is capable of being seriously addictive. That could actually be a good research paper if any of you are interested in getting published.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
And they're designing the game to be less addictive. As people have said, they just need to keep people paying the 15 bucks. If anything, they want the game to be LESS addictive so that people don't tax their servers but still keep paying. They've made gear grinds easier, removed randomness from gear and are trying to reduce the need to log in every day.
And marketing is all about psychology, so they probably have people like that somewhere.
Unlike slot machines, which profit from continuous uninterrupted use, MMORPGs have server costs, infrastructure, staffing, etc. that actually makes profit decrease if the players are online 24/7.
Blizzard's current design direction with WoW is indicative of this realization. You don't need people to play sixteen hours a day. You need them to play two hours a day forever. Or even two hours a week. It doesn't matter! Just so long as the players get enough of a "hit" to keep them subscribing (or, in the case of games based on microtransactions, keep them buying more shit).
Hence, WoW is going in the direction of things like dailies and quest queues and other time-saving methods that are designed to let you go on and get as fast a satisfaction as possible, and then come back later to get more.
I remember reading something like that, too, but I don't fully understand it yet. There are other functions of glutamates and GABA in addiction, even less severe ones, and I'm not sure what the difference is.
I'll file that one away in case I ever make it back to school.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Funny, because I would never describe Eve Online as "the absolute ideal for an MMORPG".
Exactly.
Thankfully, I think this happens to be healthier than the Everquest model, which was basically "if you're not going to be here for at least four hours, don't fucking bother."
Capitalism and human well-being coinciding! Yay!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
but one of the studies I pulled up had evidence that the dopamine reward-feedback loop is not directly related to the sensation of pleasure.
In other words, just because something's addictive, doesn't mean it's fun - or vice versa.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I worry that EA, for instance, would develop a game with role-playing character development, no initial or periodic cost, and items sold for cold, hard USD. Well, "gold" or "points" or whatever, but it amounts to the same thing. The end result of this is a property whose most avid (I would say addicted, but if the word eclipses the concept it represents in contentiousness then whatever terminology suffices) patrons are the most profitable to EA. They would be irresponsible to their shareholders if they failed to recruit B.F. Skinner's head in a jar.
That's because you (and many others) hate the PVP environment. It is close though - the danger is you simply fall off the bandwagon however when you realize all you do is change skills.
Shattered Galaxy is another one which had a model which was moving in the right direction.
EDIT: One would note this is also all simply talking about the ideal business outcome for an MMO.
EQ's game mechanics essentially encouraged you to sit there as much as humanly possible in order to benefit from the game, to camp spawns, spend five hours getting a party together to kill a single dragon, etc.
I was like "This is insane! EQ would be so much smarter to design the game so that people could get their fill out of a couple hours a day or even every other day, with incentives for you to take breaks between play and that".
People flamed the shit out of that post. They were like "thats stupid no 1 would play and eq would fail in a month ur dumb what kind of company would make a game that is designed to get you to not play it all the time"
What kind of company, indeed.
Man, I remember having exactly the same conversations.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
May I offer the observation that this conversation on any type of official forum is automatically selecting for...you know I don't know why those people are dumb.
There are "games" (more online social environments) that do that, like Second Life and Entropia Universe, which are purely real-money driven.
I don't think they're going to turn into the next WoW any time soon.
Or even the next Mass Effect.
However, microtransactions even in your single-player games are the future. ME2's "Cerberus Network" uses a pretty amazing business model, from a marketing and commodity perspective. I am in awe at the brilliance and elegance of it, and I think it's a pretty clever model for future success.
I can't find a link on it.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I don't know what conclusions to draw from that. I certainly don't think video games should be illegal, or that video game companies are evil. I guess the main thought I have is to be aware that our bodies are FRAGILE, and that they can be affected in very strong ways by any number of things which might not be obvious. Stress, sunlight, dehydration, diet, clothes, all of that will affect your life much more than you might think. Maybe kids need to be educated more about video game addiction. That seems a lot more relevant for a grade school health class, comparing to scaring kids with horror stories about heroin.
If I keep going with that train of thought... I start to seriously question the idea that humans have free will. For example, there's all sorts of things that can mess up a computer. It's not really the computer's fault if it gets a virus, or burns out a circuit. Likewise, if you are entirely the result of external factors then... yeah, you're pretty much helpless. Everything in your life is an addiction, and there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to hope that your addictions are relatively healthy ones.
Neurological determinism.
Anyway, I personally think that people going all "poopsock" on a game is not a problem that will ever truly go away on its own, because some people will just do that.
But, I think that we are moving away from companies deciding that is sound business strategy. They aren't motivated by ethical concerns, but by money-making.
And, from a money-making stance, designing your game (especially online games) to be a constant revenue stream that doesn't require constant time investment from the end consumer is an ideal.
Which means, as companies move in the direction of encouraging regular, but not constant, play by its userbase, the amount of people who are addicted to continuous play will decrease. They will still be addicted, they might still orient their lives around the game, but it may be less severe an addiction than the current "digital hermits".
