It's clear when someone jump from consoles, or a MMO game with clearly laid-out goals -- to something like Wilson's There.com, or Linden Labs' Second Life. Until someone gets wrapped up in some player-made distraction, there's really nothing to do.

Players go for the sense of space; now more than ever, games are transforming into something more than just chess. Beyond the effort that goes into creating a game, or any other subtlety, games are creating something new.

People who want to somehow regulate away video games tend not to have even a vague idea of what a game is. "Is it even up to society to decide that someone can't play?" asks game designer Nathan Franklin.

Questions on regulation and choice are legitimate no matter how you slice it, but especially once a game creates a new kind of social space. Developers have a vast range of opinions on game addiction, or what sometimes gets bandied as game addiction.

There are serious reasons that we haven't heard the bulk of these thoughts, not the least of which being that in the current atmosphere, most shouldn't see the light of day. A number of people reading this article are salivating at the thought of having something that they can use against the industry.

A Noble Feud?

Games make a magnificent target. It doesn't have to be addiction, violence, or any one thing. Games have taken ridiculous hits at least since Dungeons & Dragons. In 1989, after having lived through a lot of that flak, Gary Gygax wrote words that still ring true.

"Oddly enough, we don't seem to have progressed far beyond the Salem witch-hunt stage, 'Thar's demons in them-thar games!' cry the fanatical opponents of RPGs... How can anyone alive today retain such quaint superstitions? But once you're on the receiving end of their hysterical attacks and the target of the propaganda they dish out, those notions won't seem either quaint or democratic."

Gygax's notion, so well put in his book Master of the Game, still seems branded into the minds of gamers and developers. Are the developer haters and player haters all dark-hearted cretins, or are their attacks a viable occupational hazard of working with technology and art?

Comics, D&D and pretty much all new popular music styles have been washed in battles between the innovation of the pioneers and the doubts of the collective; the war itself goes beyond the staples of nerd culture, popular culture and even our millennium. Art and media have always had their critics.

Figureheads of western philosophy have joined in to float their criticisms, many making valid points. Socrates, in Plato's Phaedrus, criticizes writing as a technology which displaces memory. Even this Gamasutra article, by Socrates' argument, merely appears to discuss the topic of game addiction. This article cannot speak, answer questions, or defend itself. Conversation was Socrates' weapon of choice; he felt it far better a tool, in that the author of the written work can share a true knowledge of their tangible learning.

Games have already weathered their share of criticisms. Raph Koster makes a magnificent argument against game violence being patently wrong and evil. Though there's an ethical question in presenting any kind of image in any kind of art, players do often see power ups rather than hookers that can be run over. Or bunnies to be saved.

They're meeting game goals, and the icing over the top tends to be secondary. Jerald Block has also done great work at pointing out some of the flaws that have been carried on by game violence researchers thus far. He shows that though pundits, politicians, and researchers will go back and forth on the violence issue, the link between games and violence is tenuous, if only for the time being.

There's no real pussyfooting around uncontrolled gaming, because many nasty anecdotes can be tied directly to video games. Video games may not have been the cause of the problems, but presenting a balanced case isn't a journalist's first concern with a breaking story. It's definitely not a politician's concern when fishing for support.

The man who died of 86 straight hours in a Korean PC-room was autopsied after all of the sensational press reporting; what the news media failed to come back and tell us was how he died. It was deep vein thrombosis (DVT), the disease made famous by Dick Cheney. At twenty-five, this man had died of a disease normally reserved for genetically-inclined forty-plus-year-olds.