I’ve been told, with varying degrees of vitriol, that games are addictive.
Indeed.
This is a subject that comes up every so often, usually spurred by a soft piece spewed forth by a local news network or “brand new” study, and it’s a topic that I can’t say I fully understand.
That isn’t to say I don’t agree that games are addictive, chances are every gamer knows at least one person whose time and effort spent on playing would be comparable to an addiction, indeed I’ve known several. Rather, addiction is one of those things that I can’t say I’ve ever fully grasped, because I’ve never been intensely addicted to anything.
First, let me clarify what I mean by that statement.
I don’t have an addictive personality.
I’ve partied hard and drunk harder but at the end of the day, I don’t need alcohol to function. I’ve smoked, but I never feel the need to smoke all the time (that statement doesn’t purely refer to tobacco either, another vice that I side-stepped neatly). I can honestly say that I’ve never tried or done anything that I’ve ever gotten to the point where it would be called an addiction, which isn’t to say I don’t have passions, far from it, but I’ve never had a living room full of people asking me to put down the Snickers bar.
I am a passionate gamer, and let no man put my credentials to that fact asunder.
I’ve been playing since I was 2 and I don’t intend to stop, I went to midnight launches back when they, y’know, did stuff. I’ve pulled all nighters so I could finish a game, I’ve done more 100% runs than I care to mention, been to expos, ran expos, been to tourneys, had my ass handed to me by Korean kids, written for websites and worked in the biz. But if I have to pick between a date and a new release, I go with the date. If I do a midnight launch and have to work the next day, I put the title on the shelf and sleep.
I still have a life, no matter how meek
My first brush with gaming addiction that I can recall was in 1995, I had a friend, lets call him Jacques, who was an avid gamer. No mean feat in those days mind, for the younger among us it would be difficult to envision a world where there were more games for PC than any console, arcades didn’t suck and the local video game store (not a mega-chain) was a geek mecca that, unless you were a lucky so-and-so, was far enough away to take the bus you weren’t allowed to get on, to a suburb your parents never went to.
Jacques was one of those very lucky kids whose parents spoiled him to the bone, he always had the newest and best and this meant while I was still reading about games in Nintendo Power and Hyper, he had them imported from Japan, or the States, or wherever they came from, and while my PC was chugging away he had the equivalent of today’s super-beasts. It was on this PC, on a cold and wet June afternoon I went to his house and he gleefully showed me a game that his brother had sent from Canada, a game about orcs and humans that let us play our fantasy table games much quicker and without the set up time.
A game called WarCraft.
It started innocently enough, we played the game a lot that afternoon, he was still playing it when I left. Monday rolled around, but Jacques wasn’t in class. He didn’t show up all week, or the next. I went to his house to see if he was feeling well enough to do the pile of homework I had to give him, I wasn’t prepared for what greeted me at the door. This was a gaunt shadow of the boy I had played computer games with the week before, the dark bags under his eyes showed the extent of his sleep deprivation, and despite the overcast weather he still shielded his eyes from the afternoon light. As I gave him the homework he eagerly showed me the tricks he’d picked up in the two weeks since we’d last spoke, the sheets of paper thrown in a pile of instant ramen cups, I scarcely believed he’d been allowed to stay home and play games for two weeks, the shock I felt when he gleefully told me his parents tried to force him to school but he just stopped eating till they gave him back his computer is something I still can’t express.
I wish I could say this is something that I’ve only seen once but as I said earlier this is the first of many, the game changes sure, everything from Unreal Tournament to Ultima Online, World of Warcraft to Guitar Hero, but the change is the same. Each time they’ve morphed into a person who only sees the game, only sees the next big score or loot drop or whatever they’re chasing and everything falls by the wayside, relationships, work, education, hell even basic things like hygiene and nutrition lose importance. The game is king, to be the best is the only thing that matters.
Games can be addictive. There is no doubt in my mind that they can be, and I pause here to suggest that if you know someone who is, or are a gaming addict yourself that you should seek help from a professional.
Where am I going with this? Good question.
I’ve been told, with varying degrees of ignorance, that I am a gaming addict.
We’ve all been there, as gamers we’ve all hit the point where all we want is that next objective ping or level up, that next achievement or trophy. We have all, whether we admit it or not, have stared bleary eyed at 2am and declared that we’ll be done in 5 more minutes, or after this checkpoint, or when that last god-damn zombie is dead. We’ve all paid the price the next day as we struggle to stay awake at work or school, silently cursing that last zombie.
I know I have, in my hey day I would play until the wee hours of the morning, grinding random encounters in FF: VII, trying to get all 150 Pokemon, 5 starring Bark at the Moon on expert, tracking down hidden packages, trying to get the magical 10,000th kill. The last big goal I chased? 100% in Red Dead Redemption, but I stayed up later to watch the World Cup than I did riding the open plains of New Austin. And it’s not like I’ve never considered gaming over everything else in my life, even this morning I was honestly weighing the pros and cons of leaving my nice warm bed and FIFA10 or getting lunch and taking care of the errands that had slowly piled up over the morning, my conclusion? I put the controller down, and some pants on.
So where do we draw the line between passion, and addiction?
I’ll figure it out after one more game.