I got theories on business opportunities, marketing vectors, and gameplay mechanics that companies could utilize to maximize profits while minimizing social impact on the end consumer. This latter component is an essential part of a new wave of digital entertainment marketing, because positive public perception of the product will result in a vast net increase in consumer subscription and regular microtransaction buy-in.
This sort of stuff gives me a big, turgid capitalism boner, but that's neither here nor there.
It's a thing that will work itself out, because there's so much money to be made off the regular-but-casual gamer.
Well, I have to admit that I have a very cut-and-dried, cause-and-effect view on behavior and I use a lot of mechanical metaphors. That's kind of off-putting to some, and certainly colors my arguments a great deal.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I guess as WoW moves to dailies, the people who do the more time-consuming content will become smaller. I wonder if the 5/10man instances fill a middle ground well.
Steam: CavilatRest
I believe that the general addiction rule of thumb is, if you admit you have a problem and are seeking treatment, then abstinence is probably the best recourse rather than stepping down. That's guidelines for alcohol, though. If you have a really serious problem that's drastically affecting your lifestyle so that normal activities no longer excite you at all, that's where medicine steps in.
I wouldn't bother with all this free will stuff. For all practical purposes, this nucleus accumbens thingamajig is akin to looking at tea leaves as far as the state of neurology is concerned. I don't remember much about psychology at all, but I think that if you maintain the locus of control on yourself, even an illusory confidence gained will cause you to take action. But then again I haven't taken psychology in a while, so don't call your lawyer.
Uh, I guess you can try to see how much your discipline has regressed by promising someone or yourself that you'll only do so and so amount of x recreational activity a day and see how that works out for you. In all controversially addictive activities, there is biological evidence that sensory stimulation even slightly related to the activity (for my own example, eating dinner makes me yearn to watch a movie on my computer, maybe a druggie who shoots up in a back alley will get drug yearnings every time he walks by it) (oh, and the munchies when you do cannabis is an entirely different thing, but is fascinating and entirely explained) will trigger the old YOU MUST DO X ACTIVITY drug-seeking behavior, so try to disrupt as many routines as possible in order to avoid anything that you have previously linked to I dunno video games or whatever.
But then again, this is all documented advice for drug use. Drugs are pretty great for medical studies because you can pretty much follow them into the brain and see what happens from there. There is no WoWoid or grindamate that makes for neat, short, grant-magnet publications.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
yeah I dunno dude
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I might do so tomorrow.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I don't know dude, I can run Starcraft on my phone
my phone
there is literally no escape
they think "hey, maybe I should do something about this" but then
they're all fragmenting CS source binaries and snorting them through USB ports
intravenous firewire with peer transmitted viruses
porn
edit: actually, the number one downfall of software engineers is probably krispy kreme
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Also, on an unrelated note, I now have zero sympathy for IT guys. Take note: not backing up years of accumulated web interactive course material and losing an unprecedented amount of that data in a server wipe will not only get you fired, it will make a thousand students and educators take to the streets desperate for your blood. BACK IT UP.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Even WoW really takes way too much time to be optimal from a server standpoint though. If you could somehow get people to pay say 5 bucks a month for some facebook game that used only minimal bandwith, that would be the way to really make the megabucks. Every minute someone playing your game is lost money, so you'd want to make it appealing enough to get people to spend money but put in incentives for people to pace themselves as much as possible.
The real golden goose would be the non-addictive addictive game.
Alternatively you could figure out some way to offset the server load to user's computers, while still providing enough of a service to justify a small monthly fee. For example, a racing game that allows you to practice on your own computer or run custom races, but has official tournament races, downloadable content, etc, that require you to be subscribed. Or some kind of Civ style massive TBS where you play out the game on your computer and send in your turn once per day, etc.
I have yet to see a person like this whom also plays WoW.
It's like looking for a Phish fan that doesn't smoke pot.
1. Have you ever felt you should CUT down on drinking?
2. Have people ANNOYED you by criticizing your drinking habits?
3. Have you ever felt GUILTY about your drinking?
4. Have you ever needed to drink an EYE-OPENER the first thing in the morning to get rid of the shakes?
2 or more yes responses implies an alcohol problem, and 3 means alcohol abuse for sure.
Now with the exception of the last question, which is fairly specific to alcohol, the questionnare can be applied to any addiction. Applying it to video games makes for an interesting point. What we're really trying to find out with these four questions is actually an additional 2 questions:
Has <drinking> affected your life? (Scale of 1 to 10)
Would you be interested in cutting down on <drinking>? (Scale of 1 to 10, basically a mirror of the first question).
When an activity interferes with the enjoyment and progression of your daily life and health, it is considered to be in need of medical intervention. Whether it is classified as an addiction or not, treatment (which may or may not include medication) will be recommended by a physician. That's just from a medical standpoint, though: if you're doing something unhealthy, your doctor will tell you to quit it, but it's still up to you as long as your life isn't in danger ... of death.
