Are We There Yet?

Research has the potential to combat ignorance and problem play, but it needs to be organized and sustained over a number of years. Right now there are so many problems in the foundations, and so many faulty “addiction” checklists disguised as “criteria” for identifying patients, that a simple blitzkrieg of knowledge will set us back far more than it will send us forward.

Ultimately, we should try to provide some preliminary research which, taking games seriously, asks why so many players seem to have problems with play. To that purpose, the following are three areas that, based on my data and personal experiences, I think might be working together in order to prompt some of the major issues in very serious gaming problems.

Agency

The difference between those who play for fun and people who might have problems, I would tentatively suggest, is between chemical motivation and chemical need. Most all of what we do in life is based off of chemical motivation, our brain’s way of keeping track of how to best navigate life’s many rewards. When you no longer just have a desire to play, but instead must play, then you have crossed the border into dependency country.

There may possibly be a number of dependency phases that a player passes through, but agency (or lack thereof), the continual navigation through a game’s interface, is the vehicle that drives someone’s experience. Psychological, neurochemical and genetic factors may slow or expedite the process by providing a larger or smaller susceptibility to crossing that chemical line.

Media Experience

But here’s a kicker. What if “game addiction” has nothing to do with chemical and/or psychological addiction? Our brains can’t tell the difference between real sight and images that we see on a television or computer screen. Anne Marie Barry, author of the book Visual Intelligence, wrote that, “Because evolution is a slow process, our brains have not yet adapted to visual experience gained via media in any special way.” If we experience something through a visual media we think that we have seen the genuine article.

Keith Kenney, a founding member of Visual Communication Quarterly, writes that the tricks are played on the eye, and not the brain. “Pictures give us the false perceptual belief we are in the presence of the subject.” Would it be such a stretch to think that sounds and interaction might compound the illusion of presence? What if games attract players not because they immediately and effectively alter brain chemistry, but because they provide a truly unique way of experiencing our world? Some people like the unique experience of hearing Australian accents so much that they move to Australia. Some people like hefting 200-pound swords and flying on the back of a Hippogriff, so they move to Azeroth, in World of Warcraft.

Neuroscience isn’t the only place where it’s difficult to separate games from real life. Dr. Thomas Malaby of the University of Wisconsin has argued that games, particularly because of their use of ‘persistence,’ and ‘contingency,’ have started to “approach the texture of offline life.” Our brains not only perceive online worlds as real, on some level. These worlds are starting to take on the characteristics of reality, and it no longer makes sense to think of them as completely separate from our everyday lives.

For an example of how this relates to excessive play, say that a person all of the sudden realizes they’ve been playing for a few hours. They weren’t self-aware while waking up, making a pot of coffee, eating breakfast, and starting to play, but they remember that those things happened at two pm. In real life, some people drive to work, order a McMuffin and coffee at the drive-thru window, go to work, and fill out 20 TPS reports before they snap into self-awareness. Suddenly it’s 2:00 pm. Where’d the time go?

Maybe part or all of “game addiction” is simply the striking similarity some games have to real life, in our brains and in the game’s texture. If you’re interested in this, you might check out a short article that I’ve written on media experience, immersion, and how the mind flits between worlds.

Culture

These aren’t just games. Even if you don’t buy the whole “media experience” thing, some games literally create worlds. Real players don’t just walk and talk anymore. They slay dragons. Even when we’re talking about the more simple 3-D games being released this year, we’ve come a long way since Chutes and Ladders. You could say that we’ve come a long way as a culture, as well (though not that all of the changes have been positive).

Ray Oldenburg was a sociologist who tried to find something that he called the “great good place,” or “third place.” This was the place that wasn’t work and wasn’t home. It was a place in-between, somewhere you could unwind. Games, even if they don’t portray a 3-D space, provide us with that. Those that do use 3-D spaces and social interaction with other humans, they really are giving most of us something that wasn’t available in temporal space.

Games are substance-free and value-free. Most every major and minor city (in the United States, anyway) will have at least one bar and one church. Games are “open for business,” to anyone with a computer, the money to pay for a game, and in some cases an internet connection. More than that, these games give us hints as to how we might eventually improve social spaces into the real world. There are a million wonderful examples of community building in these games. There are a million wonderful examples that could be used to build a stronger and more wholesome society. You just need to look at games with the right eyes. The informed ones.

Won’t the Scary Man Ever Stop Talking?

Sure. When it comes to games and addiction, we aren’t there yet, and we really ought to step on the gas.