26.6.07
Jane's (and Dick's) addiction
Word on the street is that the American Medical Association is rethinking an internal proposal to recognize "videogame addiction" in the next DSM. The internal report is relatively nuanced, but its controversial recommendation to offer diagnosis criteria in the next DSM has occasioned the most current debate. The AMA's approach is cautious, far from the hysterical treatment we've been conditioned to fear from non-gaming culture, and it's worth a read.
Videogames are undeniably a means through which some people cause serious harm to their lives, regardless of whether "videogame addiction" is recognized as a clinical addiction. This designation would clearly be significant for sufferers, whose treatment would consequently earn at least a modicum of support from insurance providers. I don't have the technical expertise to evaluate claims of genuine "addictiveness", however, and I don't have a horse in this race; the AMA's deliberations and subsequent media coverage merely point up the general crudeness of public discourse on this subject. I'm interested in how videogames are typically addressed in public conversation - as a unitary medium with inescapable dangers and few (if any) benefits, rather than a broadly eclectic field of cultural products and practices.
I just finished Henry Jenkins' most recent book, Convergence Culture, so this is at the forefront of my thinking. There are important questions to be asked about games like World of Warcraft, which (critics have argued) correlate in-game rewards with time played rather than with skill. Indeed, the privileging of (real-life) time played has long been a defining characteristic of game design for grind-based MMORPGs - WoW, Everquest, Lineage, et al. - so it's unsurprising that "addiction" is most frequently associated with such titles. Jenkins, however, focuses much of his book on the other side of the coin, elaborating the considerable benefits of online participation. He demonstrates that active participation in online "knowledge communities" can develop social, leadership, and even writing skills beyond the standards of traditional schooling or job training.
In Convergence Culture, Jenkins focuses primarily on communities such as Survivor and Harry Potter fans, but he could just as easily have written about guild leadership in World of Warcraft. There's a growing body of research documenting significant benefits of gaming, and the MMORPG is the genre most often discussed in terms of social and organizational benefits. The community-based nature of this genre (and others such as competitive multiplayer FPS titles like Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament) requires team-building, skills training, dispute resolution, and other leadership skills prized by the corporate world - yet these are the same games most often called "addictive" and characterized with (no doubt very real) anecdotes of ruined lives.
Even specific titles like WoW, in other words, present a range of both positive and destructive impacts - a range typically ignored in public discourse on gaming. And this is quite beside the problematic question of genre definitions in rhetoric on gaming, which I'll take up in the near future.
What strikes me in this discussion isn't the medical controversy over whether videogames are addictive, but rather the fact that few people stop to ask what videogames are. Are all videogames alike enough to be considered as one group? Is each potentially addictive? Is there something in the technology itself which leads to addiction, or are we actually discussing only a narrow subset of electronic games? What game mechanisms, specifically, contribute to "addiciton" - and are they accurately associated only with videogames, or can they be discovered in other media or activities as well? Most important: how do we build a culture celebrating the many benefits of electronic gaming, while promoting praxes or behaviors that minimize potential concerns?
The AMA's brief is with medical fact, and its approach to "videogame addiction" appears to be measured and open. One of its greatest contributions, in fact, may be to illuminate how little we still know about the drawbacks (and the benefits) of videogaming. But it's not the AMA's job to engage larger questions of gaming culture and its future - that's up to the rest of us.
Word on the street is that the American Medical Association is rethinking an internal proposal to recognize "videogame addiction" in the next DSM. The internal report is relatively nuanced, but its controversial recommendation to offer diagnosis criteria in the next DSM has occasioned the most current debate. The AMA's approach is cautious, far from the hysterical treatment we've been conditioned to fear from non-gaming culture, and it's worth a read.
Videogames are undeniably a means through which some people cause serious harm to their lives, regardless of whether "videogame addiction" is recognized as a clinical addiction. This designation would clearly be significant for sufferers, whose treatment would consequently earn at least a modicum of support from insurance providers. I don't have the technical expertise to evaluate claims of genuine "addictiveness", however, and I don't have a horse in this race; the AMA's deliberations and subsequent media coverage merely point up the general crudeness of public discourse on this subject. I'm interested in how videogames are typically addressed in public conversation - as a unitary medium with inescapable dangers and few (if any) benefits, rather than a broadly eclectic field of cultural products and practices.
I just finished Henry Jenkins' most recent book, Convergence Culture, so this is at the forefront of my thinking. There are important questions to be asked about games like World of Warcraft, which (critics have argued) correlate in-game rewards with time played rather than with skill. Indeed, the privileging of (real-life) time played has long been a defining characteristic of game design for grind-based MMORPGs - WoW, Everquest, Lineage, et al. - so it's unsurprising that "addiction" is most frequently associated with such titles. Jenkins, however, focuses much of his book on the other side of the coin, elaborating the considerable benefits of online participation. He demonstrates that active participation in online "knowledge communities" can develop social, leadership, and even writing skills beyond the standards of traditional schooling or job training.
In Convergence Culture, Jenkins focuses primarily on communities such as Survivor and Harry Potter fans, but he could just as easily have written about guild leadership in World of Warcraft. There's a growing body of research documenting significant benefits of gaming, and the MMORPG is the genre most often discussed in terms of social and organizational benefits. The community-based nature of this genre (and others such as competitive multiplayer FPS titles like Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament) requires team-building, skills training, dispute resolution, and other leadership skills prized by the corporate world - yet these are the same games most often called "addictive" and characterized with (no doubt very real) anecdotes of ruined lives.
Even specific titles like WoW, in other words, present a range of both positive and destructive impacts - a range typically ignored in public discourse on gaming. And this is quite beside the problematic question of genre definitions in rhetoric on gaming, which I'll take up in the near future.
What strikes me in this discussion isn't the medical controversy over whether videogames are addictive, but rather the fact that few people stop to ask what videogames are. Are all videogames alike enough to be considered as one group? Is each potentially addictive? Is there something in the technology itself which leads to addiction, or are we actually discussing only a narrow subset of electronic games? What game mechanisms, specifically, contribute to "addiciton" - and are they accurately associated only with videogames, or can they be discovered in other media or activities as well? Most important: how do we build a culture celebrating the many benefits of electronic gaming, while promoting praxes or behaviors that minimize potential concerns?
The AMA's brief is with medical fact, and its approach to "videogame addiction" appears to be measured and open. One of its greatest contributions, in fact, may be to illuminate how little we still know about the drawbacks (and the benefits) of videogaming. But it's not the AMA's job to engage larger questions of gaming culture and its future - that's up to the rest of us.
Labels: culture
¶ 10:39
