Gaming Addiction Article with Sad Consequences
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 - 6:40am
Not sure if this is the right section of GWJ forums or not (also not sure how I feel about the idea of "gaming addiction"), but still felt this was worth sharing: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/southkorea/7376178/Korean...
The URL gives the story away, tragic stuff. not sure it's politics or controversy, or if it so specific to MMOs that it belongs there. Anyway, feel free to move (mod), if this was the wrong section of the forums.
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Wow, truly heartbreaking. I've been addicted to MMO's, but never to the point to degrade my personal welfare or anyone else's for that matter.
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I simply don't understand this.
I'm reading it, and it happened, but I don't understand how.
People confuse me.
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When my son was born I knew from that moment that i couldn't let anything ever hurt him. This makes me very sad.
This.
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This isn't the first set of crazy gamers in South Korea. This is a country that has already had a Starcraft-related fatality
Yeah, in fact it seems these stories always come out of South Korea. Those guys need to learn to pace themselves.
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Wow, what an upsetting story. What up with that.
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Certis wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
This is a heartbreaking but extreme case. The bigger story is the milions of people who are addicted to computer games at the expense of other aspects of their lives. I'm sure lots of people on this site have felt regret at having spent too much time playing games or surfing the internet.
The parents in this story were old enough to know better but I do worry about how games can affect children. Addiction didn't start with MMOs but any addiction can be harmful. I'm not saying ban alcohol or games for children but it is important that parents and gamers acknowledge that games, to some people, can be harmful.
You can't brush this off as being wackies or stupid foreigners because this happens to a lesser degree in a lot of people. Don't you know someone to who you want to say 'leave that controller alone for five minutes'?
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No, that is not the bigger story, and that's what makes me furious about reporting like this. The fact that a computer game was involved is immaterial to this tragic story. What happened was that an insane couple let their child die through neglect. This sort of thing happens every day, and computer games have nothing to do with it.
Instead of blaming the real culprit, be it lack of availability of parenting training, social services, or the kind of community support that would step in and prevent a death like this, EVIL COMPUTER GAMES are to blame.
Crazy people go on rampages and shoot and kill innocent bystanders, and it has nothing to do with whether they played some first person shooter or not. Insane serial rapists ruin the lives of many victims, but it has nothing to do with their pornography viewing habits. Parents with addictive personalities get addicted to something, it doesn't matter what--gambling, drugs, shopping, video games--and their children suffer.
Some people are just f'd up.
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I agree with the point BadKen is making - games are just entertainment, but they can be an outlet for other psychological problems. A depressed person might watch TV all day every day, but the problem is their depression, not the television.
I don't think the reporting in the article was bad, though. They even quoted the police officer saying that they were retreating from reality for larger reasons: losing their jobs and dealing with having a child. The gaming was a symptom of their inability to cope with life, not the underlying cause.
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Perhaps the problem here is the internet cafe. If they had a computer in their home they could have stayed home and played rather than having to go to an internet cafe. Obviously the internet cafe is to blame.
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It's the society's fault. Let's burn the whole thing, just to be sure.
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I read the article and I don't see the blame being placed on the computer game at all. The absurd reason that they could become so focused on a virtual world and raising a virtual child while letting their flesh and blood child starve to death is the story.
Gaming can be a trigger for an addiction like just about anything else. To say it is purely entertainment without any enablers for addictive personalities is off. I'm not blaming the game or gaming or developers at all. They are designing games that will trickle rewards to players, get them to commit time, and keep them coming back. What does this involve? It involves designing entertainment software with the ever dangling carrot, a never ending desire for just one more turn, access to social status not available in real life, gambling like components of loot drops and multi-hour commitments to get through a single organized encounter. For someone who is healthy, balanced, happy, stable whatever.. its purely entertainment, but start chipping away at any legs of that stool and people can fall.
It's not the games fault and I dont think the writer is even hinting that. It is the parents fault. I dont even see how it is social services or community blame. Again, it is the parents. For all the world knows, they live in some apartment complex where one neighbor hardly acknowledges the existence of the next. This story has its tragic hook. Real-life child dies tragically in favor of virtual child.
You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society.
Certis wrote:
Fedaykin98 wrote:
<+katisu> Q-Stone is an internet genius
Wood, R. Problems with the Concept of Video Game "Addiction": Some Case Study Examples. Int J Ment Health Addiction (2008) 6:169–178.
“The evidence so far suggests that genuinely excessive players are likely to have other underlying problems, and/or have inadequate time management skills. Excessive video game playing is therefore likely to be a symptom and not the cause of their problem.”
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Sorry, I'm still not buying that the game has anything to do with it. They left their three month old premature baby alone and did not feed her. I don't care how good the game is, that is not something that a sane couple does.
"They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby."
The online game of raising a virtual character is incidental to the neglect. The thing that led to the death of their real baby was some form of parental psychosis, most likely some form of impulse control disorder, reinforced by their joblessness and probable health issues with the premature child. Even if they never played Prius online, it is likely their child would have suffered from neglect for some other reason.
The message here should be that these kinds of tragedies can be prevented by helping your neighbors and looking out for child abuse and neglect, not that psycho Korean couples kill babies because, you know, those Koreans and their PC bangs.
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I don't think it was the game either. If it wasn't gaming it would have been something else.
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There are some who have point to the 24 hour internet cafe as enabling in the same way many states in the US do not allow 24 hour liquor sales. Also that the cafe model encourages binging in a way always available access does not,
But it is a public health concern in South Korea.
But to piggy back on other comments. What we call addiction is more often a symptom for some underlying issue-depression, bi polar disease, schizophrenia, or a chemical or genetic defect manifesting as such a disease.
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I don't think they have internet in homes in most of South Korea. I believe that internet cafes and cell phones are their main source of internet connections.
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NSFW language.
Glib, but appropriate.
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If you've ever touched the edge of addiction or even obsession you understand this. I'm a bit OCD-ish. I get sucked into virtually everything. Work, internet surfing, gaming. It's awful. And yeah, doesn't matter if my 360 were unplugged. It would be something else.
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Don't forget, though, there is a physical mechanism for addiction. So while there may be psychological reasons a person becomes addicted, there is a definite physical reinforcing of the addictive behavior after it begins.
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What the hell is wrong with these people? What I hate about this is now all the "those games are going to rot your brains and kill you" people have more ammunition to annoy us with.
Indeed. There is an actual chemical response triggered by a physical action even in gaming or other "soft addictions" such as food, gambling, etc.
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I'm not sure we can really speculate about what problems the parents specifically had but isn't this what the article actually sums up with? And to quote
I think you're tilting at the wrong windmill.
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The real question is what we should burn them with, and from where...
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I suggest we burn the world with Rock n' Roll.
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