07.28.07: The Kind of Addiction that Wakes You Up in the Dead of Night
Here’s my latest “Gaming Journal” entry:
So just now, I woke up out of a dead sleep so that I could listen to “Earthquake and Fire,†by Hepcat. For those of you in the dark, Hepcat is only one of the greatest ska/reggae bands in the history of the world.
And despite the fact that I haven’t touched WoW in about a couple of weeks, I’ve had a couple of consecutive nights of WoW-themed dreams. They have not yet forced a similar midnight media indulgence/account reactivation.
Let’s hear it for dreams.
It’s strange to be having them, because WoW hasn’t been on my mind, really. I stop in now and again to talk with some of the communities still on (via Ventrilo I jumped around while I took a little writing break earlier today), but I don’t see why that should call forth an abundance of imagery and gameplay mechanics during sleepy time. It’s interesting to keep coming back to the dream thing, though, since due to the airy origins and role of dreams they are often touted as a criteria for being in the “throes of addiction.â€
More than anything, I think it highlights the insufficiency of how we’re looking at gaming problems. There are people out there who would say, “Hepcat! Hell yeah, I’d get out of bed to listen to some of their tunes!” There are also people in the real world who wouldn’t think twice about staying up until midnight so that they can buy the latest and last Harry Potter book, fresh off the stands. Then they’ll probably be up until at least 2am reading. Gaming isn’t exactly like these things, but just imagine: these are entire worlds - with financial markets that run 24-7, powerful items that could be won at any time, and real people with real lives. Sometimes there’s story and entertainment value, too. Very few non-gamer professionals can see it, but these worlds give many different reasons to wake up in the dead of the night.
And actually, as I recall (in the way that dreams sneak up on you) I did have one dream tonight which involved the actual people who I was playing with most recently, and not game imagery or mechanics. At least one of the scenes that I remember involve being in a college campus type area, and letting one of my online friends into their dorm. Bear in mind that this is a person whom I have never seen before in the real world, and yet my dream brain had actually conjured a fully-developed face and body for this person, who smiled and thanked me before I had to run off in order to keep my chimichanga from burning down the Student Union Building. This mental image had no resemblance whatsoever to this character’s in-game avatar or mine. I honestly don’t know the Jungian archetypal rundown indicative of meaning there, but it’s kind of interesting.
Google Images: Helping me to find disturbing Jungian-ish images since 1974.
Still, Hepcat’s ‘Out of Nowhere’ CD comes highly recommended for those of you looking to spark a wholesome reggae addiction. The kind that wakes you up in the dead of night.
Neils Clark :: Jul.28.2007 :: Neils' Gaming Journal ::
This is really interesting. I just started playing an MMORPG about 2 months ago when I started playing Lord of the Rings Online in closed Beta. I found myself playing much more of it than I anticipated. However, I also feel that I have a slightly different reason for playing than a lot of people - I have a bad back as of 5 years ago and find it difficult to walk. Here is an activity where “I” can run around, wave a sword, dance and even kill things and nothing hurts. Very addictive! However, it doesn’t seem to have grabbed me as bad as reading books did when I first started that some 45+ years ago. Or maybe its just that I feel a need to go to my job whereas I didn’t need go to school to earn money for a mortgage. LOL!
Neils,
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.
Holy sweet God.
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.
In a nutshell, Mike, I think that you’re on near enough the same page as me and my co-author, and you’re ten steps ahead of most of the people doing research.
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.
All very true Neils, and well said. You’ve obviously thought about this topic a lot.
hehehehe - thanks Mike.