James Portnow is the writer over at Extra Credits, and several years ago he shared his
unedited experiences with crippling game addiction, or to be more appropriate, “disordered gaming,”
and how he nearly failed out of college, and definitely destroyed some of his interpersonal
relationships. In the intro, he talked about how difficult it was to write about, and how
he had written over a dozen different intros and paragraphs about it, and ended up tossing
them all out. And, you know, I empathize with this a hell of a lot. This script, right now,
is my fourth attempt to write about this. I usually try to be academic and as objectively
disconnected from what I’m talking about as I can, albeit to varying degrees of success.
But how can I be disconnected from something I struggle with all the time?
So, fuck it. I’m going to talk about compulsive gaming, or disordered gaming, or if you’re
FOX News: DANGEROUS AND THREATENING GAME ADDICTION, a subject that people outside the gaming community
love to talk about without any real research or gamer perspectives, and something that
we, ourselves, as gamers, tend to avoid talking about too. I think there’s a few reasons
for this--for one, we’re used to most attempts to put the negative aspects for our community
under a microscope coming from outsiders who have an agenda--mostly news outlets who need
ratings and a sensational headline that sacrifices youth culture at the altar of viewership.
We don’t like the implication that games are innately harmful or damaging to us in
any way. And, you know, I get that. In fact, this is why the traditional models of addiction
don’t even work for gaming. Most initial studies on game addiction centered around
“time played,” because that’s an easy shorthand for addiction. How do you know someone’s
an alcoholic? They drink a lot. Of course, this isn’t always true of all alcoholics,
and this is especially not true of gaming. You can’t just use the amount of hours a
person spends playing video games a week as some sort of litmus test for addiction. For
one thing, there are a lot of professional gamers. People in eSports, bugtesters, journalists,
whatever-the-fuck-I-am, designers--but also there’s a very important qualifier that
makes a compulsion a compulsion: having to do something, versus wanting to.
Like if you just play a lot of games and are emotionally satisfied and happy with your
life, there’s not really a problem. You just happen to be a happy, normal person who
plays a lot of video games. The problem arises when it starts to negatively impact your life--or
at least that’s how it appears. And to get to the heart of what I’m talking about,
I’m going to tell you my own story of game addiction.
I have multiple stories, of course. And my story is ongoing. My default
thing to do when I’m stressed is to play video
games, and it’s never really all that helpful. It’s not about decompression, it’s about
escape.
But nothing will ever compare to college. My first year of college, I was essentially
on my own, and I got hit by my first major wave of severe depression I ever experienced
as an adult. It was devastating. My motivation was gone. I contemplated suicide. I felt lost.
And I stopped going to class. Entirely. A week into the second semester, I just didn’t
go to class at all. I ate ramen, played World of Warcraft for 15 hours, showered...sometimes,
and just repeated that cycle every fucking day until the semester ended. I moved out,
and never went back. I spent the next year-and-a-half in and out of mild-to-severe depression and,
yeah, played World of Warcrack and ate. I got some jobs. But that was it, basically.
Eventually, my mental illness subsided, and I stopped playing WoW as much.
I’m bet this sounds really familiar to a lot of you out there. In fact, it’s almost
identical to James' own story. And if I were 60 minutes, the headline of this story
would read “World of Warcraft linked to depression, causes nation’s youth to fail
out of college.”
But, honestly? That’s not the case. At all.
I mentioned that the earliest studies into disordered gaming basically equated length
of play with addiction--since then, more nuanced approaches to looking at games have arisen--specifically,
studies that look at analyzing emotional and psychological satisfaction as a measurable
element, and whether or not people are choosing to play games because they like them, or are
instead indulging in the behavior because they feel compelled to do so. These studies,
while relatively new and relatively small, and therefore not conclusive enough to draw
any sorts of meaningful links that can lead to clinical treatment, are an incredibly promising
way to look at games and how we play them.
What these studies suggest is that it’s not the games themselves causing the compulsion,
but rather they’re just a symptom of something lacking in someone’s life: either autonomy,
a sense of purpose, or maybe, like in my case, a state of mental illness.
I just got over a depressive episode--well, “got over” is a bit subjective, I’m
better, but not out of the woods yet. That’s why I haven’t made a video in over a week--I
was taking time to destress. And during this week off? I played over 100 hours of video
games. Most of the time I didn’t think about it. I just sat down, turned on Dark Souls
or, the worst of them, Civ 5, and just...played for hours. I wasn’t really having any fun.
It was just...something I was doing. The video games didn’t make me depressed, but they
weren’t exactly making me feel better. But 100 hours? For some people, that’s nothing.
They play 100 hours a week, feel great, and nothing’s wrong.
Right now, there aren’t a ton of studies on this, and even the most nuanced are small
and inconclusive. It’s unlikely we’ll start to see major studies on the affect of
gaming on our brains until I’m in a nursing home and video games have become a cultural
norm. For now, we just have anecdotes like mine, like James’, and like yours. What
I can say with certainty is that we, as gamers, shouldn’t allow the media to control this
conversation. Our responses to allegations and criticisms of our medium tend to be reactionary,
not proactive--that’s to say, there’s a moral panic, we rise to defend it, and never
talk about it again, other than to say “haha, remember that one time they thought Mass Effect
was porn?” or “Isn’t it funny that they think the original Doom caused Columbine?”
The problem with not admitting that some of these problems exist in our community, and
talking about them openly, is that we leave ourselves open to exploitation, not just by
the media, but by developers, too, who have a vested interest in finding ways to condition
us to keep playing their games. And the more open we are in these conversations, the more
equipped we’ll be, as humans and as consumers, to cry foul when we see it, and protect one
another when we can.
Anyway. That’s it. Have you experienced game addiction/compulsion before?
What was it? Let me know. Did I miss something? Tell me that,
too. I’ll see you guys soon. Cheers.