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Should video games be listed as an addiction?
fencingfriend
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You may have seen it in you local newspaper, or heard about it on the NPR radio. Apparently people are talking about if we should list video games as an addiction under the American Psychiatric Association. The game of choice that is really being discussed over is World of Warcraft. (a.k.a. WoW)
Doctors have claimed that they wanted it listed so that it can be treatable under a person's medical insurance. How have these doctors proposed that it be treated? The one that I've heard the most about is through (basically) a detox clinic. Right... We should pack up all out gamers, send them to a clinic to "get clean", and search in unspeakable places for a hidden gameboy.
Anything can be listed as an addiction because an addiction is something that is being used to hide or ignore other issues in a person's life. So "treatments" and "clinics" aren't going to help. Honestly, doctors and the like need to address the real problems and then gaming wouldn't be a self-destructive habit, but just an enjoyable hobby.
Does this not tick someone else off?
Doctors have claimed that they wanted it listed so that it can be treatable under a person's medical insurance. How have these doctors proposed that it be treated? The one that I've heard the most about is through (basically) a detox clinic. Right... We should pack up all out gamers, send them to a clinic to "get clean", and search in unspeakable places for a hidden gameboy.
Anything can be listed as an addiction because an addiction is something that is being used to hide or ignore other issues in a person's life. So "treatments" and "clinics" aren't going to help. Honestly, doctors and the like need to address the real problems and then gaming wouldn't be a self-destructive habit, but just an enjoyable hobby.
Does this not tick someone else off?
fencingfriend on
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No---although I sympathize with your point abotu the potential mistreatment of the addiction, it's better for people to get some treatment for their addictions than none at all, which is what is likely to happen if video game addiction isn't covered by health insurance.
A "video game detox clinic" does sound pretty silly, but hopefully the professional psychiatric community has a halfway decent plan to accurately combat this condition.
Can you become addicted to them, and spend too much time and energy on them? Yeah.
I have a strong feeling you've worded this OP to be far more inflammatory than necessary.
Same as gambling, which is listed as an addiction, only with less immediate negatives as a result.
...Which is why the practice of medicine is best left to the professionals. Sure, it sounds silly to say that you're addicted to video games, but that sillyness is likely to lead to a dangerous stigma which will prevent people from being treated for real addiction issues.
If you snort cocaine or smoke crack repeatedly, I'd say it's pretty much a guarantee that you will become addicted, both physically and mentally. For video games, the likelihood is orders of magnitude lower, and is mental only.
Ahem.
Would you support taking gambling, for instance, off of the APA's list? Afterall, it is far from a meth addict's need for a fix and is strictly a mental addiction, like video games.
Is there anything "officially" listed as an addictive substance or phenomenon that is less harmful than video games? I mean, drugs and alcohol can kill you either directly or indirectly, or screw you up permanently (generally speaking). Gambling can bankrupt you. Video games can... make you really pasty?
Yes, yes, there are a handful of horror stories of people sitting in their chair playing WoW until they starve to death, or whatever, but playing a video game in and of itself has no capacity for inherent harm in the same way as the other things I listed. There is little about video games that make them unique or special, other than the social stigma applied to them. I can also be addicted to reading, or to television, or to collecting Troll dolls and brushing their pretty, pretty hair.
Instead of devoting resources to singling out video games, let's just say, "Hey, pretty much anything can be an addiction" and then set up "addicted to random shit" hotlines that you can call to get help. And if we want doctors to be able to bill insurance companies, then let's establish "addicted to random shit" as a medical issue, instead. All the benefits without giving dipshits more fodder to decry the game industry as a pox on humanity.
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Somebody needs to get this guy hooked on phonics.
Anyway. While I do think that to some extent this is a case of the older generation not understanding things about the younger generation, there are surely people legitimately addicted to video games, just as there are people with addictions to TV, food, and various other things for which there is no actual chemical basis for addiction. Surely there has to be something done for such people.
Oh wait........
If you want to be taken seriously, clean up your writing and make some coherent points. I get annoyed at gamers who basically give other gamers a bad name. I enjoy video games in moderation and being lumped in with idiot kids/grown-up kids who think they're 1337 pisses me off.
Well, like Jeffe said, having a gambling addiction can bankrupt you/turn you out on the street. And while I'm no expert on MMO addictions, I also can't imagine a person being as addicted to an MMO as gambling. There seem to be more real world opportunities to exercise gambling addictions, like any sort of bet with friends, and the people that do sit at home, and play WoW or EQ literally 18 hours a day or whatever, woul seem to me to have other social/mental issues.
And they should be given help. I highly doubt this is advocating the building of a Betty Ford for Nintendo or anything like that, it's just getting coverage and trying to reduce the social stigma a bit.
