Video Game Addiction
Perhaps you assume that this is going to be yet another hit piece on why video games are the bane of your existence. Or perhaps you feel that you are genuinely struggling with a crippling addiction and are desperately looking for answers. Or perhaps the almighty YouTube algorithm has finally brought your curious mind here, eons after this video had long since been uploaded. Whether you are angry, desperate, or curious, you are in for a ride. What we have on our hands today is a controversy that has been raging on for over four decades.
There is much to unpack and much to discuss. I humbly invite you on a journey with me, as we together uncover the forgotten truth.
But first, let us begin with a story, one of a gifted prodigy lost to us in a not-so-distant past.
Picture yourself as a young schoolboy, blessed with a gifted mind. You are reminded daily by your parents that you are destined for success, destined for perfection. Of course, you are not quite sure what you have done to be regarded with such high esteem. Schoolwork is like child’s play; the teachers drone on at a snail’s pace as your peers desperately try to keep up. Seldom encountering anything worthy of your time, you begin to grow weary. You would often find your mind adrift in the classroom, but it does not matter. Your superior intellect more than enough makes up for your absentmindedness. You are far ahead of everyone else, far ahead of the game. Then one day, through the recommendation from some friends of yours, you are introduced to a realm far different from your own. It calls out to you.
“Hey, want to play some video games? I know I do.”
Filled with skepticism, you follow its lead. You then find yourself immersed in a rich world teeming with wonders. Presented with a specific set of skills to master and a particular set of obstacles to overcome, you feel a rush of genuine excitement for the first time in your life. Finally, something that is truly worthy of your attention! Naturally, being the talented individual such as yourself, you quickly rise through the ranks, and relish in your friends’ adoration. And the best part about this world? If things get a little too easy for you, it will gladly bring you greater foes to conquer. On the other hand, when things get a little too hard, the difficulty will be toned down ever so slightly, until you are ready for the next step up the climb. It is perfect. Sure, everything else in your life has taken a backseat at this point, and you can forget about homework. It does not matter. You are finally getting what you wanted, that sweet sweet sense of pride and accomplishment. Your teachers, who up until this point tolerated your lack of enthusiasm for their monotonous babble, begin to grow increasingly agitated as you sleep through their classes. But what can they do? After all, compared to your peers you are still quite ahead of the game.
That is until one day, you are not.
No one is quite sure what is going on. Maybe it is that gang of jocks who relentlessly bully you every single day, maybe your family life is not nearly as rosy as you make it out to be, or maybe you are going through something so catastrophic that it is beyond our wildest imaginations. Of course, you are the only one who know what is truly going on, but that pain is yours to bear alone, and it has become far too great for you to bear. There is a fleeting thought in your mind to maybe ask for help, but you quickly bury it. You are the gifted child, destined for success, destined for perfection! The last thing you want is for your perfect reputation to be tainted by a sudden display of weakness, especially when it comes to your history teacher who seems almost elated that you are failing out of his class. Your parents disregarded your slipping grades and tardiness as a minor setback. In their mind, you are still their perfect child. So, presented with no other options in your mind, you turn to the only thing you know that can ease your pain.
Of course, sometimes your fellow peers in the digital world can be just as if not more obnoxious than the ones in real life. You may recall that one man of culture who seem to have a bizarre fixation on wishing that you will become terminally ill with cancer, or that one other gentleman who insists that he engaged in an affair with your mother. However, as crass as they can be, they are also the only ones in your life who can continue to captivate your full attention – for you to have the chance to sit down, turn on the monitor, and just forget about your pain for a while.
But eventually, even your parents begin to grow worried and frustrated. Your grades are plummeting like a fallen comet, and you always show up to class tired and wishing it would just all be over soon. You stopped reaching out to your friends, and they eventually stopped reaching out to you. Their gifted child is withering away like a star flickering on its dying breath. What ever shall they do? And thus began the daily berating.
“What’s going on? You’re better than this. Where’s that bright star we all know and love? Oh, you think you’re the center of the universe now, don’t you? Playing that stupid game of yours. Do you have any idea…any idea how much we sacrificed to bring you here?! Hey! Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you! Are you even listening?! Get back here right now before I...”
