Fun Inc. (9 page)

Action is, of course, itself a double-edged sword. The most ‘addictive’ games tend to be those that are most rewardingly complex, the most skilfully designed to engage and reward their users. In fact, many critics theorise, they are so good at doing this that the resulting pleasure tends dangerously towards the pathological. Players become so engaged in the constant interactions and stimuli offered by a video game that they are effectively drugged by their own brains into a state of imbalance, potentially neglecting other aspects of their ‘real’ lives to a dangerous degree. This hypothesis that has been explored by expert critics like the British neurologist Susan Greenfield as part of her analysis of children’s use of computers and the internet in her book
iD: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century
. According to Greenfield, excessive dopamine production induced by onscreen stimulation may in the long term reduce the activation of an area of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, in the process making people less empathetic, more self-centred, and generally more addictive and immature as personalities. It’s a trend that may augur, Greenfield suggests, ‘a world arguably trapped in early childhood, where the infant doesn’t yet think metaphorically’.

Greenfield’s concerns are offered in strict scientific terms but they embody a far more ancient and atavistic class of human fear: that people are perilously drawn by temptation to withdraw from real life’s complexities into a solipsistic, simpler world. In the case of video games, in particular, it’s hard to deny this kind of escape isn’t a large part of their appeal. Escape, simplification and control play their part in all games, and in electronic games have reached a remarkable pitch of sophistication. Yet how can they be both ethically and emotionally crude in comparison to other media, so that to play them is to risk permanent infantalisation, while at the same time being devilishly sophisticated? Entertaining people not with drug-based stimulations, tempting cash prizes and high stakes, or sex and violence, but with satisfying symbolic challenges and tests of skill is a incredibly complex task, after all. At what point, moreover, does this cease to be entertainment and become a solid curse?

One of the most intriguing studies in this area is a paper entitled ‘Pathological Video Game Use among Youth 8 to 18: A National Study’, published by Dr Douglas A Gentile in 2008 in the US journal
Psychological Science
. The criteria Gentile used to discuss pathological game-playing were based on the DSM criteria for pathological gambling – which, being a behavioural addiction, offered a far more pertinent comparison to games than the idea of substance abuse. Gentile’s method was to assess responses to a Harris poll of 1,178 Americans aged between eight and eighteen, taken in January 2007, according to eleven ‘indicators’ based on the DSM criteria for problem gambling. When, he argued, an individual had six or more positive responses out of the eleven categories, this suggested they might have an unhealthy relationship with video games.

Gentile’s questions included whether gamers felt restless or irritable when attempting to cut down their gaming, whether school-work or chores were being skipped in order to play, and whether respondents found it necessary gradually to increase the amount of time they spent playing games in order to keep on experiencing the same level of satisfaction from them. His results, he emphasised, were not testing whether people played games ‘too much’ in terms of raw hours spent in front of a machine. They were intended, rather, to distinguish between merely engaging with games, and developing a problematic relationship with them.

The results were striking. Among those respondents who were video game-players, 8.5 per cent met six or more of the ‘pathological’ criteria. These weren’t the people who played the games the most, or those who were most deeply engaged by individual games, but they were, Gentile noted, ‘twice as likely as non-pathological gamers to have been diagnosed with an attention problem’. Moreover, he concluded, ‘these results confirm that pathological gaming can be measured reliably’ and ‘that it is not simply isomorphic with [that is, essentially identical to] a high amount of play’.

Many gamers and industry representatives leapt to criticise the study, which certainly had its limitations (including the fact that, because the original survey was an ‘opt-in’ questionnaire posted online, the results can’t be construed as nationally representative in any sense). Then there were the questions themselves, which have a very different resonance when applied to children playing games at home as opposed to adults spending money on gambling. What child wouldn’t answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘Have you played video games as a way of escaping from problems or bad feelings?’ or admit to ‘skipping their homework’ sometimes in order to play a favourite game?

