BBC Panorama - Are Videogames Addictive? (Tonight @20:30GMT)
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BBC are running a Panorama documentary exploring the addictivity of videogames, tonight.
8:30pm, BBC1.
As pester power kicks in and the computer games' industry launches its latest products on to the Christmas market, Panorama hears from youngsters who've dropped out of school and university to play games for anything up to 21 hours a day. They describe their obsessive gaming as an addiction. Reporter Raphael Rowe, meets leading experts calling for more independent research into this controversial subject, and reveals the hidden psychological devices in games that are designed to keep us coming back for more.
8:30pm, BBC1.
Replies
I hope its a fair and balanced view, and not strictly anti-gaming.
I hope so.
As for blaming Panorama for FIFA, I laugh.
BTW Ferg, I really hope you're not serious.
Make the licence fee optional so I don't have to pay for this shit. Christ.
As soon as they ask that question, you know there's some heavy-duty bias there. I haven't seen it, but I'm willing to bet money that this is just another in the recent chain of an anti-gaming crusade.
I don't know, it seems like no matter what the fun is, there will be people there who hate it. Elvis, Comic books, Heavy Metal, Rap... now video-games. Damn old people and their set ways.
Makes me wonder if we'll ever be that angry about something the generation growing up now will come up with. I can't imagine the kids today coming up with something so bizarre that I will find it offensive.
edit: This is MY personal experience... I know a lot more gamers than I do alcoholics/drug addicts
Okay, now imagine all those problems, but add the physical damage that come from alcohol abuse. That's pretty much where those people would have been.
It had a shitty undertone and a lot of suggestive tripe in it, but I think most of it was more accurate than I'm used to in these types of things. It's a very small minority that get "addicted" to games, and WoW is literally designed to keep you playing it. Somewhat relieving (although it is abhorrent, obviously) to hear about the parents that starved their kids being a bit mental to begin with. Never heard of the game they were playing at the time, though.
Hide yo kids. Hide yo wife. They addicting yo peoples up!
me too, because I haven't met a single person addicted to any drugs or alcohol
Well a friend of mine in High School had a heroin related suicide. Another from a meth related overdose, a couple of guys I've known since who've been crippled in drinkin/driving accidents, and a room mate who's father spent most of his childhood in Rehab.
Just wasn't sure if this was the right comparison.
I would much rather have anyone play WoW than get addicted to any kind of drug.
speak to industry rep pointing out no psychological evidence ever published saying game addiction was real... that's boring.. another scare story about WOW
I mean personally I can only vouch for my own experience and there was a while where i would play for maybe 12 hours a day but living in a small village this was just out of want of something fun to do,if I were given something better I would have jumped at it.
For many people, WoW is better than REAL LIFE!!!
All you Haters gonna hate.
Thats what happens when you have something awesomely fun, like world of warcraft,
or sex.
We better do something about sex soon, or shit is going to get crazy.
Bullshit. Only the idiots who can't control their lives ruin everything.
To be fair he joked about the illegal part, however, there has been mmo's around before world of warcraft.
But due to the big scope of WOW, it reaches way more persons and thus persons with addictive personalities.
I'd still say stuff like farmville and such are way beyond what wow has achieved when it comes to catching addictive personalities.
Videogames tend to be viewed as less of a hazard though because they do not impact the person as visibly as drugs or alcohol. Though on the other hand, this perceived harmlessness is causing it to be so widespread which in turn makes it a bigger problem.
WoW = Fun. Not something you ingest that alters your physical being.
You want to see addiction head down to a heroin rehab clinic, hang out with some real junkies. You're kid isn't the victim of 1890's marketing: He's the victim of bubble wrap parenting or absent-tee parents. For whatever reason they didn't teach self moderation, personal responsibility or how to rationalize choices.
Some parents never stop baby proofing their kids environment. They'll use timers and parental controls thinking they're being good parents. The kid is cocooned in bubble wrap and allowed to play with battery acid without any consequences, until all that gets removed and the kid is dumped on the street with a newly sharpened set of steak knives.
Kid to self: "OH F*CK WHY AM I BLEEDING!? I JABBED THIS THING AGAINST MY SKULL FOR 18 YEARS AND NOW IT CUTS ME!?"
People who are taught to seek out imbalance, fuck themselves over in whatever they do. They can't balance their checkbook, they can't save money, they get money, they spend it. They see food they eat it until its gone. If they are tired, they drug themselves up on whatever uppers are around instead of getting some sleep.
It's not the fault of whatever activity they where doing, they could just as easily been addicted to all kinds of benign crap, its the fact that they can't balance themselves correctly. It's because of this imbalance, that the rest of us that can, are forced to put up with stupid laws, limitations, restrictions and out right bans of things.
