And yeah - There’s some credibility in the “symptom model.” Some chemicals associated with addiction are bound to be floating around in gamer brains, and many of these things are likely to apply. That’s a good article, and it succinctly gets to the core of a few different arguments. Shavaun and I get particularly into the usefulness vs. the societal damage of looking at addiction as a “disease,” as made popular by 12-steppers, but that’s the topic for another post.

Here’s the rub with the symptom model for this post. Say you’re joe-average healthy gamer and you ding 70 (reach the highest level in World of Warcraft). You’ve shown no “symptoms,” which with internet addiction criteria would be pretty hard for most level 5s. All the sudden, your best friend needs a druid for BLACK TEMPLE, and since you’ve partied with some of these Death and Taxes people, they’re super cool and ask you to come raid the following night. You cut off from work a little early even though it’s a busy day, mostly because you’ve been thinking all day about raiding with a really cool guild. You lie to your wife about what you’re doing so that you don’t have to cook dinner, and when she discovers that it was all over a game she decides to leave you! A far-fetched situation, but if you do even one of the above, you’ve qualified as an online gaming addict… Check the criteria - from its creator’s site:

http://netaddiction.com/resources/online_trading.htm

This criteria, especially when used by practitioners with no idea what a game is, could cause a huge crisis of mislabeling. It’s going to be the overdiagnosis of ADD and ADHD all over again.

But that’s not the really huge problem. Even if we can create criteria to diagnose problems correctly, this assumes that gaming is a deviant behavior worth erasing. In many cases, it could be. If someone is troubled enough that they’re seeing a therapist or a medical professional, then the gaming is probably something that’s on the way out. If all we do is yoink it, without understanding the purpose that it served, then we risk some serious problems for the individual as well as the general public.

I think the key to why this is troubling, however, is that these games represent a medium that’s already permeating our real world existence. These secondary worlds present people with an experience that, even in terms of how our eyes work, can pull people in and immerse them. There are thrilling stories, exhillirating interactions, and real live people (ones who we often know in the primary/real world). When people are pulled in by these things, are they also addicts?

If we start to use these technologies on a daily basis - for social, political and business reasons… Have we become addicts?

Look at those criteria in the context of second life, and you’ll pretty quickly see that they just see a game as a single behavior. The problem is that within these worlds that live on screens, there are a thousand behaviors.

I suppose the strongest case for going easy on the AMA would be if one subscribes to the “syndrome model” of addiction– e.g., the same abstract ‘brain stuff’ happens across all behavioral and chemical addictions, and this produces similar *symptoms*, so it’s OK to cut some corners and lump some potentially disparate things together because they significantly involve the same ’syndrome’.

I think there’s something to this, but it seems to take away much of the utility of diagnosis: the only thing that can come from such a diagnosis is the advice that “yep, you have an addictive personality; distance yourself from things you get addicted to.”

Which is fine advice, as far as it goes. But we have fine-grained, scientifically-informed advice for heroin addicts, alcohol addicts, suntanning addicts, even sex addicts, all based on the nuances of the potentially-addictive chemical/physiological ‘hooks’ each has.

So yeah, I’m totally with you that lumping gambling, internet, and gaming addiction is really not the way to go.

It may or may not be old news, but FWIW, I cribbed the ’syndrome model’ concept from Howard Shaffer via this NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/magazine/25addiction.html?ex=1182052800&en=86640948153fa1b0&ei=5070