Game Addiction by Neils Clark

Author:Neils Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2012-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Taking Care of Business

Game addiction takes an addict, but that’s not a topic that invites easy self-exploration. For gamers, it’s partially the problem of facing the demons that make them play. I played partly to face the embarrassment of not having many vile demons to speak of. The ease of slipping into a game, demons or no, baffles the best of us.

In high school, somebody close to me began suffering from a serious string of drug addictions. She was sent to an international rehab center, so in order to understand the process I attended an affiliated group therapy program. Surrounded by alcoholics, hardcore drug addicts, and your standard dysfunctional people, it was time to share our demons, put them on the table. Someone asked, “What’s your problem, Nails?” (My name gets mispronounced a lot.) “Well,” I started, “It’s not life-threatening or anything, but I get caught up in playing video games. There are times when my days just vanish.”

It took a while for the eighty people in the room to stop laughing, even the Tony Robbins wannabe. Rather than entertain the thought that a computer could cause problems, the psychologist leading the session spoke for the crowd. “Games,” he scoffed, “games don’t cause problems, Nayls. Are you sure that you don’t have any real problems?” He listed off some examples, like alcohol or past molestation.

Is that what they really expected? “Oh, you guys know everything! Of course I was molested! Silly me to try pulling one over on the masters of psychology!” Sure, sixteen-year-old Neils had your usual teen problems: Nobody at his high school wanted to be his girlfriend, the teachers of his favorite subjects were comically terrible and his voice still cracked. While that group therapy temporarily took me past some basic issues of confidence (molestation commentary notwithstanding), the problem of playing too much was never resolved.

Since games weren’t something that I could balance on my own; they continued to create other “real” issues. A few years down the road, probably my second year in college, life was slipping through my fingers. I was playing games in order to escape the stress of... Not being able to stop playing games. Maybe I was destined to build some kind of addiction regardless, but I do wish that I’d had some help at regulating myself. Today, my love of games is all too often spoilt by the issues they bring up. I don’t want that.

Gamers don’t always need help to start playing for the wrong reasons, but nothing helps like a sprinkling of our standard human tragedies, uncertainties and failures. The individual is an essential element, but it’s almost never as simple as having an “addictive personality.” There are a host of different reasons, psychological, genetic or otherwise, that can drive certain individuals to pursue specific games, substances, or other behaviors.31 On top of that, isolated events can pop up and trigger binging. Even subtle frustrations can prompt seemingly innocuous escapism. Eventually some gamers reach the tipping point, where a game has been played too much and for too long.

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