was clearly wrong. For months my sole housemate would carry out her life behind me, barely noticed. Nobody should have to endure such brazen indifference within their own home.
The real difference between these two experiences was that the first was driven by a genuine love of the game I was playing, while the second was a sullen alternative to a situation that I didn’t want to face. Curiously and importantly, “Final Fantasy VII” was a wonderful game, one I remember fondly. “Final Fantasy X-2” was, in my opinion, a plodding rehash of things I’d seen before though it still provided a suitably numbing and lengthy series of goals that diverted my thoughts away from my life.
There is an important distinction here that is central to this book; one period of play was engaged and passionate, the other was escapist and deadening. When I have played games in an unhealthy way I have found that time spent not gaming has felt like wasted time. I became fixated on my in-game goals; everything else became a distraction. The more time I crammed in, the more I would obsess about making my life as efficient as possible in order to obtain the best results in the game.
These days I consider myself to be an exceptionally capable scheduler – well able to plan, account for time, finish on time and so on and so forth. Bizarrely, I would say that I learned most of this through over-gaming. Constantly, I would try to minimize all other activity in my life to create as much time as possible for gaming. I might have chores, homework and sometimes work with my father to be done, all of which I would rattle through at breakneck speed so that I could get back to my beloved ZX Spectrum, my Amiga 500, my Playstation (or Playstation 2) and more recently my Xbox 360. For those of you up to speed with gaming, you would be right to notice that I am behind the times. While being able to organise my time is clearly useful, the mindset that it sprang from was less than healthy; I needed to get my life out of my way so I could get back to gaming.
As an adult, I am aware that I still have the capacity to game problematically and I can see clearly how this hurts me. Now I know to break off a long stint of gaming some 20 minutes or so before I have to socialise or be with my family. If I don’t, then the irritation of having to leave whichever virtual world I’m in the process of saving will be vented onto those around me in caustic comments and acidic ripostes. I know to avoid gaming for more than a few hours in a day, even when on holiday and on top of my responsibilities. If I game longer than this, it becomes an empty, treadmill-like experience that will leave me in a foggy haze for the little of what remains of the day.
While I love gaming, I appreciate its potential to negatively impact my mood and make others around me feel unimportant. As a psychotherapist working with many people for whom gaming is a central part of their lives, I see this awareness and experience as an asset of mine. I know the struggle – to some small extent I’m still working through it.
The Appeal of Video Games
In order to be able to work with any addiction, it is important to find a way to empathise with the appeal of the behaviour. With gaming, this means understanding the fundamental appeal of games and discovering the particular nature of them that draws people to take part in the first place. Being both a gamer and someone that has created games for a living, this is a subject that has fascinated me for years and tells me a lot about what it is to be human.
The gaming industry has grown from nothing to a majority pastime in less than 50 years: a relative blink of an eye. There are many parents and mental health professionals that managed to get through an entire childhood without playing a single digital game. For such people, it is a huge but by no means impossible leap of empathy to understand how ‘young’ people today can commit whole days to running around virtual worlds or find themselves packing every spare minute with repeated check-ins on their non-existent kingdoms.
Even for those that are deeply immersed in the hobby, it might be hard to capture what draws people to dedicate such vast amounts of their precious time. What follows is an outline of the core appeals of gaming, as it is understood within the industry itself. The bedrock for this comes from the work of Richard Bartle (Bartle 2009), who developed the Bartle Test of Internet Gaming. While Bartle’s ideas are broadly considered dated within the world of game development, they nonetheless form the foundation of how the business has come to recognize what players look for in games:
Socializing: The internet has opened up endless possibilities for meeting up with others in order to play video games. This has proved to have colossal importance for gamers. Much of the reason for this comes from our basic desire to be with others. Games can enhance this by allowing players to assist, gift and form guilds with one another, making their friendships tangible and measurable. An example of a game which relies heavily on socializing would be “ Second Life”.
Creativity: In games you are given characters to develop, worlds to build and cities to decorate. As a result players are able to use games as a powerful medium for both self-expression and self-exploration. This offers the chance to simultaneously engage in ultimately frivolous acts of design and creation while also enabling the deeper processing of unconscious fears and struggles. An example of a game that heavily relies upon creativity would be “Minecraft”.
Accomplishment: Typically all progress made in games is clearly documented and reported though feedback. As a result, games offer a way for players to see ‘constant measurable growth’, allowing them to persistently explore the game with a concrete sense of improvement, something we might struggle to find in the outside world. As a result, the surmountable difficulty that games provide is an immense proportion of their appeal. An example of a game that heavily relies upon accomplishment would be “The Legend of Zelda”.
Competition: Video games offer us a pure and safe way through which to gain superiority over others. Games that pitch us head-to-head come with the inherent excitement and fear of proving ourselves relative to someone else. Once again, this aspect of games has been greatly enhanced through the connectivity of the internet, which enables worldwide competitions and leagues to be accessible from our bedrooms. An example of a game that relies heavily upon competition would be “Tekken”.
Immersion: Out of all of these aspects of gaming, this is the one that is perhaps the most unique to video gaming. The others could be attributed to many games that existed thousands of years before the first computer, but digital games allow us to become immersed to a powerful new level. Whole worlds and histories can be explored and interacted with. Players are able to exist through alter-egos in environments that look and sound increasingly real, and where the narratives are becoming ever more compelling. An example of a game that heavily relies upon immersion would be “The Elder Scrolls Online”.
While video gaming has brought together these appeals in new and concentrated forms, they are all sources of enjoyment that we can understand on a broad, historic and human level. Where a child might turn to “The Elder Scrolls” to become immersed today, they might have used a novel a century ago. Where an adult might prove themselves in a game of “Fifa”, they might have once opted for an actual game of football.
A difference between these more time-honoured pastimes and video gaming is that the latter frequently ends up being played addictively. Whether, for any given individual, this propensity to addiction might have expressed itself in the absence of games remains unknown; as a society we have seen the power of video games to become addictive and we are, as a whole, concerned.
Discussion: The Fear of the New
Much accessible literature on the subject of gaming addiction presents the picture of a digital plague that is sweeping through our younger generations via modems. In 2010 the BBC ran a “Panorama” episode on the subject, arguably presenting games as a genuine danger to our youth. This is, admittedly, far sexier and news-worthy than the reality whereby, out of those people that game regularly,
