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March 09, 2005
The Bad Habit of Addictification
By Anders Sandberg
Today I attended the release of the Eudoxa Report: Fair Play och moralpaniken by Rasmus Fleischer, a report dealing with the issues of moral panic, gaming, internet addiction and how NGOs work to become part of the government. Unfortunately right now only available in Swedish, but I'd like to summarize a few interesting points.
The background is the organisation Fair Play and their media-successful claims that computer games increase violence and are addictive. In fact, many forms of computer-use are apparently addictive according to Fair Play.
The first point of the report is to question this addiction account. Is there addiction (or dependency) on computer games, and if it exists, is it necessarily bad?
Addiction can be defined as a craving for something that develops into a dependency and continues even thought it is causing the addicted person physical, psychological or social harm.
Often the term is used for the brain disorder that causes loss of control of drug-taking behavior: quite a few people use drugs or other things without being addicted. However, recognition of this modern vulnerability view has been slow in coming to Sweden, partially through the opposing "addiction as a exposure-induced epidemic"-view forcefully promoted by Swedish drug-control pioneer Nils Bejerot (Fleischer also makes the case in the report that there is a direct descent of ideas from Bejerot to Fair Play). In any case, I will use the first definition for the rest of this entry.
The widely accepted definition of addiction as craving something harmful clearly makes anything addictive harmful- it is not possible by this definition to be addicted to something neutral or good. Hence addictive becomes a powerful rhetoric attack on anything seen as undesirable. It is enough to show that it produces (or that it might produce) cravings for more or dependency, and it instantly becomes something dangerous.
However, dependency is not necessarily dangerous. We are all dependent on air and water. Less trivially, most of us have a shoe dependency: we cannot walk outside well without good footwear, since we have used it since we learned to walk. This dependency, like all dependencies, limits our range of actions. But it actually increases the range in other directions- Swedish winter is not survivable barefoot. A drug dependency can be entirely manageable if the drug is cheap, safe and plentiful - such as caffeine - or if the benefits given are greater than the costs - as in the case of many chronic medications. One aspect of gaming Fair Play does not seem to stress is whether gaming or computer use could have beneficial aspects.
Cravings are also not necessarily negative, not even when they are self-reinforcing. In the video "Dödligt Spel" ("Deadly Game") shown in the schools by Fair Play, cognitive neuroscientist Martin Ingvar points out that games are designed to be both easy enough to play, but constantly challenging in order to both reward us, draw our attention and force us to give our outmost. In the surrounding context that sounds quite sinister. Add to this that time seems to vanish during the game. But this is also almost exactly the definition of Flow from Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi! In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Csikszentmihalyi argues that this kind of skilled focus is a key component in growing as a human. Taken in the context of humanistic psychology, flow is seen as something desirable and important for humans to develop. And games, like any other activity, can be the focus. Rather than claiming that self-reinforcing focus necessarily leads to harm, this view takes the more open view that it can also produce positive effects. It remains to be demonstrated that a certain self-reinforcing activity is more likely to be harmful than helpful, if one wants to make the case that it is addictive.
Overall, it has become fashionable to addictify nearly any human activity. We are sex-addicts, shopaholics, tv-addicts, roleplaying addicts and junk food addicts. It removes responsibility from the "addict" (since he clearly no longer holds full responsibility for his actions) and from the close social network (since it was the addicting properties of the object rather than any of their actions or inactions that caused the addiction). Outside helping institutions get a raison d'etre and money to act, creating a public choice incentive to expand- and make more people aware of the dangers of their particular kind of addiction.
The 10-question test of whether you are a "screen addict" is taken nearly point by point from DSM-IV's checklist for substance abuse disorder. But by separating out mild effects such as "thinking about the Internet when not connected" or "being irritated when not able to get connectivity" from heavy issues such as "committing crimes to sustain the computer use" makes it far more likely that people will get high scores and hence be diagnosed as addicted. Directly mapping drug abuse criteria to another domain can seriously reduce validity (taking heroin each day is a severe addiction, but playing a game each day?). An interesting exercise is to replace "computer" and "net" by "books" and "libraries": clearly most of my academic friends suffer from severe cases of text addiction.
But books and writing are held in high esteem in our culture. We might smile at the reclusive bookworm or the driven author, but few would consider sending them for psychiatric treatment curing them of their love with text. But computer games are the lowest of the low (OK, maybe pornography manages to get in below them) of our media, at least seen from an upper middle class perspective rooted in traditional art and culture. They are commercial, american, violent, engaging and involve technology. Rasmus Fleischer makes another interesting connection when he points out the links between people involved in Fair Play and the traditional art/culture establishment, and strongly argues that the artistic and cultural merits of computer games are being ignored.
If games and computer use do not have any redeeming qualities, then their ability to start craving-loops or dependency would imply that they are addictive and negative (but again, the level of addiction and negativity would require an empirical study). But if one accepts the view that at least some computer activities indeed are positive, then the issue becomes far more complex. Then it is not just an issue of reducing child computer usage (Fair Play promotes bribing children to have computer-free days) but to find ways of encouraging the positive activities. As Fleischer points out, learning the skills required for an IT world is best done intensively and from an early age. I know I would never have gotten a Ph.D. if I had not started by spending hours and hours as a kid before my Sinclair ZX81 doing simple simulations and games. A majority of online gamers cite social contact as a key point in the game, something that deflates the Fair Play claim that computer games tend to desocialise people. Many games do stimulate imagination, visuomotor skills, strategic thinking or at least reading English.
Perhaps the first step to get out of the either-or trap of imaging computers and games as either addictive and negative or neutral and non-addicting, is to refrain from using the term addiction. Addiction is deep down a case of mislearned habits. And by allowing ourselves to use the far less loaded term "bad habits" it becomes much more manageable to discuss the problems of misuse of computer games. Games and computer use can cause bad habits. In a few cases these bad habits are so severe that they could be viewed as an addiction (again, likely due to a vulnerability to addiction formation), but the vast majority of users with bad computer habits merely stay there. There is no evidence that people who game a bit too much end up in a downward spiral towards violent computer-junkiedom. In most cases the bad habits clear up sooner or later, due to individual decisions (I once erased Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to get work done) or interactions with family or friends. Viewing the problem as one of regulating habits rather than invoking the entire pantheon of addiction puts the control in the hands of the people involved, not among outside groups.
Posted by Waldemar at March 9, 2005 10:04 PM