Tags: Games


On Wednesday, the American Medical Association decided that playing video games a lot cannot be called an addiction. There’s no science that proves that a person can develop that kind of dependence on video games.

No matter how much World of Warcraft you play, you will be able to quit and your body will not go into withdrawal, nor will your mood worsen. Does your /played time show years instead of hours? No problem! You can uninstall the game and never play again, and you won’t suffer from headaches, cold sweats, depression, angry outbursts, shaking, or disturbed sleep. Actually, that looks like a list of things you get while playing WoW for too long, not after you stop! WoW is the number one cause of angry outbursts while playing video games. I have nothing to support that statement.

“Make No Mistake, We’ll Decide It’s An Addiction Someday!”

Anyway, it’s worth noting that in making this decision, the AMA also recommended that more studies be done. And if those don’t prove that video games are addictive? Then they’ll keep doing studies until one finally pays off, and then they can start prescribing more drugs to kids! “Billy, put down the controller and take your Videogoxatrim!”

As someone who has a lot of experience playing video games until 3 am on weeknights, I can’t see how anyone can say game playing is an addiction. At camp in the summer, I used to play cards with friends. We would also play late into the night, and be sure to be in our sleeping bags before dawn. Our parents didn’t complain. They could hear us outside playing cards and knew where we were. They would get mad when we woke them too often, but didn’t ask our family doctors to fix our card playing addictions! Games are fun and they don’t end like movies and TV shows. It’s hard to get your fill of a game, unless you become physically exhausted and just can’t play anymore. When you’re having fun, you just want to keep playing until some other issue overpowers the fun factor.

Imagine if Star Wars was a movie that went on for hundreds of hours without interruption. Dozens of lightsaber fights, lots of space battles, countless aliens, more cheesy lines than you can imagine! I would have a very hard time pulling myself away. I would watch it for so long, some might say that I was addicted to this awesome Star Wars movie of my dreams. But they would be confused.

Addiction is something far more specific. The word ‘addiction’ is used with ignorance, perhaps by people who want to vilify video games because they don’t like them or don’t understand them. Addiction can be a very harmful medical condition deserving of medical treatment. Accusing someone (out of ignorance) of having an addiction is deplorable. Would you accuse someone of having syphilis so lightly? I find it far more plausible that someone who plays video games instead of doing anything else could be suffering from something else. Depression, social anxiety, something like that. I don’t think it’s right to blame video games. Sweet, delicious video games.

Help Me Stop!

Still, something constructive could be done to help us to stop playing video games after a reasonable amount of time. Most gamers would like to stop playing after a few hours. If there were tools to help us turn off our games before midnight, I think many of us would use them. Some ideas:

• Add an in-game alarm, with snooze. Once the alarm goes off, an icon could appear in the corner of the screen. Snooze to give yourself more time to finish one more quest. Then the icon starts blinking. Then it appears closer to the center of the screen. As time continues after the alarm went off, the alarm can become more annoying. The only way to reset the alarm would be to exit the game and load it again. These extra actions you need to take to play into the wee morning hours might be enough to make some people stop playing.


• Similar to the alarm system, except gameplay could be affected. After the alarm goes off, enemies could get tougher. You might get fewer and fewer points as time passes. Less ammo. Your character moves more slowly. Enemies move more quickly. That kind of thing. This option would only work in a single-player game. No one would accept gameplay penalties in a multi-player game.


• After a set number of time, game features get turned off. Draw distance gets shorter. Graphics start to look worse. User interface elements become ugly, or disappear entirely. Music and sound effects get disabled or volume is lowered gradually over time after the alarm goes off. Your character becomes invisible. These would all act as reminders that you should have stopped playing and gone to bed.

Of course, these would all be optional tools for gamers. I predict that many people would choose to use them. I would be satisfied with a blinking icon in the game to tell me to go to bed. Adding features like this would give some brownie points to game developers, showing that they care about the issue without agreeing that games can be addictive.