Reuters has a story on video game addiction and whether it is, in fact, an addiction, addicting people. Like, uh, addicting stuff. Next Generation always posted their thoughts at length. My thoughts? I’m glad you asked.
I actually wrote a story two years ago about this very subject for my local newspaper. The idea was generated by the fear that, yes, I was addicted and generally had a problem. I was gaming on average of about four hours a day. That hasn’t changed, and is probably typical for the regular “Hard Core” gamer. What worried me was that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t NOT play. It was like, if I didn’t kill people in Halo 2, I would lose my edge and get pwned, as the young people say. But was I addicted, or just worried about getting my asskicked online? My fear of addiction has returned as of late, with me worrying night and day about my Gears of War Annex score. I’m currently ranked 998 in the leader boards, with over 400,00 people playing it. For some reason, that leader-board has latched my attention. I know, I KNOW, that if I really work at it, I can break the upper 500 mark. But is that addiction or me just wanting to be better than everyone else?
In the Reuter’s article, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry wouldn’t touch the subject with a ten foot pole. They refused to even go and get a damn ten foot pole to think about touching it with. Once you open the door to gaming addiction, you open the door to Internet addiction and then television addiction and then twitter addiction. It would be Pandora’s electronic box and I don’t think anyone wants to be dealing with that this century. There is no doubt in my mind that some gamers have a hard time putting down the sticks. But there are millions of people softly addicted to something. Does anyone want to know the number of people that sit in front of a television every night? I sure as hell don’t. My grandmother gave me wonderful advice once: everything in moderation…