addiction
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Jace Hall tackles media coverage of WoW addiction
Jace Hall is well-known for his comedy videos, but apparently he can also be a pretty serious dude when he wants to be. In a recent blog entry, the internet funnyman talks about a recent piece on "internet addiction" by CNN personality Campbell Brown. Addiction is a tough topic, and WoW is an easy sell as a scapegoat. Like any activity you love, if you feel passionately about it, you should fight for its proper representation. Jace certainly is. His stance on addiction: "It is my opinion that human beings are capable of creating destructive relationships and associations with almost anything. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is a fundamental trait of the human condition. This trait can occasionally direct people toward the use of escapism. Sometimes this can be a necessary mode of survival and very healthy – other times is can lead to counterproductive personal and social behavior. What that means is that, YES, someone can get so involved in watching movies, or reading books, or tweaking their myspace page, or surfing, or playing games, or swimming or drinking, or using drugs, or having sex, or ANYTHING THAT THEY FIND USEFUL TO ESCAPE WITH, that they actually begin to ignore other important aspects of their lives and it becomes a real problem." Hall laments that news organizations and personalities seem eager to paint activities they're unfamiliar with or don't understand, like WoW, as unique and dangerous forces in addiction then countless other activities. Among those with addictive personalities or social difficulties, any activity can become addictive, and this particular report, he says, is pure fear-mongering "based ultimately on conjecture." My personal opinion on these matters is that it's difficult to pin "WoW addiction" on any particular source, and that usually, like Jace says in his article, there are circumstances that extend far outside of the game that can cause these problems.
South Korea seeks to impose gaming curfew, makes computers 'edgy' and 'cool' in the process
Seems like China and the UK aren't the only countries worried about their kid's computing habits. According to the BBC, the South Korean government is currently mulling over plans to regulate just how much time -- and at what time -- kids play video games. It seems that a number of services are ready to follow through with suggestions made by the country's Ministry of Culture, including: Maple Story, Mabinogi (no access granted to school-age gamers between midnight and 8 am) and Dungeon and Fighter (slowing down user's connection after they've been logged in for a certain period of time). Nineteen games are said to be included in total, which is a significant portion of the country's online gaming market. This will inevitably force kids to build their own underground games on disused servers, like Chia and her friends did in William Gibson's Idoru. They'll need to do something with those 1Gbps connections, right?
Korea to impose gaming curfew to curb minors' playtime
The South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has announced two new policies aimed at stifling so-called video game addiction among the country's youth. Dubbed the "nighttime shutdown," users ages 19 and under of certain online games will be required to select one of three mandatory six-hour blackout periods set for the middle of the night, during which a user would be barred form online access to the particular game. The blackouts will be instituted for a number of popular online games, such as Maple Story, in the second half of this year. Additionally, testing of a second, "slowdown" policy has already begun, affecting four popular pastimes, including Dungeon Fighter Online (pictured above). The system is said to "drastically" reduce the internet speed of any underage user logged into a policed game for an unspecified but "lengthy" play session, according to The Korea Herald. Eventually, this dys-functionality will be rolled into 19 RPG titles, representing 79 percent of Korea's online game market. Some affected game companies have questioned why equally popular MMOs, such as Lineage, have not been marked for regulation. (Good question.) For years, South Korea has identified and sought treatments for "game addiction," which continues to be a major headline generator in the country and abroad. Critics of the new playtime enforcement policies believe that underage players will inevitably find ways to get around the shutdowns and slowdowns, suggesting that even unprecedented government intervention is not a reliable solution. That is, until the government sends its army of guys with bats to your door. [Via Massively]
Korea institutes nighttime shutdown for underaged MMO players
"You've been playing long enough, it's time to do something else now." It's a statement you'd expect to hear from your parent, but from your government? The Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has introduced a set of policies known as "nighttime shutdown" for underage users -- an enforced six hour blackout time. According to today's report in the Korean Herald, kids can choose the start time for their six hour window -- midnight, 1:00 a.m., or 2:00 a.m., and internet access will automatically shut down at that time for six hours. The point of this new "curfew" of sorts is to help curtail video game addiction among Korean citizens, a problem that's been making headlines off and on for a while. While it's only in the testing phase at the moment -- it affects four games right now, including Dungeon Fighter Online and Dragon Nest -- it will eventually expand to include 19 of the most popular online games in Korea, such as Mabinogi and MapleStory. The new policies aren't limited to nighttime shutdown, either. If an underage player is online for a significant amount of time online, a "slowdown" will come into effect, throttling back the user's connection speed and presumably making it much more difficult to play. You can read the full story in the Korean Herald. [Thanks to Amana for the tip!]