So where does this balance come from? Is it organically grown in some people and missing in others? If by organic you mean purposefully part of their environment from an early age? Yea its organic. Those that have it teach it most naturally those that don't have to work at it but it establishes a patter that makes it easier for those kids to teach it to their kids.
You're job as a parent is to set those kids down in a mine field and watch them defuse every last bomb and plant a garden when they're done. Not wonder around blind folded with a stick from explosion to explosion.
Now I'm say we're all responsible for ourselves, but saying that there's no such thing as such an addiction is not entirely true.
Your brain reacts to things, and produces endorphins in a natural way, a feeling which people will enjoy and can get addicted to, it's a much slower process, but it's fully possibly to get stuck in it.
Like getting addicted to food or sex, both possible addictions that have been with us for ages.
Yeah, sure, you can become addicted to something. Basically saying you enjoy something, so you're going to keep on doing it.
But I don't believe someone can have an addiction, or suffer from addiction. As if the word Addiction is used to describe a disease. It's not a disease. It's a state of mind, and the person is in control over it, they just don't want to stop.
If you are actually addicted to something you'll get withdrawal symptoms when you stop taking it. Heroin will give you shakes, nausea, hallucinations etc. Even something like caffiene will give you headaches and mood swings if you go cold turkey. Games do not give you withdrawal symptoms.
But conflating video games with physically addictive substances is trivialising the effects of those addictions. It's insulting to both the addicts of these substances and people who make the games.
Right, I should have specified that I was talking about video-games. It's not a physical addiction in the same way heroin is, is what I was trying to say. It's not an addiction at all in my opinion.
But that's like saying "cheer up" to someone with a real depression. It just isn't that easy.
The brain is complicated, and usually it often has to do with some real chemical imbalances, and in the case of non-substance addiction, the person has become addicted to his own feeback loop of brain reactions to the fun stuff.
Now I'm not going to say "oh poor you" to these persons, nor would I say "poor you" to a drug addict, but addictions are real, it's just not centered to a product, it's centered to either artificially creating these substances in your brain via taking stuff, or having your body create them constantly.
All of that is highly debatable. I've never seen any credible evidence that any of the effects you described are real, other than having something to do with substance abuse.
Saying things like "the brain is complex" can go either way. Some people use it to say that it's complex, and things go wrong with chemicals and whatnot which leads to mind-illnesses like depression. But that has never been proven. And yet other people say that the brain is so complex that we don't understand what causes those effects, or if they're even real.
There's yet another aspect of whether it's normal function or not. If you get hit, you feel pain, which is normal. But you don't have "Painage", it's not a condition, it's just the way the body normally functions. Likewise, if you get dumped by your gf you'll probably feel depressed, but to say that the person suffers from depression, as if that's a disease, is a bit on the ridiculous side.
So taking it up another few notches and saying that someone who plays WoW 20 hours a day suffers from a "gaming addiction" is bordering on the absurd, considering the sheer lack of evidence there is to support it.
If you give anyone heroin, they will become addicted to it.
If someone plays wow there is a good chance that they'll quit on their own at some point.
Calling it a WoW addiction makes it that much easier for people to demonize it and try to ban it. Oh its an addiction we know how to handle that!
Lets take a step back and look at another example:
We're finally starting to have rational conversations about the non THC versions of cannabis, shit that makes awesome paper, great rope, super durable cloth and gets no one high. These aren't just trivial things this can change manufacturing but as a society we freaked the fuck out. In the time it took us to calm down about weed we've raped and slaughtered our forests. We had something that grew faster than trees and lasted longer but we freaked the fuck out and banned it. We're fuckin nuts, and that same "take 200 years to get over it" shit is going to happen with games like WoW if we let people classify it as addiction right up there with hardcore drugs.
I'm definately not saying wow is addictive, I'm saying people with addictive personalities are likely to suffer from games as much as they'd suffer from any other kind of thing that would trigger these effects on their brain.
If we're going to ban games for people getting addicted to them we might aswell ban coffee aswell.
What I'm saying is, games are not addicting, people get addicted to games, that is an important thing to mention, since we can start banning everything, but some people will still get addicted to anything that'll trigger them.
I do, my brother "suffers" from it, but in my personal opinion, he suffers from being a dumbass more. He's on medication for it, and talks about it very seriously. I think it's BS and I make sure he knows it, and yeah you're right, it pisses him off like nothing else. But, the truth hurts. I constantly challenge him to show any kind of evidence that he has a real condition, and neither he nor his doctor can do that.