Years passed, and you eventually found yourself stumbling your way into your graduation ceremony, alone and full of regrets. Sure, you manage to barely scrape by, thanks to your superior intellect, but does that even matter? Your peers are off to…well, greater and better things than whatever you are up to. It is then you realize that you are far behind everyone else, far behind the game. Your parents have resigned themselves to the fact that their favorite gifted child is no more. That night, as you turn on your monitor for the umpteenth time, you are greeted by a single message.
Challenger.
You have done it! It is one most splendorous crown of achievement, a gift bestowed upon you for all these years of dedication and sacrifice. But to you it is no gift at all. As you sit there during this monumental moment, a shell of your former self, you resign yourself to your fate that you are doomed for a life of mediocrity until the end of time.
That is a cookie cutter story of your typical video game addict. In fact, if you were to do a little research online, you would find an archive of eerily similar experiences. Now before we venture further, perhaps some of you are already up in arms, pitchforks at the ready. “Blasphemy! How dare you desecrate my sacred hobby!?” Others may find this little story hitting a little too close to home. Please hold on just a second, because now we will uncover the source of this controversy that has been ongoing since the birth of video games themselves.
We fear that which we do not understand, history has repeatedly demonstrated this fact to us. This may not be news for some of you, but video games are far from the first to come under fire from the masses. Cellphones, movies, television, radio, books, music, pretty much anything new and of any entertainment value introduced in the history of humanity has seen its fair share of moral panic. Even Dungeons & Dragons, yes…that tabletop game in which you roll a dice and conjure cinematic fight scenes in your mind with your friends, was not spared from the flames.
However, what separates video games from all else is the sheer amount of public attention, negative public attention, that they have received over the years. While most of what was mentioned previously – cellphones, movies, television, radio, books, music – have been more or less accepted as a natural part of our modern lives, video games have not quite gotten there just yet. Most of the bad press about video games are centered on their more…violent variants. However, every now and then, you would find a shocking story about some poor soul who went on a 3-day gaming spree at his local internet café after losing his job, exhausting himself up until his heart literally gave out, and had his corpse carried out on a stretcher hours after he had died. Now, you may think that this example is on the extreme end, and you are right. This is not a story that you hear about every day, which is exactly why it would make for fantastic press. What these extreme cases overshadow though, are ones involving people suffering in more subtle ways. Flunked out of their schools, fired from their jobs, relationships in shambles, you will find these gut-wrenching stories on various corners of the internet.
Eventually, the authorities began to take note of these stories of desperation, and the controversy escalated quickly from there. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association introduced a new diagnosis to describe this new “video game addiction” problem called “Internet Gaming Disorder.” It was labeled as “condition for further study,” meaning it was not official yet – just something to keep in mind. However, that did not stop the World Health Organization from upping the ante and introducing their own version of the condition years later – “Gaming Disorder.” Only this time, it was official. Yes, you heard that right, not “condition for further study,” officially designated Code 6C51 under disorders due to addictive behaviors in the 11th edition of International Classification of Diseases. They did repeatedly stress that they were only referring to that small selective group of people who are literally destroying their own lives playing video games, and that video gaming is a health hobby for the vast majority. Well, if they are only trying to help those who seriously need it, then we got nothing to worry about right? Then why the anger? Why the outrage?
The answer may seem obvious. After all, would you not be furious if one of your favorite hobby was dragged through the mud? But there is a more subtle, and perhaps sinister explanation. You see, the World Health Organization, despite all its good intentions, has inadvertently classified video games as morally corrupt. A strong accusation some may say, allow me to elaborate.
You see, right next door besides Gaming Disorder rest drugs and gambling, a collection of strictly regulated and ethically controversial products and services known colloquially as the sin industry. These had a complicated legal and political history – the prohibition act that saw alcohol banned in the 1920s, the war on drugs that has been a monumental nightmare to deal with, and the stringent restrictions placed on the gambling industry are all testaments to that fact. When you look beyond the clinical perspective and take these other points of view into account, it becomes crystal clear why there is so much outrage over lumping video games in there with the likes of drugs and gambling. The unfortunate reality is that the stigma will always be there – death by association.