WoW, Casually: A spring invitation to students who raid
Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player with limited playtime. This week we invite raiders who are in school to join us and try out being a casual. Because our esteemed editor-in-chief was on NPR's "On Point" last week, I gave it a listen. As expected, the show took a few calls from people who are completely incapable of balancing their work and playtime -- people whose lives were "ruined by WoW." There was also the person who said that "you can't do anything without 24 other people," which we know is absolutely not the case. And the one that really caught my attention: the psychologist who gets panicked calls every spring from parents whose teens are playing so much WoW that they aren't going to pass. It fascinates me that this is seasonal and also so last-minute. Additionally, I am curious as to whether there are other activities that get in the way during the spring that psychologists also get frantic calls about. I remember it being so hard to focus in the spring while in school -- even in a climate that doesn't have seasons. Summer is looming on the horizon with vacation, new opportunities and huge life changes. We're just looking for distractions at that time. For graduating students, it's called senioritis and it's been called that long before we had computers in our homes to play games. Regardless, it's an issue. But rather than risk screwing up opportunities for the rest of your life just to keep up with your raiding, it's time to give being casual a try. Here's why and how.
New UK Internet Addiction clinic offers in-patient therapy to 'screenagers'
Internet addiction, as you know, is a growing worldwide concern. Recently, the UK opened its first rehab clinic for Internet Addiction (the provocatively named Broadway Lounge), but that was only the beginning. Capio Nightingale Hospital in London has announced its own plan to get gets out of the World of Warcraft and into the real world through an intensive in-patient, day care, or group therapy environment. The program is aimed at 15 to 17-year-olds, although kids as young as 12 could participate. A hospital spokesman said that the service hopes to "address the underlying causes of this addiction to transform screenagers back into teenagers." And if you thought we were running this because we wanted to use the word "screenagers," you might be on to something.
Forget the "Crackberry": Stanford students are addicted to their iPhones
Years ago, when the Blackberry started gaining traction among business users, people found themselves using the device so much that the nickname "Crackberry" was invented to describe how addicting the device was. According to a recent survey of 200 Stanford University students, the iPhone is just as addictive as the Blackberry, if not more so. Nearly a third of Stanford students surveyed worried about becoming addicted to their iPhones, while more than a third had heard complaints they were using the devices too much. The survey gives some insight into why students found their iPhones so addicting: 74 percent of students surveyed said they 'felt cool" when they got an iPhone, but more importantly, a quarter of surveyed students said their iPhones felt like "an extension of their brain or their being." I can definitely vouch for the addictive nature of the iPhone. I use my iPhone for almost everything these days, and it's fundamentally changed the way I do a lot of things. When I'm out and about and have a question about some bit of trivia, Wikipedia is only a few taps away. When I'm comparison shopping in a store, Amazon's product reviews can tell me in a few seconds whether what I'm looking at is a worthwhile purchase. And I've definitely gotten complaints that I use my iPhone too much from both my wife and a couple of my friends. Funnily enough, though, the friend who was most apt to complain about my iPhone usage stopped complaining about it altogether once she got an iPhone of her own -- within a few days of using her iPhone, she admitted that she finally understood why I used mine so much. How about you? Do you find the iPhone as addicting as the Stanford students? Let us know in the poll below or in the comments. [Via Ars Technica] %Poll-42365%
Boozing 27 year-old chokes mom over WoW
This is a sordid story, no matter how you slice it. In short, an adult male violently attacked his family when he was asked to stop his loud drinking and WoW gaming session so the children in the same room with him could sleep. Because of the violent nature of the events, I am putting the details after the break.
