neils clark

Violence and addiction. What better recipe for press attention and funding than to research not one, but two sensationalist topics at once!? Excessive Computer Game Playing: Evidence for Addiction and Aggression? Published in last month’s CyberPsychology & Behavior, beat us all to it. While the claim that these researchers have staked seems enticing, how much value is there in asking these sorts of questions? Does it help the therapists, researchers, gamers and their loved ones, or is it possible for these questions to take everyone further away from actually being able to deliver that help?

Before we get to big sweeping questions, there’s a key problem that I just don’t see being addressed in a study which compares addiction against violence, and that’s causality. And I’m not just talking about whether the violence caused the addiction, or visa versa. How do you establish that gaming was the real driving force behind Lee Seung Seop’s fatal 50+ hour gaming binge, or behind the Columbine massacre, rather than the established psychological models which incorporate the biology, psychology and socialization of a person exhibiting truly excessive or troubled behaviors? This is key, and it’s glossed over in almost every single study of gamer violence and gamer addiction to date.

I think that a much more telling piece of research is the article to be released soon by Dr. Jerald Block, who was on this blog late last month talking about Columbine. Jerald noted that,

“The Columbine shooter, Eric Harris, only began making actual plans to blow up his school after his parents banned him from computer access for about a month, on the advice of a therapist.”

So what, then, is the relationship between addiction and violence? It’s unique, because people are unique. There are important distinctions that we only really see once we understand a game, and many therapists just aren’t willing to take that step. A great many therapists are waking up to the complexity of games, but many more still only barely use email. When somebody like Kimberly Young says that gaming is a problem to be stamped out, many otherwise excellent therapists are apt to listen – not because she’s actually credible and informed, but because they don’t have the first clue about what happens inside of a game - let alone the various ways that problems might manifest themselves. They may even have their own fears and stereotypes associated with the technology - and the bottom line is grim. Many problem gamers who seek mental help aren’t getting a high enough level of care, and all gamers, healthy and not, are further stereotyped.

What do we really learn from asking a question like this? Even with perfect methodology, sampling and analysis, it would have said that addicts are or are not also violent. That doesn’t seem to me the question of someone with a blank slate, ready to figure out where gaming actually connects with addiction and violence. Instead, we’re exploiting societal fear and focusing on issues which hold the greatest amount of prejudice against people who use technology. Is this research about helping a gamer, their family, and their loved ones – or is it about giving fodder to politicians, justifying society’s fears, and meanwhile providing therapists with tools that are flawed in their reckless simplicity?

Honestly, I’m not sure. I haven’t read their article yet!

On the research:

1) Ok, ok, I haven’t been able to look closely at the methods, but even if Sabine Grusser (who definitely knows her stuff) has made a jump from Young’s “Online Game/Internet Addiction,” which would be welcome, we’re still in the early stages of learning how to measure addiction to games. This research might give us an early glimpse at whether later hard data will show addiction and aggression to be interrelated, but it’s really limited to just peeking.

2) What’s more, the format of the action MMO game is evolving into a few more dark directions, as with Age of Conan and Warhammer. Some parents, many through no fault of their own, just aren’t going to be able to regulate content or time played. If games really are a key element to how this plays out. If, as the politicians posit, the games are a significant contributor to violence and/or addiction, then we must understand how evolving game elements evolve these effects.

3) The failure to link “excessive gaming” to aggression suggested by the article doesn’t discount either, it just means that if either exist they do so independently of one another.

Thanks to Kotaku and Aleks Krotoski for originally linking to this article. Thanks also to Penny-Arcade, for keeping us sane. They drew that comic towards the beginning of the article (not ALL of us are PAX-attending P-A junkies).

Neils Clark :: May.19.2007 :: Game Addiction, Research ::

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