POLL: Video Game Addiction

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@ LNT,

Wow - that's probably the most well-said statement I've read around here in a long time. And here I was about to re-install BG again.

EDIT - I would like to add to that that video games, especially RPG's, create a false sense of achievement and success (I found the long lost doohickey +1! I slew a dragon made of pixels! I pulled a gem out of a chicken's butt!), when the person should be out in the world striving for REAL successes, even if they are as modest as getting a job or losing a few pounds. I'm sure LNT could word it better, though.

[ June 24, 2006, 22:02: Message edited by: Death Rabbit ]

 

It wasn't video games that gave me a story to back it up like that, but drugs. I became less interested in socializing and more interested in getting high. As a result, now I am less comfortable in social settings than I used to be, and am less comfortable in the spotlight (I used to be a spotlight whore). Back in College, I was able to talk to women with little to no difficulty. Now, it's really hard sometimes...

 

@Gnarf

Yeah, I have a friend going through that right now. Sometimes you can't even understand what he's saying because the moment there's a silence he finds it awkward and he just fills it in with the first thing which comes into his head so when people we don't really know hear it it makes him sound like a kid with A.D.D. I think it's bec. when he smokes weed he doesn't follow a certain train of thought and just keeps digressing and since he's taken it so much that's how he thinks off of it.

But for the current topic, I'll have to go with the consumers. As has been said already, it's their choice.

 

@The Irreligious Paladin:

Thanks for the explanation... Yes, I see. Looks like my impression was outdated. Still, I think it's not that odd for a teenager to have $50 to spend, is it? I doubt a typical date costs (much) less than that, does it? Plus, they can always buy it together if they are siblings or close neighbours. And yes, one shouldn't laugh at parents blaming certain games for suicides, disorders or whatever else it takes.

At the risk of being flamed, I need to point out that while certain games treat you with cheeky comments on the loading screens, like, "Remember to change underwear daily," or, "While characters don't need to eat, players do," some games capitalise on the addictive factor. It's not like developers, publishers or server operators have any obligation or even right to limit your playing time, it can honestly and with clear conscience be said that they bear no responsibility. Especially if they not merely provide a service in a very technical sense, but actually sell a product and advertise it.

If I owned a game company and people started committing suicide, killing other people, getting divorced, losing jobs, neglecting children, committing any sort of crime or tort, I would certainly feel at least some blame and would try to do something to counter the threat. I don't believe a company's only social responsibility is to deliver profit to shareholders. After all, social or not, responsibility is always responsibility and people shouldn't be shielded from responsibility for their actions just because they are running a business and doing it for their own profit. It's understandable to favour businesses by virtue of their social role (providing jobs, providing products, meeting the needs of the people), but not without that role. Businesses typically want special favours because they are supplying products, giving jobs etc to the local populace when it comes to taxes or other such, but when it comes to actually giving that job and being responsible for the quality of the product or consequences of use, they rotate 180 degrees and say their only social responsibility is to deliver profit to shareholders. Personally, I could have it either way -- but not both ways at the same time. Give them no social responsibility and no social favours, or give them social favours and social responsibility. This is the only serious, mature solution. There is no third option, the rest is flip-flopping not befitting a serious businessman, let alone public authority.

This said, I don't believe someone should go to prison or be fined for the Everquest incident. But I do believe the publisher and service provider should do something.

 

@ Enagonios:

I can see what you mean. Yet, I have been able to toss aside the rag of addiction and only get high on special occasions with good friends. Usually it does make us less sociable, all we want to do is order pizza, play X-Box, and giggle at each others video game failings. The other night, however, I came into a situation where weed helped with socialization. It was at a Les Claypool show and I got seperated from my crew and ended up front and center with several hippies passing around joints. I got to know those guys through the common thread of Les Claypool enjoyment rather than weed, but it was in the mix. Don't do it though, they could have (but didn't) lace it with meth or PCP. I felt sorta safe in the mutual respect we all threw at Les' supremacy with the BASS. Odd case anyway you look at it.

@chevalier:

Here, Hear.
Any responsible business owner who hasn't been made hollow and empty by bar graphs and pie and point charts would feel some remorse. If they did do something I can't with my experience, wisdom, and intelligence figure out what, but I'm not a business man. I'm a laborer and know that if the company asked their insurance or whatever to pay a small settlement it would just open the floodgates. Suddenly every parent whose child played games and commited suicide or other heinous acts would have grounds to sue game companies.

It brings to mind the case of the young men from Columbine who killed 16 classmates and 1 teacher and then killed themselves. After the fact it was found out that they liked playing violent games like Doom and Quake and listened to Marilyn Manson. Now all the victims and families of victims tried to bring class action cases against Id software and whatever MM's record label. Thankfully every court up to the Supreme rejected the cases.

