Through history, the artist hasn't had to explain his or her work, nor understand how it affects physiology. That's a view that the industry can take, though in some ways gaming goes beyond art. It's not a view that can hold up with respect to the longstanding feud between innovation and caution.

Playing two days straight tends not to be fun; equally un-fun is being abruptly disconnected after you've played your daily allotment of X, Y or Z hours. While the collective can't do much about the people making nuclear weapons, harvesting killer viruses or filming Saturday-night sci-fi movies, it can influence the ways in which people use video games.

Game dependency, whatever might invite it to spring up, is most certainly a textured and subtle effect. It's influenced by social, economic, psychological and other rich dynamics. Games are a subtle new place to interact, but regular people won't care about that. If they get a bad gut feeling, then most move on.

If a game bites them, then they bite back. It's natural, and the voices of the bitten are drowning out the voices of the artists, programmers and publishers who work hard to make games.

In the face of this feud, noble or not, there are people who would take a critical design discussion out of context.

Rally

The forces that be make certain pieces of this topic near-impossible to discuss publicly, but it's an issue that deserves refinement. Between developers, addiction isn't a breathlessly exciting or fun topic -- but it's one that can come up. If that happens in good company, then don't parry or force it away.

Let the conversation flow, just like any other. If you get the thumbs up from your personal subconscious, then see where the conversation takes you. Yammering opinions to the press can sometimes hurt the industry, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about putting the player's health first, attacking addiction with creativity and keeping distance from the fanatics. At least until more reliable research can hit the scene.

The industry understands the games, yes, but we're no better than game-hating fanatics when we scoff at understanding the problems that may be caused by games. If you have thoughts that you think could help to shape these conversations, you can voice your thoughts in the comments below.

If the game industry is going to be sustainable, and if games are going to live long enough to meet their potential as a form, then society has to understand the health issues in gaming. They need to be responsible, but so do we.

Facing the issues may be as simple as showing that games aren't the cause, but it's our level of concern that's more likely to win the heart of the mob. Yes, regular folks need to educate themselves; gamers, parents of gamers and game developers also need to educate themselves.

No, the quality of the information in 2008, especially how it's presented, is not perfect. What can we do about that? As we can understand ways to separate problem gaming and amazing gaming, like wheat from the chaff, certain developers might play a serious role in encouraging more responsible play and design. Over anything else, whether we win or lose will depend on how we play the game. The actions of developers and their players will speak loudest.

Game developers aren't crack dealers. The people who make games are giving us something to do, and they're good at what they do. While there are serious considerations to weighing in on addiction, sooner or later the industry will want to engage critics in dialogue.

If the research can't pony up and provide reliable information, then it won't hurt to have discussed health issues freely and openly among colleagues. Some kind of language for discussing excess-balance might be a byproduct of those conversations, but it's a distinct possibility that there wasn't much to talk about in the first place. What are the truths and fictions behind the anecdotes?

It's high time someone figured that out.