Learning is a powerful stimulus, and while it may account for a good bit of the joy that we feel in gaming, there are a lot of other things going on as well that I’d put into category 2, what I basically call media experience. You could probably incorporate learning into part of the experience of the game. In any case, one big element of which that is worth mentioning, because it gets to what Jirel is interested in, is Scott Rigby’s player movitations. We can be motivated to play by many, many different things in games. I’d go so far as to say that we’re all unique, and these games (MMOs, particularly, but also our ability to play any game we want) provide us with an entire universe of different experiences. And I think that they keep some people playing long enough for category 1 to catch up, if it was not actually the initial motivator. Sometimes media experience can keep people playing AFTER the addiction would have burned someone out and caused them to leave.

Symptoms are another interesting topic, because how do you develop treatments for both groups 1 and 2? You obviously can’t just throw pills at the people in group 1, and how do you even differentiate? Until we reconcile this, we need a way that cogently (rather than the bad criteria out there now) gives us a way of helping both groups. What we offer up in the book is functioning, which sits at the roots of most of our diagnostic criteria for addiction today. Some other researchers have taken stabs at this bringing functioning back, like Seay’s project massive - and his “self-regulation.” Really, though, self-regulation is just one slice of functioning, which interweaves with the development of the problem and the process of fixing it.

And in the end - a problem in functioning is more of a red flag. In order to get to the meat of the problem, you do address functioning, but you also need to have some knowledge of the addiction and media experience interplay. You need to understand how the individual found what he or she was looking for.

Thanks for posting, Mike and Jirel.

The combined power of my IE and my laptop just destroyed about 7 sweet paragraphs of reply goodness. Digital technology is kind of like Kaiser Soze sometimes

And just like that…

He’s gone.

That’s interesting. You’re right– your “symptoms” don’t really fit elegantly into the addiction profile. Who’s to say they’re symptoms? What do they mean? Etc.

I’ve come to judge gaming addiction in two ways:

1. How closely does playing fit the “addiction profile” (e.g., how disruptive is it to daily life, basically)?

2. How much of a person’s ‘mental space’ does playing and thinking about playing take up? I mean, brains are wonderful things but they’re not limitless. They’re also very plastic, and conform to thinking about what you expose them to very efficiently. Expose them to an online world, and they’ll voraciously try to learn all about it. To the exclusion of other things, perhaps. So I would suspect this second is perhaps a bigger factor than the first for you? That maybe your dreams are indications that WoW is taking up a lot of mental space that could be used for other things?

This second factor is actually pretty novel to gaming addiction. I mean, it takes a lot of brain real estate to hold all the things involved in online games… imagery, npcs/quests, game mechanics, guilds, social ties, etc etc. You don’t really have that to any similar extent in other sorts of addiction. And holding that stuff in your head can take your edge off in living life (or so I’ve found).

Just trying to express something I’ve been thinking about lately. Hope it makes some sort of sense.