When addicts get addicted to non-addictive things
Here's the odd thing. Everyone agrees there are videogame addicts. Using fairly standard terms of definition, numerous studies have shown large levels of addiction – this one, for example, claims that 3m players in the US alone are addicts. And yet, that same study also somehow concludes "it's not that the games are addictive".
So hang on – three million addicts addicted to something that isn't addictive? What's all that about, then?
As I noted earlier, it's curious that the games industry regularly and proudly utilises the word "addictive" to praise and promote its own products, yet reacts with extreme indignation should anyone else use the same word to describe them. And not least because we all know, from direct personal experience, that it's true.
We've all been there. I've lost countless entire days of my life – days when I had other, more important things to do – to Tempest 2000 and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Raiden 3 and Geometry Wars Waves (and many, many more). I've sat there hopelessly glued to a controller, pressing Start over and over again against my conscious will until morning turned to afternoon turned to evening turned to night turned to morning again.
I've smashed my own property, (breaking joypads or stuff I've thrown them at) and caused myself physical injury (Grid Wars 2 gave me severe tendinitis which left me unable to open a jar of jam for a month, and God knows what the last 30 years of staring at monitors and TV screens and tiny handhelds have done to my eyesight), both signs of damaging addiction.
Whenever gamers meet, they trade such tales like fishermen or drinkers, with theatrical embarrassment but no sense of genuine shame. The time they didn't leave the house for a week on account of a new Championship Manager, their 10,000 hours logged on World Of Warcraft, the day their mum/girlfriend/wife hid/smashed/sold their console to break the hold of Pro Evo Soccer or Gran Turismo, or whatever.
But hey – we can handle it, right? We could give it up any time we liked. And indeed, for the majority of gamers such events are isolated extreme incidents in a lifetime of healthy, balanced gaming. But here's the thing – most drinkers aren't alcoholics. Millions of people quit smoking every year. Huge numbers of people manage to get off heroin or tranquilisers or anti-depressants. Are those things, then, not addictive?
Most of us, I'd suggest, have enjoyed (and I use that word very deliberately) episodes of binge drinking. Even the most moderate imbiber has (or has had) a blowout on occasion where they knock back the recommended weekly intake of units (or much more) in a single evening. The obvious logical analogy is with that of the moderate gamer who occasionally runs into a Goldeneye or a Super Mario Galaxy and has a "lost weekend", but then resumes normal healthy patterns of use.
Yet whenever I've gone on a giant boozing session (in my younger years, obviously – at my age nothing is worth the four-day hangover that a heavy night now causes), I've never once bought another drink against my conscious will. I've never once thought "Okay, I really want to get home and have a sleep, but OH NO somehow I've gone to the bar and handed over more money!" I kept drinking because I was enjoying it and I wanted to, and knowingly accepted the consequences I knew would arise the next day.
Yet with the games I mentioned earlier (and many others) I've told myself, more times than I care to remember, "Okay, last one and then I'm definitely going to go to that meeting/do that bit of work/put out that increasingly serious fire in the kitchen", but then hit the Start button again (and again and again) anyway, even though I didn't really want to, even though the game was making me angry or frustrated rather than entertained. And so has every single person reading this feature. (Don't even try to deny it, because if you hadn't you wouldn't be reading this site in the first place.)
So which is more addictive – alcohol or videogames? Because nobody even remotely sane tries to argue that alcohol isn't addictive, yet its usage patterns are almost identical to those of videogames. The vast majority of people use both things responsibly and pleasurably, with occasional brief binges (which usually decrease dramatically in frequency with age), and only a tiny minority get damagingly hooked.
So why is the games industry – and indeed gamers – so hysterical about any suggestion that games can be addictive? After all, they're explicitly and unashamedly DESIGNED to be addictive, in a way that alcohol isn't. You could argue, in fact, that the only games that AREN'T addictive are bad games. That's why "addictive" is universally used in the games media as a term of fulsome and glowing approval. No magazine or website ever writes "this game is incredibly addictive, so don't buy it, 2/10".
The addictive qualities of booze, on the other hand, result directly from prolonged and serious misuse, and they have to overcome fairly major physiological defence mechanisms such as the body's tendency to pass out when you get really pissed and the fact that alcohol by itself tastes horrible.
