Games Addiction – The Silver Lining

Posted on | December 7, 2010 | No Comments

While half the games industry is stuck in a yes-they-are-no-they’re-not argument about whether games really are addictive (or compulsive, or harmfully habitual) I thought I’d take a different approach. If games are addictive then this might turn out to be a good thing.

In between all the horror stories of game addicts ruining their lives, one part of the show struck a chord with me, “Problem gamers have underlying emotional issues”.

In other words, problem gamers tend to have pre-existing issues. This is true of many other addictions and compulsions;  people are often described as having ‘addictive personalities’. It is also said that when one addiction is overcome, another is found to replace it. The activity that they become addicted to isn’t the source of their behaviour it is the vehicle that carries it.

But what is significantly different about an addiction to games is that it can be tracked and monitored and even rationed (especially so if, as the report also claimed, online games tend to be the ones that cause the most cases of game addiction).

If games are considered to be an activity that attracts compulsives then perhaps this is an opportunity for games to help people. Pattern recognition could be used to find people with addictions.

Mechanisms could be built in to spot problems. Mechanisms could be built in to limit play. People with a propensity for addiction could be warned. They could seek help. They could ask the game to help them with their addiction. Compulsive behaviour could be tracked and studied like never before, and behaviour-management techniques could be evaluated and applied.

If it’s true that addicts will latch onto another activity when they abandon their current compulsion, maybe a managed addiction to games is better than an unmanaged addiction to drinking, gambling or drugs? No other compulsive activity is better structured to observe, and understand the behaviours of its victims.

Obviously this opens up a lot of ethical questions (not least about privacy and medical insurance), but remember the original quote, “Problem gamers have underlying emotional issues”. Games don’t cause these issues, they expose them. If you take kneejerk actions to prevent games from being attractive to compulsives their issues simply move elsewhere, to activities that are harder to track, and that are potentially more damaging than playing games.

In other words, use games to help people with underlying issues. Those victims’ families in the show would readily ban games deemed to be addictive – perhaps this would be like  Edward Jenner’s lab assistant throwing out his ‘dirty’ petri dish. Maybe within games lies the cure and not the cause of addiction…

How would such addiction-management work? That’s another question. I’m not sure someone like Blizzard would ever want to help an addiction-management initiative, not least becasue to do so would be to acknowledge an issue might exist, which would be a legal hot potato.

The important thing is that games, if they are shown to be addictive, have qualities that might just allow us to help people with any kind of addiction.

Category: Design, Games, Opinion

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