I mean it's a sad world, and terrible things happen daily everywhere, but blaming 3rd parties is part of American scapegoating. From the other post on a parrallel topic centered in Asia it seems that China has already instituted laws and regs to fight growing worries over video game addiction. The USA is a very free country compared to many, many sovreign states out there, and I love it mostly for those reasons. Yet, our freedoms can only work properly if individuals take responsibility for things. If only. . .

 

No responsibility, pass the blame. It's an easy way to live. Nothing is ever your fault, so you don't have to feel bad about it.

 

@The Irreligious Paladin:

I think Doom, Quake and Manson did shape the youngsters' minds to some extent. But parents were at least as much at fault, I think. Manson is sick and should be locked out and I wouldn't be surprised if they were to find subliminal stuff and other psychmanipulation in his crap, but Quake or Doom doesn't make you a violent killer. It gives the wrong ideas to the wrong heads, though. Glorification of violence is there. Think of those who play with cheat codes enabled and get off on the slaughter, sorry little losers with an illusion of invulnerability. If they take it out to the external world... And playing the game might eventually set them on the track to do that. Still, for that to happen, it takes a kid with "predispositions". My underaged brother has aggression problems while he's played less FPS than I have. I played quite a lot of various ones in my time, my all time favourite being weapons under the 1 slot, and what? I can't remember when I last had to hit someone other than the aforementioned.

On the other hand, while you can't directly blame the game for the killings, it's obvious that the omnipresent gratuitous violence and glorification of violence for its own sake, as well as sex for its own sake and sex in conjunction with violence, is having ill effects on the youth. In contributes to the kind of culture we see among teenagers, especially male ones. It's still possible that in some cases, games actually absorb some of the violence real life would have to take, but it's not like they always serve as a way to relax tension and unload it. Sometimes they are stimuli and means of getting off on it, if not usually. I've seen hyper 12 year olds in combat mode in cyber cafes, waiting for their turn at CS and treating adults like screaming civilians you trip on while trying to save the world. And, of course, violence-loving crap like Manson should be banned.

Another thing is that it's not only aggression kids derive from those games. The really dangerous part is aggression combined with contempt. Still, for things to reach that level, it takes some negligent parents. This, however, is no excuse to sell mindless-violence-glorifying games to minors.

 

Actually, violent crime and promiscuity have been on the decline in the United States for over 20 years. It may seem logical that violent, sexual content in games, television, and film would lead to increased violence and promiscuity in our society, but the facts do not support such a claim at all.

[ June 26, 2006, 05:53: Message edited by: Drew ]

 

maybe because if you can kill your enemy in the game it relieves your stress and you end up not going after the person you hate IRL?

 

@ Chev
I guess I didn't express what I should have. If a child purchases something it's the parent's responsibilty to ensure that it isn't harmful to the child. Parents should check up on what their children are doing, investigate the games they play, monitor them.

"Video games killed my child!" Please. She's a nut who doesn't understand what she's talking about.

Not on your life. I would however laugh at them if they started blaming it on Mc Donalds in some wierd blame game. It's not the fact that she's lost her child that I'm laughing at, it's that she's blaming video games for something that is most likely more her fault that anyone else's.

So one depressed teen tops themselves, the mother pins the blame on Everquest, and the company should do something because of it? Somebody is always going to be offended, use something in the wrong fashion despite warning labels so on and so forth. If Everquest wasn't around I imagine the kid would have killed himself when his girlfriend dumped him or something similar. Everquest wasn't the cause for his suicide, it 'could' have been the straw the broke the camel's back but it wouldn't have been the basis of the suicide, just the little nudge that pushed him over the edge.

 

This example reminds me of the D&D case in the 80's. A teenager killed himself, his mother found out that he had been playing D&D for 2 years, and she blamed her son's suicide on D&D.
I would like to reiterate one aspect of this story: she found out AFTER her son's suicide that he had been regularly playing D&D for TWO YEARS.
That's a serious issue of bad parenting if you ask me.

Very true. The only difference is that the media wouldn't have been blaming his girlfriend had that happened.

Remember the Columbine shooting? Some people were blaming Doom for it, because the 2 teens used to play it. They also used to play bowling - no one blamed that. And of course no one thought of mentionning the 10 million players of the game who did not go around shooting their schoolmates.

Remember TV in the late 80's? It was the Big Bad Guy at the time, the one responsible for all the Evils perpetrated by teenagers.

I think the problem of violence is much larger than D&D, video games or TV, and I think it's a far more complex social issue than these blamist trends in the media would have us believe. And there's a huge difference between addiction to alcohol/drugs/nicotine and addiction to TV/video games.