(If drinks companies actively wanted their product to be addictive they'd invest billions of pounds in making whisky taste of strawberries, not lava. To become an alcoholic you have to work pretty hard at it, either through sheer bloody-minded persistence or putting an awful lot of orange juice/cola/lemonade/lime in your spirits. And see also tobacco – who enjoys their first cigarette? Why can't you buy Benson & Hedges Cinnamon Cut?)
At this point, defensive games-industry execs or journalists usually start demanding hard and irrefutable scientific evidence that games can be addictive, which is stupendously and disingenuously missing the point because we all know already that they are. If even normal, well-adjusted people like us can occasionally get obsessed, then it stands to mindbogglingly obvious reason that there will be less normal, less well-adjusted people who let their habit get out of control.
"Ah," they retort, "but that means that it's not the game itself that's addictive, it's the addict's personality", to which the only reasonable and intelligent response is that one where you stick your tongue right into your bottom lip, pull a stupid face and go "MMMUUUUUHHHHH", because you have to have an addictive personality to get addicted to pretty much anything. Nobody ever became physically dependent on alcohol as a result of their first can of Bass Shandy, for Christ's sake.
The truth of the matter is that the definition of "addiction" is a scientifically vague and nebulous one anyway. My thesaurus, for example, regards the word as interchangeable with the words "habit, compulsion, dependence, need, obsession, craving, enthusiasm, infatuation", in which case it would seem I'm variously addicted to crisps, oxygen and Megan Fox.
Even after years and years of dedicated research nobody seems able to agree whether cocaine is strictly technically addictive, or gambling. Yet the gambling industry doesn't loudly proclaim its hurt feelings and sense of persecuted injustice if you suggest that there are people who are addicted to gambling, because we all know there are.
The games industry and media's loud and huffy protestations that there's no INCONTROVERTIBLE DEFINITIVE ABSOLUTE SCIENTIFIC PROOF that games are addictive is indistinguishable from the decades the tobacco industry spent splitting hairs and obfuscating and stalling and trying to deny what absolutely everyone knew was true about cigarettes. (Indeed, even now there are still plenty of lunatics who insist that there's no conclusive, empirical proof that passive smoking damages health.)
Quibbling over semantics is not only missing the point, but fundamentally dishonest misdirection. We all know what we mean when we say "addicted". Go to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting and sniffily tell them they're not really addicts and just need to pull themselves together. I'll hold your coat.
I don't agree with the ludicrous mindset that says anything people somehow manage to harm themselves with should be banned. You can hang yourself with a pair of pyjamas, but nobody pickets the Marks & Spencers menswear department demanding government action on the Pyjama Menace. If someone strings themselves up from the banister with their PJs, a sensible society provides ambulances to go round and try to resuscitate them and psychiatrists to try to help resolve whatever issues caused them to do such a thing. It doesn't ban pyjamas.
(And for all the gaming world's predictable hysterics every time anyone dares suggest there might be a problem, I'm pretty sure nobody's ever even said that addictive games should be banned, let alone how one might determine which the dangerous ones were.)
But in the entire pantheon of things people get themselves addicted to, videogames are almost unique in that they're specifically, knowingly and deliberately made to be addictive. It's a farcical, embarrassing act of mass collective cognitive dissonance to try to pretend otherwise, as well as being rather insulting to some very talented game designers.
You have to wonder what everyone's trying to hide.
I really enjoyed this.
Only trouble being that ciggies are designed to be addictive. They do taste like shit, but they're ultimately a delivery system for nicotine.
I know because Russell Crowe told me in that film about smoking with Rusell Crowe in it.
Regardless, you made some really interesting, level-headed points. A good read.
Much better than the nonsense about the bloke that reviewed the chair wrong.
Thanks.
Wish I knew why my comments always got eaten at work.
In short: games don't have the same health issues associated with them as most things we refer to as 'addictions' like drink and drugs. Hence the desire not to use that word. In the same way you rarely hear about 'coffee addiction' even though it seems half the nation suffer from it. It's harmless 99% of the time.
Nor does gambling.
Great article, absolutely nails what I was thinking reading the complaints about this program..