Yet the questions Gentile raises deserve serious consideration. As he pointed out in a subsequent interview with the website Negative Gamer, games are specifically designed to exert the kind of appeal that, in the case of some individuals, can become pathological. ‘If you play a game and it doesn’t affect you, what do you call it? Boring. You want to be affected, so don’t pretend they don’t affect you. And that’s what most gamers who get really defensive are doing. They’re telling this little lie. Games don’t affect me, but of course they only want to play games that do affect them.’ It’s a point that both the games industry and gamers are often unhelpfully evasive in confronting.

The term ‘addiction’ isn’t just emotionally loaded: it also represents a great deal of ambivalence amongst game-players and creators. As a young gamer, I was an avid consumer of magazines that reviewed video games. Reviews tended to be broken down by criteria like the quality of graphics, sound and control systems. But another key rating was always a game’s ‘addictiveness’ – essentially, how much you wanted to go on playing, and how hard you found it to put the controller down and turn the system off. The more of this they had, the better. You wanted, as Gentile puts it, a game to ‘affect’ you. You didn’t, of course, set out to distort your life in a pathological way. But, given how good gaming is at tapping into some very powerful human responses, you couldn’t always remain in what felt like total control.

There’s an element of this in all popular entertainment. A book is described as ‘impossible to put down’, and this is high praise. A television series is described as ‘compulsive viewing’ and this – a term borrowed from a behavioural disorder – is a testament to its quality and the skill of its makers. Yet most people don’t worry that books or television series are, of themselves, so appealing that they represent a hazard to consumers. When my parents caught me on numerous occasions reading a favourite book under the covers of my bed at night by torchlight, they may have lightly scolded me, but they didn’t feel the need to consult a psychologist about my alarming book addiction. And nor, to be fair, did they worry excessively when there were sporadic rows about how much I should or shouldn’t be allowed to play
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
on my Nintendo Entertainment System.

Why, then, the special concerns over games? The basis of this is the idea that they are uniquely powerful as a medium; that, as critics like Susan Greenfield suggest, they simply affect us more, and more dangerously, than pretty much anything else. Yet neurology, even while it explains the precise mechanics of certain feelings, is often an extremely poor guide to social behaviours; and it’s certainly safe to say that the reasons people play games pathologically are
never
as simple as ‘the game was too powerful for me to handle’. Putting it another way, there is no such thing as a game with which most players have a pathological relationship. As Gentile himself pointed out, the amount of time spent on a game does not correlate with pathological play; and the very idea that games simply act like a mind drug on a hapless minority of their consumers offers little succour to those who do experience these problems, and little in the way of insight or practical advice to everyone else.

Perhaps most tellingly, as the idea of pathological gaming has begun to be taken seriously, the emphasis has increasingly fallen on the social context rather than on the medium itself. In 2006, to much media fanfare, the Smith & Jones Centre launched itself in Amsterdam as the first European institution specifically set up to treat video games addiction. The programme would operate along the lines of previously successful approaches to dealing with behavioural addictions like gambling. Here, surely, was clear evidence that video games were a special, problematic case as a medium.

In November 2008, however, the same clinic made a striking announcement. On the evidence of the hundreds of cases it had treated since opening, the media were told, it would be abandoning the ‘addiction’ style of treatment for something essentially social and educative in approach. As its founder and head, Keith Bakker, told the BBC, ‘These kids come in showing some kind of symptoms that are similar to other addictions and chemical dependencies. But the more we work with [them] the less I believe we can call this addiction … Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old-fashioned communication.’ It was, Bakker explained, a question of understanding why and how they chose to play: ‘If I continue to call gaming an addiction it takes away the element of choice these people have.’ Once again, the issue is causality and experience had shown that pathological game-playing was itself more of a symptom than a cause of distress.