But since this is such a cut and dry issue that avoids all controversy, as real medicine often tries its best to do, you're probably not interested. Addiction will only be truly socially defined by various levels of politics, and when I say that word I'm no longer interested in continuing so I'll stop
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
That's a pretty insulting generalization.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I can't help but draw a parallel to the casual marijuana user who gets picked up on felony possession, then loses his job, his family, and 18 months or however long the mandatory minimum is in whatever backwards state is prosecuting him. I think that, if he feels a compulsion to use marijuana in a situation where this is a plausible consequence, it's reasonable to call that compulsion an addiction (by the "causes problems" definition) even if we were to pretend for the sake of argument that there are no other adverse effects than the external, socially-ordained prison sentence. Certainly it's fair to say that this hypothetical guy is suffering adverse consequences as a result of his compulsion to use marijuana, even if these negative consequences (personal, as well as costs to the State in loss of production, correctional maintenance, legal fees) don't arise from the drug abuse itself. In the US, we call this guy a felon. In Amsterdam, they would call him Steve.
I would prefer a framework for defining addiction that focused on the individual, and the degree of interference that their addiction applies to their material aspirations, considering only the moral framework of the individual addict rather than the wider views (and penal code) of society. The problem you run into there is the (real, if not so common) people whose primary material aspiration is amassing an unlimited supply of drugs with which to flee the phenomenal world for an internal fantasy that has more kaleidoscopes and walruses... or XP and Gold, as it were. But I think this is actually a real problem for the treatment of addiction; I don't honestly believe that a psychologist or psychiatrist or any other kind of doctor can, utilizing only the discipline of medicine, distinguish between an addiction of this magnitude and the sort of bizarre, socially-discouraged obsession that is historically associated with some of the greatest minds of all time.
Hold on now, I only said they can't make the distinction using medicine... but they can and do make that distinction every day, on the eminently reasonable basis that a Tony Montana-style pile of coke isn't the product of a great mind, but of a socially undesirable degenerate. And I can't imagine that it's common to find someone who remains quite so enthusiastic about cocaine after detoxing from it for a couple months. But the consequence of this is that social values - for instance, the relative social value of a man obsessed with solar panels to a man obsessed with crack pipes - have always played a major role in the determination of addiction. The pretense that addiction is a purely medical phenomenon is about as accurate as the pretense that our news media is unbiased.
Perhaps the value of keeping society rolling on well-oiled treads is ultimately even greater than the value of providing internally-consistent mental health care service to individuals, though. I'm not actually decrying this as an usurpation of power by a cabal of cloaked, dagger-wielding mental health professionals; on the contrary, I'm arguing for a shift of focus from addiction as a medical issue to be addressed on an individual basis to addiction as a systemic issue to be addressed on a societal basis. We're already dealing with it as if it were a societal issue, if we take a few moments to really evaluate the medical distinction between a fixation, an obsession, and an addiction. I'm afraid that too often this distinction is made in the same way as the colloquial distinction between insanity and eccentricity: wealth.
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read): If an unemployed patient can't pay off his credit cards, but maintains his raid schedule in lieu of a more aggressive job-search, a reasonable doctor would rightly diagnose addiction. Would it still be addiction if the same patient used his generous trust fund to play the same amount of WoW (and with the same degree of compulsion) while maintaining exceptional physical fitness thanks to a rigorous personal training regimen? If he (remember, trust fund, gobs of spare time here) has a vibrant social life that the pursuit of subsistence denied his penniless alter-ego? Distinguish, using only the tools of medicine, the apparently-mad fixation displayed by this guy from that of a WoW addict.
TM;DR (Too Marxist; Didn't Read): FOAD (Why You Silly Goose), bourgeoisie scum!
But soon the kids realize that most of the game's content is blocked off and requires a membership. Of course the kids don't want to be second class citizens in the wonderful world of Club Penguin so they harass their parents until they get what they want.
I guess some people would think this isn't much different than kids begging their parents for the latest cool toy everyone else has but I feel the social aspect makes the kids much more likely to get hooked completely and for a longer period of time.
Battle.net: Fireflash#1425
Steam Friend code: 45386507
There is a distinction between addiction, fixation, and obsession and it's called a psychiatrist referral, where you get one if you land anywhere between the commas. If you're rich and you spend your money on video games you'll probably get multiple referrals AND tons of test which will get the referring physician lots of nice kickbacks.
Medicine protects itself from this kind of drama by first stating that if you are unworried about your situation, then treating it's a zero to low grade priority. The individual provides their own framework in that regard. If you do lots of cocaine and you lose 90 lbs in a month, and you're still unwilling to admit that the cocaine is a problem, then the weight loss will be treated and then you're back out on the street. Well, that's actually not what would happen, but that's the protocol for situations of less hyperbole. Drugs making you broke, but you hate money? Super. By the way, you do have insurance, right?
And yes, in nation-states with less impositions on drugs, their use results in substantially less stress and life impact. As a result, it is reasonable to say that these regions with more lax drug laws also have a higher threshold of substance abuse (how many drugs you can take before you burn out on them). But that's one of many other factors like biology, which is always the same.
Therefore, addiction is seen not only as biological, but social and cultural as well. Not even medicine overlooks sources of addiction that should have no obvious neurobiological basis or follow general drug addiction/tolerance trends.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.