There was a decent amount of discussion about how to make games that people come back to more often, through achievement systems, at some of the summer development conferences.
A good and interesting article that I enjoyed. However, I do take argument with:
two nights in the pub will give you about the same number of hours of fun as a typical £50 blockbuster game for about the same amount of money, and you don't need an Xbox Live Gold subscription to be allowed to do the first one with other people.
Firstly, £50? I can think of only the terrible COD BLOPS which has come close to that, making it atypical – the typical cost of a new blockbuster game which is requiring of an Xbox Live Gold subscription, is £39.99.
The time taken to finish such a game is far from fixed, with Medal of Honor completable in 5-6 hours, Fallout 3 New Vegas and Fable 3 both being examples of blockbuster RPGs which can take weeks, even months to complete. And of course, some of the most addictive games – the niche-market football/driving obsessive games such as Forza 3 or Fifa 11 will be played for the year or more it takes for the next iteration to be released.
Pubs might not require an Xbox Live Gold subscription (which will cost you roughly £3.20 a year depending on how you pay for it), but a dress code might require new threads, you might need a taxi there and back, and there might even be an entrance fee. All of these will cost significantly more than the £3.20 required for XLG, and crucially, they won't last you a full month.
In other words, the smart games & booze enthusiast will stay at home getting pissed alone while hooting it up over Xbox Live, until they vomit all over themselves and pass out. It's the popular choice these days.
Firstly, £50? I can think of only the terrible COD BLOPS which has come close to that, making it atypical – the typical cost of a new blockbuster game which is requiring of an Xbox Live Gold subscription, is £39.99.
That's a pretty spurious argument – you can also drink in Wetherspoons, or in a boozer with a happy hour or any of a dozen other kinds of price-reducing promos. (Plus the cost depends on where you live, and whether you have crisps or play pool or put some songs on the jukebox, etc etc.) It's a ballpark rule of thumb, man.
Also, where the heck are you getting a Live Gold sub for three quid?
EDIT: Whoops, quoted wrong bit.
I'm just delighted that nobody has used the term 'addicting', the use of which is grounds for murder.
This is all true enough, but the other thing we all know is that there are two or three different kinds of 'addictive' and we're using one while the Daily Mail and Fox are using another.
Alcohol, pot, possibly cocaine, Grid Wars 2 and other good games – feel good so you want to continue, some binges, addictive personalities in danger, situation normal.
Casino gambling, Zynga bullshit, parts of WoW's design – ruthlessly designed and evolved to tweak built-in wires in people's brains to make them feel bad when they stop. Often not even initially fun; just addictive.
Heroin, meth, crack, nicotine etc. – rapidly or immediately make lasting changes in brain chemistry in a large number of users that cause pain and depression in the absence of another hit, up to convulsions, hallucinations and other physical withdrawal symptoms.
Ah, paragraph breaks not WYSIWYG, noted, sorry.
Stu, I said roughly £3.20 a year meaning of course that it was roughly that much per month. And I was wrong. I've just checked on Amazon and a 12 month sub costs ~£2.50 per month.
Well gambling might not cause health problems but it does cause other quite obvious problems with losing huge amounts of money.
I mean that, plus the money issue we're talking about now might be one of the reasons gaming gets focused on more than other things: it really is so cheap that anyone can do it, even kids. These people getting addicted are, seemingly invariably, getting hooked on one game, so the pub/alcoholism comparison doesn't really work. Every drink costs more money. Farmville and some RMT MMOs aside, these people are buying one game and playing it to death. Yes, there's possibly the monthly cost of a Gold sub (£3) or the World of Warcraft sub (£8) but that's all. Compared to drinking that's tiny. Even if you throw in the £20 for the WoW box aswell, you're not going to get much drinking/drugging/gambling done on £50 every three months.
I genuinely think that's key. Most students and kids can't afford to be alcoholics. Most can't afford a drug habit. So yeah, you get horror cases where they start stealing stuff to pay for crack, but at some point for most the reality of it kicks in. Not so with games. So it doesn't feel so bad, Warcraft can eat a load of time, but that's the only expense. Your time. And consequentially your social life. And perhaps degree. Or job. But never directly money.