This doesn’t mean that the children going to the centre didn’t have real problems that were manifesting in their gaming, or that they hadn’t developed some extremely negative and counterproductive gaming habits. But it does suggest that by far the most useful approach is a pragmatic one that overlaps with more general risk and protection factors, rather than one that treats game-playing as an isolated and uniquely perilous pursuit. Some people are psychologically more at risk of developing pathological behaviours than others; some people are more socially at risk than others. Identifying and offsetting these risk factors is vital, but this, as Bakker himself strongly argued, is above all a task for families, schools and gamers themselves to learn about in the broad context of living a psychologically well-balanced life.

In this context, we shouldn’t forget that video games actually have an awful lot going for them as a social outlet. You can lose time to games, but it’s extremely difficult to lose your health or your wealth to them. Far from being the root of people’s problems, many games and their associated communities can provide an excellent mechanism for identifying and supporting those suffering from depression, alienation and other social problems, by functioning as a communications network that reaches many people and places that more conventional pastoral care simply doesn’t reach. As Gentile’s own report notes, ‘it is certainly possible that pathological gaming causes poorer school performance etc., but it is equally likely that children who have trouble at school seek to play games to experience feelings of mastery, or that attention problems cause both poorer school performance and an attraction to games’. Games potentially provide a constant source of information and contact for such people. Compare this to a cable television company where, no matter how many solitary hours someone chooses to spend slumped in front of their screen, the company themselves will have no way of either knowing or doing anything about their behaviour.

Indeed, working on the practical assumption that a minority with unhappy or unbalanced lives are always going to exist to some degree, and are always going to look to something for comfort and escape, games start to seem one of the most benign – and effective – options they could select. It’s said that the devil makes work for idle hands. But the world has found few better cures for mental idleness than video games. In an ideal world, everyone would enjoy from birth an attentive, close-knit family; safe, efficient public transport and access to pleasant outdoor spaces and social facilities; they would socialise with a group of close friends living within easy visiting distance and so on. In the inevitable absence of much of this for many people, however, games can become important for a huge number of positive reasons; and even those who use them to escape or evade bigger issues in their lives may be doing something entirely reasonable in the circumstances. Indeed, many of the patterns of electronic play that have appeared in the twenty-first-century gaming world bear an uncanny resemblance to this kind of lost ‘village’ style of interaction, with groups of players forming tightly knit and intensely sociable online micro-communities, and undertaking often remarkably mundane in-game activities together simply for the pleasure of feeling that they truly belong within a particular (virtual) environment and to an intimate group of friends. Games, here, are not so much the cause of social pathologies as a refuge from them – and potentially a route out of them in a way that passively consumed media simply cannot be.

As the British author Naomi Alderman (who was living in Manhattan during and after 9/11) observed in an article for a British newspaper, video gaming offered her a vital refuge in the months after the attacks from a horrific reality she could do nothing to deal with or change. ‘I remember surfacing from four-hour
Diablo II
sessions feeling as if I’d been on holiday, so grateful that I’d been able to blot out the images of genuine horror filling my city,’ she wrote. ‘The game was so mind-filling it left no room for the anxious brooding that I was experiencing the rest of the time. This was a tremendous blessing. For a few months, I played
Diablo II
for probably 30 hours a week, and I remain convinced that it was a pretty healthy response to the situation I was in. My desire to play the game faded as the city got back on its feet.’

In cultures like South Korea’s, too, where playing games in public internet cafés is the equivalent of going to a pub or bar in Britain or America, it’s hard not to make the comparison between the booze-fuelled nightlife of a Western city and the buzz of one of Seoul’s more than 10,000 ‘PC bangs’, where the strongest stuff served tends to be coffee or energy drinks alongside a bowl of ramen noodles. There may be a lot of swearing and smoke in the air, but violence is almost unheard of, and gaming is considered an intensely sociable business (and a subject of great national pride). In South Korea, with entire television networks dedicated to broadcasting live matches of cult games such as
Starcraft
, pro-gamers are national celebrities and can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Gaming excellence, like sporting excellence, is seen as an aspiration, even a gift, and the games industry itself is increasingly being seen as a meeting place for some of the best and the brightest in the coming generation: a nexus of innovation and technical skills.