Keeping It Real – Simply Addicting?

Last week, Britain’s investigative television show Panorama took on the issue of video game addiction, much to the delight of gamers everywhere.  Since I’m not a fan of television in general and I don’t get the BBC anyway, the only clue that I had that this program was airing was from the sea of angry tweets in my Twitter timeline.  I was intrigued, so I took to Google and found a clip of the show where a saddened mother laments that the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft had taken over her son’s life and he had turned violent.  She said that it was a “dangerous tool” in her household.  It was then that I realized just why my friends were so angry.

Video game addiction isn’t just a fabrication of our imagination.  It is very real, and it has destroyed many lives.  Hopefully most people who were angry about the Panorama episode weren’t angry at the fact that it was bringing light to the issue itself, but rather doing it very poorly.  The first question that arose in my mind was that if her son was refusing to go to school in favour of playing World of Warcraft, what sort of measures was she taking to get him help?  Ultimately she is the parent and the one in charge, so to place all the blame on a video game is shirking responsibility.  Unfortunately, this British mother wasn’t the only person to dump all of the blame for her son’s addiction on a video game.  In South Korea, the government is actually planning to implement a midnight ban on video games - if you’re a minor, that is.  The ban will bar minors from logging into an online game between the hours of midnight and 6 am.

Jo Rin, a ministry official in charge of the law justifies the midnight ban by stating, “The thing about online games is that once you are in, it is extremely hard to get out of it, especially if you’re a kid.”

With the government making plans on controlling how much game time its youth is involved in, I end up wondering why it isn’t addressing the real issue at hand: The parents.  Why is the government sticking their hands in an area that was once a parents-only domain?  It was always up to the parent to instill good life choices in their child, but now the government is suddenly taking away civil rights instead.  What’s more is that every time I read an article about the South Korean game ban, they always use adult examples of over-indulgence gone bad.

“In February a 32-year-old man died after reportedly playing for five days straight without a break.”

While that is unfortunate, he wasn’t exactly a child and didn’t have a mother or father there to realize he had issues.  The article also states that children are often too tired to go to school the next day because they were up all night playing video games.  With this ban in effect, who is say that these children won’t suddenly become that British mother’s son and just stay home from school completely?  If the parents won’t parent, perhaps it’s time to target that as the real culprit of video game addiction in children, rather than blaming game developers.

Blizzard Entertainment responded to the Panorama episode:

“Our games are designed to be fun… but like all forms of entertainment… day-to-day life should always take precedence. World of Warcraft contains practical tools that assist players and parents in monitoring playing time”.

Blizzard realizes that there are people who refuse to log off and forgo real-life activities.  If you’re a WoW player, you may have noticed one of the tips displayed during a loading screen which basically reminds players that it’s important to go offline with their friends as well.  World of Warcraft addiction is a personal issue with me because I was hopelessly addicted during 2004-2005.  I was living alone in my dormitory at college and overall I was just miserable.  I didn’t fit in well at my university, and the entire experience was jarring.

When one of my sorority sisters introduced me to Dark Age of Camelot, I found solace in the fact that I didn’t have to log off to hang out with my friends.  It was a safe environment, and it provided me with a much-needed outlet.  A week after playing the Dark Age of Camelot trial, my friend introduced me to World of Warcraft, which was still in its infancy stages at that point.  We were hooked.  The difference was that she still went to her classes and earned her degree.  I did not.

But I never placed blame on World of Warcraft, and I still won’t.  I was an adult in charge of my own life, and with or without the game I still would have dropped out because I had other issues.  In some ways I’m almost thankful for being addicted to World of Warcraft that year because if it wasn’t WoW it most likely would have been alcohol.  Being addicted to a video game is definitely not healthy but I am glad that I didn’t wind up inebriated in a ditch somewhere due to over indulgence in something else.

When I was at home, my addiction was set to continue except that my mother noticed how much time I was spending locked away in my room playing the game.  Despite being an adult and capable of making my own decisions, she intervened like a good mother should.  The 32-year-old man who died from playing too many video games might not have had a good support system. He might have been battling some other issue, and this was just his way of dealing with the pain.  If it wasn’t a video game, it might have been drugs or alcohol that killed him.  We will never know.

A video game is no more of a dangerous tool than a gun.  My father owns several guns, and he is very fond of them.  But he would never in his wildest dreams consider using them on another human being.  He takes them to a firing range and uses them on targets instead.  It may be an old example, but it is one that still holds true: If a gun is used to shoot another person, it isn’t the fault of the gun.  It is the fault of the person wielding it.

The dangerous part about televised programs that deal with video game addiction is that they target the game developers themselves instead of asking the real questions such as, “what are the parents doing to stop this from happening to their children?” Instead, like a lazy society, we don’t consider other possibilities and do the easy thing; we place the blame on others and refuse to look at our own behaviours.