Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
the U.S. surrounding video games, within which video games were targeted
to prey on children by sucking them into compelling worlds they could not
escape. By starting from the assumption that addiction to video games is a
fact and selecting compelling stories of problematic use, a particular narra-
tive is reifi ed, one that depends on children as the target audience of video
games to make the argument more powerful. Further, as these arguments
are often addressed to non-gamers, there is a gap in the level of understand-
ing about how games work. This can be exploited, making the issue more
urgent, especially when danger is lurking for the young people parents are
supposed to raise and nurture.
The consequences of these trends and the importance of children within
them can be best seen by looking at a gamer's perspective on the discussion
about problematic play. Although gamers may use the word addiction to
talk about their play habits and refer to games as
Evercrack
or
World of
Warcrack
, when talking about game addiction as a whole they generally
resituate the debate by focusing on the problematic use of games by some
documentary on video game addiction and note,
Chris Dando kicked in his sister's bedroom door in when his parents
turned of his connection to
World of Warcraft
, Joe Staley dropped out
of university when he became addicted to his Xbox. But focusing on
these extreme cases just showed me how abnormal games addiction is,
and how these sad stories are so unlike anything I've encountered in the
30 years I've been playing games.
20
A separate response prefaces much of the analysis with the contention that
“I do not possess the evidence that gaming does not cause addiction. What
I do know, from an enormous amount of time spent researching the sub-
ject, and interviewing those researching the subject at an academic level on
both sides of the argument, is that there is no evidence that games
do
cause
actively note the gap between the aberrant, destructive play of a handful
of admittedly devastating examples and the norms of play for those they
know. Gamers typically place responsibility on the parents to regulate all
sorts of media use, just as they believe the parents should monitor other
forms of behavior, like using drugs or skipping school.
The key theme of problematic use or addictiveness in games is that the
argument for addictiveness is predicated on the belief that children are at
risk and parents need to oversee their behavior. If demographic data, like
the thirty-four-year-old average video game player, was fully acknowl-
edged, a more holistic recognition of the impact of video games on the
populous could be made. However, outside observers are primarily con-
cerned with the alleged impacts on the young. Video games are equated