Teen runs away to meet older WoW soulmate [Updated]
digg_url = 'http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/01/05/teen-runs-away-to-meet-adult-wow-soulmate/'; Before we delve into this story, I just want to say that everything turned out alright. No Canadian laws were broken. No authority figures taking advantage of underage people in their care. The teenager is home safe and his online lover is allowed to return home whenever she likes. Here are the facts: A 16 year old boy in Ontario had an online affair with a 42 year old mother of four in Texas. They met in WoW, but much of the affair took place in MSN chat. The parents knew of the relationship for over a year. The boy told the woman that he was 20. The consenting age in Ontario, Canada is 16. The boy had a history of addiction to WoW, had seen a counselor and was given computer privileges again as a reward for good behavior. She came to visit him for the Christmas holidays and asked him to meet her in a hotel. He asked his parents for permission. They said no. He snuck out at 2 am and went to her anyway. The parents and local authorities made a plea to the public for his safe return. The boy and woman were spotted together in public two days later and brought in. Again, the boy is home safe and the woman is not being charged with anything in Canada.
My wife needs an intervention for her Live Cams addiction
It's a problem worthy of an episode of Intervention. Yes, I'm ashamed to admit that my wife is addicted to the Live Cams app on her iPhone. It all started when she was searching for new apps in the App Store, and she noticed a little app called Live Cams [US$0.99, iTunes Link]. It sounded innocuous enough -- the app provides a way to search, browse, view, and in some cases, control live web cams all over the planet. At a price of less than a buck, Live Cams couldn't harm anything or anybody, could it? We were both sure that the developer, Barry Egerter, couldn't have any evil intentions, so she bought Live Cams and installed it on her iPhone. That's when I noticed the changes coming over my wife. Rather than conversing over dinner, she would stare at her iPhone, occasionally touching the screen to switch to a new webcam or aim a camera at a new target. She'd interrupt my constant attempts at reaching a new high score in DoodleJump [iTunes Link] by waving her iPhone in front of my face, forcing me against my will to look at cute kittens cavorting on a cat cam in Tokyo. And when she started waking up at 3:30 AM to see what the "Really curvy road in Slovenia" looked like in daylight, I knew she had a problem.
China bans corporal punishment in internet rehab, UK and USA open up their own clinics
China's, how to say this, unorthodox rehabilitation methods, which involve "beating and confinement" of internet addicts, have finally been fully outlawed. Following the death of one teenager due to the treatment he received at an addiction camp, the Chinese Health Ministry has come out with a statement to say corporal punishment and methods restricting personal freedom "are strictly forbidden." In the meantime, the UK and USA are playing catch-up by opening up their own computer addiction camps, which have been described as residential internet detox clinics. Their genius ploy to get you off the web juice has been to go cold turkey and teach people to do chores as a distraction (really, chores and boredom are the cure and not the disease?). The British version even has a 12-step program, but we advise doing what we all did -- if you find yourself spending most of your time on the internet, just become a full-time blogger. Read - China bans tough treatment of young Web addicts Read - Britain's first computer rehab clinic opens Read - Clinic for internet addicts opens in US
MMO Family: When enough is enough
MMO Family is your resource for leveling a gaming-specced family ... From tips on balancing gaming with family life to finding age-appropriate niches for every family member, MMO Family offers you advice on MMO gaming of the family, by the family and for the family. Whether yours is the kind of family with "screen time" limits or the type that takes a more laissez-faire approach to logging in, there comes a point when enough is enough. Plenty of pixels and ink have been devoted to the debate over whether or not internet and gaming overuse should be considered an "addiction." What we're here to discuss is how gaming affects your family. As parents who game, we should be in a unique position to appreciate, respect and guide our children's attraction to games. But sometimes in the crush of day-to-day living, it's easy to let those last few minutes slip into half an hour ... past an hour ... into the evening ... into a habit that's begun eating away at family balance. To help parents recognize when their children's gaming may have passed what's reasonable and productive for them as individuals, we touched base with psychiatrist Dr. Kourosh Dini (author of Video Game Play and Addiction: A Guide for Parents and himself a gamer). Statistics on gaming use, he explains, show that most gamers manage to balance gaming with their daily lives without negative consequences. "In fact ... sometimes what one can gain from a game is quite profound," he observes. "The person's mind and the video games together set the stage – either for benefit or for detriment." A gaming schedule that suffocates one child's motivation and energy might buoy another through social problems at school. Our mission: to keep the mix healthy, productive and fun.
