Gaming Addiction

Slide 1: Beyond Game Addiction Neils Clark Games for Health 2008 Baltimore, MD

Slide 2: 1. Thirteen years and counting  Hoax Sub-Criteria: Obsessive thinking about what is happening on the Internet  IAD Question: Are you preoccupied with gaming (thinking about it when offline, anticipating your next online session)?  Hoax Criteria: There is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control Internet use  IAD Question: Have you made repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop online gaming?

Slide 3: 1. Thirteen years and counting

Slide 4: 2. Games aren’t without problems, but we’re in an ‘interim’

Slide 5: 3. Immersion is the first key to understanding excessive use

Slide 6: 4. You get to the second key by looking at how the game works Tolkien Primary and Secondary Worlds Looking at Culture and Structure in Both Kinds of Worlds

Slide 7: 4. You get to the second key by looking at how the game works Culture  Primary (Wang Tta in Korea)  Secondary (Binge cultures in raid guilds) Structure  Primary (Work, school, the kids, etc.)  Secondary (Raiding, farming, exploring, traveling)

Slide 10: 5. The third and final key: how we interact Is gaming pathological, or regular interaction?

Slide 13: 6. What IAD defines as addiction isn’t necessarily pathological excess

Slide 14: 6. What IAD defines as addiction isn’t necessarily pathological excess Remember that one IAD question, ‘Are you preoccupied with what’s happening in a game?’ In a robust secondary world like World of Warcraft, is it really pathologic to be thinking, anticipating or even preoccupied with game events? In the other question presented earlier - there are non- pathological reasons that somebody might be unsuccessful in plans to cut back gaming. Some might be in-game friendships with living people, real-world cultural pressure and relationships with potentially healthy online activities.

Slide 16: Functional Squeeze

Slide 18: Functional Shrink/Replacement

Slide 19: 7. Physical and physiological addiction takes time

Slide 20: 8. Game devs could provide functional tools right now

Slide 21: 9. The long term game dev solution is a critical design discussion

Slide 22: 10. Researchers need to connect

Slide 23: Questions/Closing neilsclark@gmail.com ` Selected Reading: Secondary worlds: J.R.R. Tolkien's 'On Faerie Stories,' located in the Tolkien Reader. Published by Del Ray. The texture of game worlds: Dr. Thomas Malaby's 'Beyond Play,' published in Games and Culture but freely downloadable from ssrn.com. Physical immersion: Anne Marie Barry's chapter from the Handbook of Visual Communication. Published by Routledge. Game-influenced pathologies: Dr. Jerald Block's Pathological Computer Game Use, available at jeraldjblock.medem.com. Note: Pathologic Computer Gaming is a similarly titled but different piece of research on that website. Real-world culture: Florence Chee’s “The Games We Play Online and Offline: Making Wang-tta in Korea.” Published in Popular Communication 4 (3), 225-239, 2006.