The BBC ran a story about people being addicted to gaming — most frequently to the World of Warcraft game (not, as yet World of World Of Warcraft, but surely that’s only a matter of time). This apparently provoked a number of angry responses from gamers who accuse the BBC of treating gamers according to the usual cliches — sad, lonely people in basements with no friends outside the virtual world.

The problem is that both sides have a point. The reason that gamers are stereotyped as such is because many of them do fit this description, but many people enjoy online gaming and manage to have friendships, relationships and even children in the real world. But that’s the point. These people aren’t the ones who are the addicts.

The term addiction is also sometimes applied to compulsions that are not substance-related, such as problem gambling and computer addiction. In these kinds of common usages, the term addiction is used to describe a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity, despite harmful consequences to the individual’s health, mental state or social life.Wikipedia: Addict

So if you play online games to the extent that it may have harmful consequences to your health, mental state or social life, you may well be an addict.

For example, it’s easy enough to make the case that this South Korean was an addict:

A South Korean man has died after reportedly playing an online computer game for 50 hours with few breaks.BBC News: S Korean dies after games session

But most people won’t be that bad. It’s like alcholism: some studies suggest that as many as 8 million people in the England have some form of alcohol dependency (at the lower end of the ‘alcoholic’ scale). Now I’m not entirely sure how they rank ‘dependency’ in this case, as 8 million seems rather a lot, but I’m presuming ‘gaming dependency’ can be treated as a similar continuum.

If you are working from the logic that it may be harmful to your health, mental state or social life, then you don’t necessarily need to be doing it all night every night to be on that scale.

The BBC editors blog covered the story in more detail, quoting from who said:

…teenagers lived their lives almost exclusively in this virtual world, falling behind with their studies, damaging their health, and failing to engage with their peers in the real world.BBC Editors: Addicted to Warcraft?

Apart from the obvious fact that no-one has ever known a teenager who lives his life in the real world, being generally too full of hormones, angst and frequently alcohol, this is obviously a serious issue. The whole point of computer games is that they should be fun to play. That they should make you want to play again.

This is particularly true for the subscription-based games (you pay £40 for the game then another £7 per month or whatever), as opposed to the one-off purchase type. In these games, if you aren’t playing, you aren’t paying, so it’s in the interests of the games companies to make games that you want to play as regularly as possible. As an aside, I refuse to buy this sort of game on the basis that I object to paying a continuing fee once I’ve paid for the bloody game in the first place.

But whether a game is subscription-based or not, a game that you are going to want to play repeatedly is going to be better-liked, and get better reviews than one which isn’t. Simply because it is obviously more fun to play.

When I was at school, I played computer games a lot. But there were also kids who could be described as having a ‘football addiction’, playing football every night to the detriment of their schoolwork. That’s no different in principle from gaming (except that it’s obviously healthier).

Again, parents have to take some responsibility when children are involved.

Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, say the game has been given a “rest” system, which rewards players for taking a break. Paul Sams of Blizzard says parents have also been empowered: “We’ve put in a robust parental control system so that parents can control how much time their kids play, and when they play and it’s all managed.BBC Editors: Addicted to Warcraft?

So if parents have the power to limit their kids use of the games, and choose not to, aren’t the parents partially to blame? It’s like parents who complain that Grand Theft Auto is too violent for their 12-year old whom they bought it for because the shop wouldn’t sell it to the kid, what with it having an age rating on it. Or the parents who complain that Flesh Eating Zombies IV is too violent for their nine year old, after renting it for them…

Even going back to the days of the ZX Spectrum, “addictive qualities” were something that you specifically looked for in a game (See Crash! review of Cybernoid from 1988). Because you don’t want to pay money for a game that you don’t want to play very much… you want to get one you’ll love to play over and over. The more addictive a game is, the more you’ll like it, the better reviews it will get, and the more successful it will be.

When I was a student, I was slightly addicted to an online text-based game called Viking MUD. I would be found playing on this when I should have been working, and sometimes I played through the night as “Mangelwurzel” (along with SY, with only coffee to keep us going). This was a text based precursor to the more fancy modern World of Warcraft stuff (and, I believe, is still going).

I played so much because I enjoyed it. Now I don’t. I have other things to spend my time on, like work, kids, and er… blogging every day.

But people become addicted to lots of things: usually to something that gives them some sort of pleasurable ‘buzz’ which they then miss when they are not doing it (even if there is no chemical addiction involved). You get compulsive gamblers; why not compulsive games-players? It may well be cheaper.

I’m not entirely sure what point I’m trying to make here: something along the lines of “yes, of course it’s possible to be addicted to computer games, why is everyone so surprised?” with a hint of “just because you play computer games doesn’t necessarily make you a sad case”. Oh, and possibly a touch of “but you should watch what you’re doing with any activity”. Only with added rambling thrown in…