 

Don't forget the horrendous effect on our culture doo-wop rock and roll in the 50's caused to the youth.

@ Abomination:

Still sounds rather harsh, but I can agree to disagree and don't think you're a bad person for it or anything. You and I are simply different people with different takes on some things. You are indeed with me on the belief that the kid was already suicidal and didn't need a socially isolating game to make him kill himself.

Imagine this: The discussed kid runs in and hurriedly eats dinner while talking about his lvl 16 high elf wizard slaying a dragon by himself (I don't play Everquest, bear with me if my scenario is off in that respect.) His mother is clearly not impressed, neither are his other family members. The only one interested is the dog hoping that if he pays enough attention he'll be fed scraps. Boy leaves table after a few minutes and less than half his dinner to play more Everquest. Later that night he's cursing and screaming, his mother comes in to find him weeping tears and babbling about a horde of ogres killing Glamourking the elf or whatever and she tells himto shut up and turn off the computer cause he's got school tomorrow. Next day she comes home from shopping to find that he's stolen her husband's handgun and shot himself and is now lying dead in the bathroom tub. To us it seems almost obvious that it was the fact that no one cared for what he did that he killed himself. Put yourself in the mother's shoes, assuming she always provided food, clothing, and shelter and thinks that that was all that was required of her. In her eyes she's a good mother. Of course she looks for a scapegoat, and the most obvious one for her was the game he'd been crying about the night before.

This is a hypothetical situation. I don't know what really happened, she didn't get that close to it on the talk show. She did however feel so adamantly that she sponsored the creation of and online gaming addicts annonymous group on the internet.

Everyone seems pretty unanimous in saying it's personal responsibility to avoid gaming addiction not industry responsibility. Oh, besides Mr. Sarcasm up at the top of the page.

 

Yup. I know that's how it works for me, anyway.

I think the majority of the blame went to a movie or music video (can't remember which) that depicted the exact actions that they carried out. Coming into the classroom in a trench coat, pulling out a shotgun, and blowing their classmates away.

Well, if they'd expertly rolled bowling bombs into the classrooms I bet somebody would.

 

Which would have been awesome, by the way.

 

Yeah, killing in styyyyle.

 

Tacky. Just plain tacky.

They had bombs -- several of them. Fortunately, they were as inept as they were psychotic and none of the bombs exploded. The little cowardly psychopaths were going to pick people off as survivors were running away from the explosions -- but they had to change their plans.

 

Is this a reference to the game, or my and Fel's good natured (though admittedly tasteless) bowling joking?

 

@Drew:

The link is obviously logical, for one. To negate it, you'd have to prove that while the crime and promiscuity ratio is falling, the gratuitous sex or violence ratio is at least falling at a lesser rate, if not stagnant or on the rise. That, and that there are no other factors distorting ratios, such as improvement in the area of crime prevention.

While games don't invent violence or sex per se, they play on certain urges and catalyse them. Submitting ideas is not in fact as important as catalysing certain urges and promoting certain attitudes and distorting the immature player's perspective of reality. When such is done for profit, there's no disclaiming responsibility, at least in any moral sense, even if the legal ground isn't too solid.


@Enagonios:

It works for some time, but for how long? It's like unleashing the anger and channeling it elsewhere rather than dealing with it. Something like kicking inanimate objects.

@Abomination:

Even if you don't give him the right to card customers and thus make sure no one a month or a year younger than 18 buys something 18+, it's still the retailer's responsibility not to sell the 18+ stuff to someone who's visibly in mid teens. Everything else is claiming that profit is more important than the rating. I'm apparently forgetting the, "Thou shalt not stand in the way of profit," commandment, aren't I?

That parents are responsible is another thing. A parent filing a suit or reporting a software publisher or retailer should take another form and report himself.

 

In the United States, the "law enforcement officials per capita" has also been going down. We have less promiscuity and violent crime and more of it in the media. The only studies done in an attempt to link video game/film/media violence and promiscuity to the real mccoy have come up inconclusive, at best. Maybe things are different in your neck of the woods, but in the USA no link has yet to be proven.

The facts actually seem to show that increased violence and sexuality in our media lead to less of it occurring in society. (I doubt that this is actually true, but the statistics do at least indicate that violence and sexual content in our media is a non-issue.)

 

The causality is the other way around, I believe (though a spiral isn't outside of the realm of possibility). Because it's becoming rarer, when it happens it becomes news. The same phenomenon can be found in airplane crashes; so rare that when one goes down, it's almost global news. Meanwhile, the dozens of car crashes aren't even a blip on the radar. This type of thing led to the myth (now squashed) that flying was more dangerous than driving. I leave it to your imagination as to what increased media coverage of violence/promiscuity combined with media coverage of things like game conventions would do...