Blogger discusses EverQuest addiction
It's easy to talk about gaming addiction as an abstract concept, but whether or not you think the idea holds a lot of water there are an awful lot of studies and examinations of it that just won't go away. Still, the concept is easy to deny. The human element, however, makes it much more real and that much harder to ignore. Which is why, ultimately, it's probably a good thing for everyone that Kotaku's editor Mike Fahey has written up his story of his EverQuest addiction -- the origin, the escalation, and the recovery of sorts. Mike describes how the death of his relationship led to him escaping into the video game that increasingly was preferrable to his normal life -- which, in turn, led to him winding up without his car, then without a job, and then ultimately to the point that we could probably see coming, where the game became preferrable to pursuing a romantic relationship. He chronicles the downward slide, followed by the slow crawl back out of being addicted -- but, at the end, he doesn't conclude that EverQuest itself is the problem. As he himself puts it regarding his addiction: "I hid. I ran from my problems, hiding away in a virtual fantasy world instead of confronting the issues that might have been easily resolved if I had addressed them directly." His story focuses not upon the game, but on his own responses and how they were what was ultimately responsible for what happened and where he wound up. It's an interesting piece for the conclusion alone, and worth reading for anyone with even the slightest stake in the topic of game addiction -- which, for those of us who play MMOs, should really just include all of us.
Study: Singapore teens play 27 hours a week
The topic of addiction comes up pretty often when you're talking about World of Warcraft -- as Dr. Hilarie Cash told us, this is exactly the kind of game that brings out addictive tendencies in people who already have them. They've dealt with it in Sweden and elsewhere in the world before, and the most recent place to step up and face the problem is Singapore. This article talks about a three-year study that reveals some interesting facts about how and why Singaporean primary and secondary school students play their MMOs. The average amount of playtime per week, according to the study, is 27 hours. That's over a day of playtime per week.Still, while that seems high (and remember, it's just an average according to this study, which apparently isn't done until the end of the year), I like the government's take at the end of the article: regulating it, either by attacking the games or putting unenforceable rules on the Internet, just won't work. If these kids are playing too much (and generally the rule is that if your life is suffering, you're playing too much -- it's hard to believe that a kid going to school can play for 27 hours a week and still have time to do homework and sleep as they need to), then it's their and their parents' responsibility to get educated and fix it. Lots of people play MMOs, but it's up to those who do it unhealthily to get help for themselves.
The perils of covering game addiction
Gamers will argue almost endlessly over which games are the best, which ones were most important, what the proper way to play is... but one thing we almost universally agree on is that we are not addicted. We all know the arguments -- the guy who plays sixteen hours a day in his parents' basement would have acted like that anyway, it's just a game, he doesn't have a substance addiction. Why even bring it up?Neils Clark, author of Game Addiction, wrote up a post about ten fallacies in addressing game addiction. The point of the piece, rather than concluding whether or not it's worth discussing, is to point out the ways in which many of the arguments on both sides are inherently flawed. The first point, for instance, is taking on the oft-quoted stance that "well, games aren't drugs" by laying out the many kinds of repeated behaviors that psychologists already recognize as potential addictions and treat accordingly.MMORPGs, more than perhaps any other genre, are usually replete with tales of utter addicts and non-stop players. The article is worth reading if you care even the slightest bit about the topic, because it reminds us that the elephant is not a part of the furniture. It's an elephant, and it's the sort of thing that needs to be addressed -- especially as the genre expands its appeal and its user base.[ via GamePolitics ]
The Daily Grind: You were on my mind...
