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The Soapbox: The selfish gamer
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. It happened a couple of months ago. I was in a remote area in Lord of the Rings Online when another player -- the only other player in this small zone -- sent me a tell. "Can you help me? I need to finish this quest, and I keep getting killed in this cave." Honestly? My first instinct was to say no. It had been a busy day, and I was sitting down to a brief, 20-minute session that would be my only chance to get anything done until tomorrow. I was hoping to knock out a couple quests of my own, and I really didn't want to log out without accomplishing something with that character. So I responded and declined to help, which he took in good humor. Then it hit me what I just did. In a social online game, I'd refused to help someone who blatantly asked for it, all because I was being self-centered. So I sent him another tell. "You know what? What the heck. I'm sorry; I was having a me moment. Let's do this." And so we did. It was fun, and I logged out 20 minutes later without having advanced my character but feeling as though I accomplished something substantial even so. It was at this moment that I started to realize just how MMOs have conditioned me to be as selfish as possible -- and I made a promise right then and there that I'd start fighting back against that conditioning. I didn't want to be a selfish gamer any longer.
Virtual reality game gets Pavlovian on crack addicts
Bless you classical conditioning, for without you we wouldn't have stories about virtual crack dens. A Duke University developed game is attempting virtual reality therapy for crack addicts hoping to break their addiction. Prof Zack Rosenthal states that the game takes people "into a virtual crack-related neighborhood or crack-related setting and have them experience cravings, just like they would in the real world." Rosenthal says cravings are a mental and learned behavior which the game attempts to quell.Subjects will face in-game temptations and be required to rate their level of craving, after which the craving is expected to subside due to the game's inability to deliver a real fix. The therapist then ties the moment the craving subsides to a tone trigger, leading the addict to "associate the sound with the sensation of a decreased craving." Yup, it's all one giant virtual reality "Pavlov's Dog" simulator. [Via GamePolitics]