It basically goes off of his faith that he has it.
His best excuse is that it's something about him that's abnormal, therefore it's a disease. To which I call BS by saying that by that logic gay people are sick too, and can/should be cured of their gayness. Which is complete bullshit. And notice that religious people actually do try and rid people of their gayness. Because it's faith-based, much like depression.
True. Fair enough.
Bad comparison because there are conditions where your feel pain that doesn't actually exist - that is the "physical" analogy of depression.
Here's how it effects me: on the 2nd day of a 3 day Christmas cruise to the Bahamas my brain decided it was time for me to be sad, the same way my brain sometimes decides a crowded bar poses a life or death risk. I've learned to deal with it.
I think it all depends on if you suffer from it or not, which homosexuals clearly do not, even if it might be a "abnormality" in hormones or whatever it might be, because it has nothing to do with upbringing.
As someone once wisely told me a long time ago; if you want to fake a disease to get out of class, fake a stomach ache, because they cannot disapprove that you have it.
Brain is a bit of the same way, real depressed people or people with addictions can't prove it via any samples of tests or so.
Btw, people can still be assholes, dumbasses, or idiots, and still suffer from depression, but it's true, we don't know all about the brain to pinpoint what the cause of it would be for every individual.
Exactly that, you can explain it in a hundred ways, but people can not really know how it is like unless they've experienced it themselves.
Learning how to deal with it is mostly the only way to handle it, not everyone is fortunate to have the willpower to do so though, and most have to deal with the shit days that you cannot do anything about.
While not trying to derail the thread, I'm willing to bet there are alot of people on these boards who you wouldn't guess was suffering from something like this, comes with the creativity :P
This is beyond horrible.
I don't know your brother or his circumstances, but on this end it sounds like you go out of your way to make someone depressed feel bad about themselves.
Is your end goal for him to finally just kill himself and be done with it?
*edit - just read your reply below this. that comes off as much more rational.
Lets all put out shitty games that noone wants to play so kids dont get addicted...That will keep us employeed!
"You just got yar bell rung chief, shake it off!"
"It's been 4 years, who are you again"
"I'm your old CO hahaha don't play stupid with me son! Why can't you tie your shoes you an idiot now you got out?"
"No I just... wait what were we doing? Who are you?"
If you say you randomly feel sad, I believe you. I don't think there's any reason for any of you (my brother included) to deceive me. And that being the case, it also means you can't control it. So we're right back to the homosexuality example. I have no doubt that someone who claims to be gay, is in fact gay.
My problem comes when it's classified as a disease. And worse yet, when that disease is treated in backwards ways. For homosexuality it's Jesus-camps and whatnot. For depression it seems to be these random-ass drugs that plain simple do not work. They even claim that a huge percentage of the people taking those drugs, still suffer from depression symptoms, and have disclaimers like "If you experience suicidal tendencies after taking this drug, consult a doctor immediately".
It seems to me like there's a group of people out there with a genuine problem, but instead of helping, the drug companies are trying to sell a dangerous product that's based on pseudo-science and cash in on it. Doctors go along with it of the fear of getting sued. And I just don't get it.
No, I'm just the only one who actually does care about him. I'm trying to help, everyone else is trying to put him on drugs.
Way to many side-effects to go with those drugs, still too crude a treatment, but it's better than lobotomy.
But still, people often get entirely emotion-less from that stuff instead.
If you suffer from it, it is a disease, and the main focus should be for you to get the help you need, drugs usually end up as being the careless solution for everything we can't explain.
Exactly.
Hey, I hope I'm not coming off as cruel or something. I don't mean to diminish what you guys are going through. But I'm just afraid that people like my brother are being taken advantage of, and put on these dangerous drugs for no good reason.
It's hard to know, most likely they never found a proper solution and are quick to prescribe the pills.
Anti-depressants are like hammering down a nail with a sledgehammer, we're still in some foreign territories.
Accountability is a tough pill for parents to swallow.
My 2 cents plain and simple. We make entertainment. How much time people spend on said entertainment is so varied and dependent on individuals, that we as a whole cannot be held responsible. Our sole purpose is literally to entertain. We cant make money and thus fund our industry if we fail that simple directive.
that being said, I fully realize some people have problems putting down the controller. How to help those people should be a discussion, but with the best interest of the industry first. I know that sounds very "the man-ish" but honestly I dont feel a multi billion dollar industry should suffer a massive blow b/c a fraction of the gaming population wont turn it off. Gambling is the first industry that I can think of with a similar problem... Similar is key word there... Perhapse we can view them, and there steps towards solving the problem as a potential guide in solving our own.
just my take on the subject.