And that is not the worst problem that the World Health Organization is facing, if you look at the current definition of Gaming Disorder and compare it to its next-door neighbor Gambling Disorder, you will see that they are quite literally carbon copies of each other, just with the word “gambling” swapped out with “gaming.” Naturally, those who have caught on to this argue that you can theoretically apply this definition of addiction to anything – that everything can be addictive. It is no wonder that gamers are not the only ones up in arms about this. As we speak, there is a heated debate happening among academic and clinical experts about whether it is truly the right call to classify video game addiction as a legitimate clinical diagnosis.
But let us put a pin on this controversy for a while and assume, just for the scope of this conversation, that video game addiction is a legitimate clinical diagnosis that warrants some form of intervention. Then what? Impose sin taxes on the next wave of major releases? Enforce daily curfews through mandatory server shutdowns? While some of you may be nodding furiously with great enthusiasm, others may find that they could not help but feel that there is something just a little bit off about these proposals, that perhaps we are not exactly hitting the mark with them. It also certainly does not help that most of us are not taught much about addiction itself beyond a couple of crash courses and PSAs.
So, what if I tell you that much of what we think we know about addiction is wrong?
What are we usually taught about addiction in school? Chances are, probably something in the lines like this: Drugs are like a black hole, and anyone who dares to take a single whiff of that “good stuff” are destined to a life of pain and misery until their inevitable end. But where did these claims come from? The truth is that most of what we knew about addiction came from a series of experiments done in the 1950s and 60s. They usually involved putting a rat in a cage. The rat was then given a choice to drink from two water bottles: One with plain water, and the other infused with morphine, a type of painkiller that can also make you feel quite euphoric – addictive too. As it turned out, the rats unanimously preferred the drugged water, even if it meant they would eventually overdose and die. Seems simple enough to comprehend, but some researchers were skeptical. They noted that the rats were left in their cages with not much else to do besides getting high on morphine. Imagine for a second, that you were placed in a 4x4 cell with no contact with the outside world. These rats were quite literally in their version of hell.
So, these fellow researchers decided to conduct a similar experiment, but with a twist. Instead of sticking the rats in literal solitary confinement, they built a new cage, one dubbed “rat park,” which was basically heaven for rats. The rats in “rat park” got plenty of room to run around, food to eat, and toys to play with. Most importantly, they had other rats to socialize and “interact” with. The rats were then again introduced to two water bottles: one with plain water, the other infused with morphine. It was then they made their shocking discovery. Not only did the rats in “rat park” drank less of the morphine water, but those who had been previously conditioned to become dependent on the drug eventually weaned off it.
Of course, not everyone was convinced by this. We are talking about rats in a lab, not us fellow human beings out in the real world. Now, doing a similar experiment involving humans would have ethical complications. But fortunately…or rather, unfortunately, there was indeed a human experiment conducted unintentionally that may provide some insights. That experiment was the Vietnam war.
The year was 1971, and the war was not going well for the United States. Morale was at an all-time low on the frontlines, and the public at large was growing increasingly agitated. Needless to say, then President Richard Nixon had his hands full. It was also around that time when he was informed that the congressmen who traveled to Vietnam to survey the war effort returned with terrible news. The rumors of fellow American soldiers using heroin on the frontlines were confirmed to be true. Heroin was and perhaps still is believed by many to be one of the deadliest and most addictive drugs in the world. Nixon promptly declared drug addiction to be the country’s “number 1 public health problem.” As more people learned of this discovery, they grew terrified of the prospect that there would be a massive influx of heroin addicts flooding back into the country, with supposedly zero hopes of recovery. Except, when the war eventually ended and the soldiers returned home, that did not actually happen. Most veterans simply returned to their regular drug-free lives. As it turned out, using heroin helped made their lives in service more bearable, which made sense when you consider the fact that they were deployed into the opposite side of the world and made to fight a losing war in an unfamiliar land. But when they returned to their civilian life with their family and friends, there was simply no reason to continue.