And the likes of WoW can keep you occupied very cheaply for a very long time. I spent years on it. I wouldn't say I was addicted, I played a lot, by which I mean maybe 20-30 hours a week. But that was my gaming time. I didn't play other games. Wish I would have, would have been more fun. But saved some money.
"I genuinely think that's key. Most students and kids can't afford to be alcoholics."
That's a bit disingenuous. They perhaps can't afford to be pub alcoholics, but you can buy strong booze in supermarkets for farcically tiny amounts of money (unless you're a kid and can't get served in pubs or off-licences, which is a whole other issue). In real terms alcohol has plummeted in price in the last 20 years, and you could easily get pissed for three or four quid.
But all this is somewhat off the point. Games are addictive, and are designed to be addictive. All the piece is saying is that anyone who gets outraged at that suggestion has some sort of agenda and shouldn't be trusted.
(Sorry for any typos, I´m not a native speaker.)
What´s funny to me is that the games that caused my hardest binging session aren´t even the ones I liked the most. I remember spending countless hours collecting useless blue coins in the sub-par Mario Sunshine, causing me to get a horrible, splitting headache; forcing myself through the very repetetive Advance Guardian Heroes in order to unlock useless side characters; but the worst have been the whole weekends inside mindlessly grinding levels, souls and items on Aria Of Sorrow, Dawn Of Sorrow and Portrait Of Ruin.
There is definitely a difference between playing a game a lot because it´s really good and playing it because it triggers some weird anal-retentive collecting/levelling part in your brain. After getting 100% souls and all the gigantic swords in Aria Of Sorrow I felt empty and ashamed of myself.
The really good games, the skill-based, twitch reaction titles like Bangai-O Spirits, Armed Police Batrider, Alien Solider or Trackmania are the ones I rarely play for more than an hour at a time, because after a while I´m just exhausted. They just feel so satisfying to play – and getting better at them require actually learning new skills instead of pushing buttons to kill small rats for ten hours to make your wooden stick go up a level so you can go on and kill slightly bigger rats.
So for me, a good game isn´t necessarily the most addicting. As Hypocee mentioned, games like Farmville and WoW are deliberately programmed to suck you in as much as possible, in a unsettling, Skinner-Box conditioning type of way. When I fire up MAME to play some credits in DoDonpachi, I don´t suddenly end up sitting in a pool of my own excrement three days later – it´s just a terrific game that I play for half an hour and then go back to whatever I was doing before.
The internet, however… man, that´s addictive on a whole different level.
Games are addictive. And the advent of the mainstream MMORPG and the sprawling nature of the modern video game has made things worse. No longer is it just the pick up and play thrill of Tetris. There is a whole new generation of sad, bedroom ridden geeks out there – yes, there always has been but this time it's more sinister. An army of socially inept zombies. Don't let your kid become one!
Great article. It does sound like these twitchy industry figures are feeling guilty for some reason, but as the common sense above states, they really needn't be.
Is it something to do with the bizarre stigma which means videogaming is rarely talked about as an equivalent of other pasttimes or hobbies?
All games, real-world or otherwise, succeed or fail in their ability to push some sort of reward buttons for the player. What would be the point of them otherwise?
Do some people play certain games to a compulsive level over a long period of time leading to detrimental effects on health and social life? Clearly some people do and therefore in these cases the reward buttons being pressed by the game are working particularly well.
But you could say the same about missing a child's birthday to attend an unimportant league match at the other end of the country if you are a hardcore supporter of a football team. Some people are just prone to overdoing things.
Of course, some games companies are taking steps to prevent addiction. For example, Fallout 3 still runs pretty poorly on my computer, to the extent it will crash after about three hours max, thereby ensuring I cannot stay for too long in the post-apocalyptic virtual environment it otherwise draws me into. Thanks, Bethesda!
Books and TV programmes (DVD boxsets, particularly) can keep me up far past a sensible bedtime, but books particularly don't get accused of being addictive.
If I've learned one thing from games though, it's the opposite of addiction. As they take up so much time, you have to develop the ability to abandon them at any point.
Bad games get the axe very quickly, and I've found that I now do the same with bad books, bad films and bad TV, where before I might have read/watched to the end 'to see if it got better'.