What moniker said ^^
That's all it comes down to.
tl;dr WoW ruins lives, but only in the hands of people who are already easily addicted to other things.
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!
This can be said of all addictions.
It takes many exposures to an addictive drug to develop any kind of chemical dependency. For that much exposure to occur, the habitual use has to precede the actual dependency. This would imply that the addict had a pre-existing psychological issue leading to the frequent drug abuse. Normal healthy happy people don't walk down the street and fall face-first in a pile of cocaine and get hooked.
I would. The DSM does not need a separate category for every single drug. There may be idiosyncratic differences between cocaine addiction and heroin addiction, but the differences in etiology and treatment would not be significant enough to warrant separate disease categories. Likewise, I don't think that every possible addictive behavior warrants a separate diagnostic heading unless there are significant differences in etiology and treatment. A single blanket heading for "Addictive behavioral disorder not involving chemical dependency" should be sufficient to cover both gambling and gaming.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Probably the only reason why I do not play WoW is because of how much devotion you have to put into it. With other MMO's, like DAoC, they are actually curbing the amount of time it takes to level up, and all the BS you have to go through is like a third of what it once was. This is a better choice because now people with less time on their hands can actually play casually and actually compete!
Also, I'd like to add that addiction to videos games spells something out on the real world. I mean look around, turn on the TV, and you have Iraq War this, Avian Flu that, Mysterious Aztec calendar saying we're all going to die in two weeks. It's no wonder that people are shutting that out and instead living in their own worlds online or playing games. Even things like work in games is better than Real World work. In rune scape, you cut down a tree bye clicking on it, but in real life, you have to physically push the shopping cart around pulling down recalled pet food off the shelf...
Gaming seems less harmful than gambling because you could sit at a table and gamble your rent away in one hour. Gaming is slower than that. You might not be able to spend all your rent immediately but it can keep you from uni / work. Eventually you fail uni or lose your job. Then you're stuck in a rut that you can't get out of because you want to grind a bit more.
Who'd want to hire someone that lost their last job due to non-attendance? Also agreed with others that say its more of a stigma due to not being seen as an addiction like gambling is. You can find a gamblers anonymous easily. A gamers anonymous? Don't think so.
That's the thing though.
If I give someone crack, and they get addicted, would it make sense if I said, in self-defense, "well, Your Honor, he must have an addictive personality! His getting addicted is a symptom of the problem, not a cause!"
That's from encyclopedia.com so I guess there's two schools of thought regarding addictions. Maybe we should just be careful to differentiate from a psychological addiction and a drug addiction.
Isn't one of the things that makes MMO so much fun the social factor? So we're sending people away so they can stop hanging out with other people like them from all over their country? I'm guessin some of the older folk don't really understand gamers.
Feral's right about how it should be defined, but that doesn't really address how it needs to be dealt with. I honestly don't know enough about the whole thing to have a decent opinion. I know China at least has clinics dotted around that specifically deal with anixiety and sleep deprivation symptoms that result from internet usage.
I get like this without internet access... is that on the list?
honest question.
I think in America there are group counselling programs where nyphomaniacs hang out with over eaters and the internet addicted rub sweaty palms with people who just love to dance.
But I could be wrong.
the problem I actually do have with this is simply that games are addicting in a way that many other things can be, and I would rather them all be put in together than to have video games, especially just one particular one, said to be addictive.
edit - which I realize is a problem dealt with in the limed posts above.
I dunno, I played WoW pretty hardcore for a while and then stopped for 3 months, played once the xpansion came out and now I've stopped playing again.
That's how my friends all have been; they play pretty seriously for a while, stop for a few months when their lives get busy, then start up if they have a lull. We've all pretty much quit for good this time around, since we've been out of college for over a year and our time for gaming has decreased significantly.
Again, I wouldn't lump all serious players together. Lots of serious players aren't addicted so I would be loathe to make such a generalization.
Yes, they're called AnimeCon.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The word "addiction" used to be used to talk about physical dependency on something, like alcohol or tobacco or painkillers or whatever. Stuff that affects the chemistry of your body and has medical side-effects and might have medical withdrawal symptoms.
Then "addiction" came to include psychotic compulsive behaviors like gambling or sexual compulsions.
Now, it looks like people want to put the word "addiction" on anything they like doing enough that they don't really feel like stopping.
Medical insurances do tend to cover this stuff: They're called psychologists, or counselors. They're people who help you get over whatever it is in your life that's making your "addiction" so attractive that you'd rather do that than go to work or feed yourself.
Do I think that video game addiction should have a sexy spokesdoctor like Dr. Drew Pinsky? No. That's what your run-of-the mill, unsexy already-covered-by-insurance counselor is for.