Of course, this is not to say that addiction is entirely the result of poor life circumstances. There is absolutely a physical component to addiction, one you cannot simply ignore. However, it would be foolish to focus entirely on the biology of addiction itself…and to ignore everything else that is contributing to it in the first place. Like with rats living their proverbial version of hell, or with veterans locked in deadly combat continents away from home, addictions are short term solutions that create long term problems. They are what we do to run away from what is causing us pain in the moment, and they are what leads us to suffer beyond.
Then here lies the critical question: What are we running away from? What are you running away from?
You may have heard something in the lines of what I am about to say. “If only you could spend a fraction of this obsession with your stupid games and actually went off and did something worthwhile, you would be unstoppable!” Maybe it is from your parents who just could not seem to understand what you are going through. Maybe it is what you secretly tell yourself as you lay in bed looking up to the night skies with your bloodshot eyes after another ten-hour marathon gaming session, dreading over another day wasted. You may notice that you can be quite harsh towards yourself. You may even have come to believe that you are fundamentally broken – that you are lazy, pathetic, and will never amount to anything in life. But think about this, what drives you to play video games?
You would find yourself spending hours poring over the hundreds if not thousands of moving parts in a single match on the rift. You would practice incessantly until you have mastered the most intricate combos of your favorite fighters. You can perfectly recount from start to finish all the twists and turns of an epic trilogy set centuries into the future. Yet when your chemistry teacher calls you up in class and asks you to identify the first eight items on the periodic table, or your coworkers request that you help them with a couple of minor corrections in the latest draft of a report for your manager, your mind draws a blank. Why? Because you are lazy? You are telling me, the same person who would stay up all night searching for the latest meta on min-maxing every facet of an Orc Shaman, the same person who would spend hours wandering aimlessly in the Barrens to help find some poor fellow’s wife, is lazy? You are not lazy. You are highly driven...to play video games. The problem you are having is that you are not finding yourself highly driven to do much else.
Consider this, we now live in an age in which we have all the information of the world at the palm of our hands, and the ability to converse with others across the globe with the single push of a button. Yet somehow, many of us have come to feel increasingly trapped…and alone. Some of you may be struggling with the way you look, some of you with mental demons from a distant past, some of you with making friends or finding love, and some of you may just be trying to find a single iota of purpose for your existence as you trudge along to your dead-end jobs or as you work towards a degree that you simply could not care less about. It is as if you are lost in a maze, never quite understanding why you are the way you are or why you continue to exist. No wonder you would consider the option to just mentally check out, to seek refuge in a virtual realm beyond this cruel and messy reality to satisfy your deepest desires for a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging. That is all you ever wanted, even if it is just for one more day, even if it means letting your life slowly wither away into the void.
I must admit that I created this video with great ambivalence. On one hand, as a gamer myself, I completely understand why we would be upset with those who throw shade at what we love, especially from those who seem to have little understanding of what video games are all about. There are few communities out there with the same level of zeal quite like with the gaming community. Not to mention that the genuine passion from gamers – fellow creators eager to entertain with their vibrant personalities, fellow athletes eager to compete for the title of world champion, and fellow developers eager to find that spark of inspiration to create their next magnum opus – is one that is truly magnificent to behold. Yet at the same time, I do not believe that we can turn a blind eye to those among us who are genuinely suffering, who had this wonderful hobby twisted and warped into one necessary for survival, one that once taken away leaves behind nothing but an empty husk.
And to those of you who unfortunately bear the burden of this cursed crown. I wish that I have perhaps given you some insights to ponder over and will continue to do so in the near and distant future, but I do not possess the hubris to claim that I have all the answers. But maybe, just maybe, as much as I understand you may find it difficult to believe, you will eventually find your way out of this darkness, and we will then witness the rebirth of a star.
Selected References
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D Griffiths, M., J Kuss, D., & L King, D. (2012). Video game addiction: Past, present and future. Current Psychiatry Reviews, 8(4), 308-318. [LINK]
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González-Bueso, V., Santamaría, J. J., Fernández, D., Merino, L., Montero, E., & Ribas, J. (2018). Association between internet gaming disorder or pathological video-game use and comorbid psychopathology: a comprehensive review. International journal of environmental research and public health, 15(4), 668. [LINK]
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