MMOs have a tendency to be very addictive, arguably more so than other game genres. Even if you are very strict with yourself and try to limit your play-time, we bet you can think of a time when you were super excited about a new MMO you had just started playing, and experienced something similar to the opening lyrics of the song in the video above: "When I woke up this morning, you were on my mind." Okay, so they're talking about loving a person and not digital entertainment, but MMOs weren't so big when that song was written in the 1960s.This morning, we would like you to share how much you think about your MMOs when you're not actually playing them. Simply being at this website means there's a good chance that you are invested in your games beyond just logging in and playing. Do you talk with friends and co-workers about your gaming exploits? Does thinking about your next play session ever get in the way of your productivity in daily life? Perhaps you can turn it off like a light-switch, never allowing yourself to be distracted any more than you want to be. Or maybe you simply find a way to get online whenever you're jonesing. Let us know in the comments section.
Player stories on the official site
Blizzard asked for real-life stories from players a little while ago, and now they've posted a pretty big collection of them over on the official site (this page was around last year, but they've added many stories since then). As Bornakk says, these are personal accounts from players of how playing the game with others has helped them grow relationships in real-life. I'm not sure what exactly the point of posting these is (maybe Blizzard wants to stave off some of that negative media reporting about the game and addiction to it), but then again, if you dive into a few of these, you can see that they don't really need a point -- they're really interesting (and in some cases pretty heartwarming) stories about how players are using this game to enrich real-life relationships.They're still accepting more stories as well, so if you've got a good tale of some WoW-sharing in real-life, hit them up over on the submission page and put yours in the mix. Hopefully Blizzard will figure out a way to get these out into the real world -- harsh stories about addiction are so easy for the media to jump on, but great stories like these are the real reasons we all play this game.
[1.Local]: In which He-Man and Eddie get pwned
Reader comments -- ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.Sometimes it's the smallest details that people grow attached to. Take, for instance, this note that came in on the news tip line from a dejected reader named Brian. Brian and his compatriots are lamenting a dearly departed Battlemaster - one who seemed strangely reminiscent of a certain Eternian prince.Subject: Adam Eternum is MISSINGSome time around patch 3.2, all the Battlemasters in Shattrath were changed. Gone is Adam Eternum, with his smashing magical loincloth and Gnome sidekick.Instead we have, as a royally ticked-off guildie puts it (after having downed several stiff drinks in despair), "Shome Draenei hussy ... hic!" My guild here on Ysera, at least, has gone into mourning.Oh where, oh where has Prince Adam has gone? Find out what else readers have been mourning or celebrating this week - plus peek at an internal WoW.com team e-mail in which Hunter columnist Eddie Carrington gets soundly pwned - after the break.
WoW.com Interview: Dr. Hilarie Cash continued
One of the thing we continually see whenever the media talks about Internet addiction and how this all works is this tendency to say it's the game's fault. Well because the government is so worried about this whole thing, the government has -- obviously a completely different kind of government, and a different kind of culture and society than we have, but because the government's worried, and because, the way I understand it, the game developers in China don't want to get in trouble with the government, they've created things like if you keep playing beyond a certain point you start losing points, and things like that.
Kick your WoW habit with ReSTART clinic
Just when you think this kind of thing can only happen in the Netherlands, along comes ReSTART, a Washington state-based rehab center that offers a 45-day course of treatment crafted to help you kick your internet or World of Warcraft addiction. Oh, and it's all offered at the bargain price of $14,000! "We've been doing this for years on an outpatient basis," Hilarie Cash, the center's director, told the AP. "Up until now, we had no place to send them." Of course, if you want to kick your WoW addiction for just a little bit less cash, the serious professionals of the Joystiq Internet Rehabilitation Clinic Staffed By Serious Professionals have some fine replacement therapies to recommend.
