Gaming fanatics show hallmarks of drug addiction
Excessive computer gaming has the hallmarks of addiction, suggests new experiments on “drug memory”. The researchers argue it should be classified as such, enabling “addicts” to start seeking help.
“We have the patients and we have the parents and family members calling us for help,” says Sabine Grüsser of the Charité University Medicine Berlin, in Germany.
Sorry, the researchers are selling, but I’m not buying it and here’s why. While it’s touching that a person has an issue they need help with, that doesn’t mean a researcher has to redefine behavior to fit within an existing disorder definition.
First, the usual issues with this kind of research. Small study (N=30, 15 participants/15 controls), so any results the researchers found have to be taken with a healthy grain of salt (and pepper, if you like a balanced meal). And while I have nothing but respect for young adults in Germany, they may not be representative of the majority of game players (nor those in America). In fact, I’d say this study might say something about German game players, but I have my doubts whether these findings are robust enough to go beyond that.
Read on for more analysis…
Learning is recognised as an important underlying mechanism of addiction. In becoming addicted, people start to associate cues that are normally neutral with the object of their craving. To a crack addict, for instance, a building in which they have used the drug is more than just a place they have been – it becomes a trigger for craving and can, on its own, reignite a need to use the drug again after months of abstinence.
They showed them a variety of visual cues and asked the volunteers to rate how they felt about the images. All had normal reactions to neutral images, such as chairs, and even to alcohol-related images, despite the fact that all the participants drank alcohol.
But excessive computer game players showed classic signs of craving when they were presented with freeze-frames from some of their favourite games – they desperately wanted to play, expected to feel better once they did, and fully intended to indulge again as soon as possible.
Isn’t “learning” an important underlying mechanism of daily life?? How can one turn “learning” into a negative such as this? Perhaps this is just a bad translation, maybe the report meant to say “association,” as in when a person associates something good with a good memory, something bad with a bad memory.
The thing is, we do this all the time. Normal people do this all the time. You see a photograph of a deceased love one and memories can come flooding back uncontrollably, making you very sad. You eat french fries at McDonald’s and you remember your teenage years and, if they were good, you might go and eat more french fries more regularly to “relive” those memories more often.
I guess my point here is that if someone has given something an emotional charge, it’s a no-brainer to show that relationship. People get emotionally attached to all sorts of things they shouldn’t, however, so this alone is not a good indicator or “proof” of an addiction.
In another test, the researchers monitored the response of a large muscle in the eye, to see how much the volunteers could be startled while looking at a game-related image. Scientists theorise that the most pleasing stimuli prompts the smallest of startle reflexes. They found that excessive game players could not be easily startled, unlike the controls.
That’s certainly an odd thing to measure and then draw a conclusion regarding “addiction” about. A relaxed startle reflex isn’t in any diagnostic criteria for any addiction, so it’s not clear to me where the researchers drew this from. Perhaps there’s other startle research that shows this, but one wonders why the researchers wouldn’t use the more widely-accepted criteria that already define “addiction.”
Grüsser says that addictions stem from relying too heavily on one coping strategy, which eventually becomes the only activity that can activate the dopamine system and bring a person relief. “It’s the same mechanism in all addicts,” she says.
This may indeed be true. But I’m not sure the relevance of the researcher’s comment in regards to this study, since this study did not measure dopamine levels in their subjects.
And while not everyone agrees that computer games have the addictive potential of drugs, or even gambling, groups such as Online Gamers Anonymous and EverQuest Widows are overflowing with stories of people so wrapped up in slaying monsters that for days they neglect to eat, wash or sleep.
The research was presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, in Washington DC, US.
I always find it amusing when an article says, “and while not everyone agrees,” they then go on to cite all those people who agree and add more anecdotal evidence on top of the findings to show more “support” for the research. Nothing like mixing good old objective data with subjective opinion of the reporter. After all, there are so many stories online about people being “addicted” to game playing, so they must be! There’s a lot of stories online about people being abducted by aliens…
If you take a step back here, you find people being entertained so much and so well, they start to disregard other aspects of their own life. As I’ve noted elsewhere, this could be easily explained by adjusting to a new stimuli in one’s life that is phasic — you immerse yourself in the gaming world, become an expert at it, enjoy it for a year or two or three, but then lose interest in it as you realize its rewards are less than those that can be obtained in real-world activities. Some people never get to that final step, however, because the rewards remain positive and interesting for them.
We talk offhandedly about “football addiction,” “TV addiction,” and since the 1970’s, “video game addiction.” Yet in all of that time, nothing has come from all of these pronouncements of addiction. We haven’t raised a generation of addicted children to technology. And we likely never will.
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docjohn at 10:28 am on
November 17th, 2005
One further thought…
If you have noticed a number of “symptoms” in a gamer’s behavior that look similar to symptoms of something else, you’re not alone. In fact, if you carefully comb through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), you’ll find a great deal of symptoms which fall under multiple disorders. That’s what makes reliable diagnosis a sometimes challenging task, even for skilled professionals.
Researchers often start with this premise — that this set of behaviors looks similar to something else we already know. But that smacks a bit of circular reasoning and doesn’t appear to be the best or most reliable method for determining whether something new actually exists.
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One further thought…
If you have noticed a number of “symptoms” in a gamer’s behavior that look similar to symptoms of something else, you’re not alone. In fact, if you carefully comb through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), you’ll find a great deal of symptoms which fall under multiple disorders. That’s what makes reliable diagnosis a sometimes challenging task, even for skilled professionals.
Researchers often start with this premise — that this set of behaviors looks similar to something else we already know. But that smacks a bit of circular reasoning and doesn’t appear to be the best or most reliable method for determining whether something new actually exists.
