Cookies as bait?!

Online Gaming Addiction

Introduction

Many friends of mine have asked me before why people get addicted to online games. Some of these questions are ubiquitous in nature and spring upon many girlfriends caught in the predicament of their boyfriends spending too much time and attention on some “stupid” game and not diverting enough attention to them.

Some of the common complaints I hear are:

“How come Roy spends more time on Dota (Defence of the ancient) than on me?”

“If only there was no stupid Warcraft around”

In extreme cases some relationships even borders on the rocky end or end abruptly because of the presence of these online games. To me, playing online games is alright. I mean you can’t expect your boyfriends to be playing Barbie dolls right? It’s all a matter of control and setting the right priorities.

Since these questions have popped up with increasing frequency during recent periods and with the renaissance and proliferation of online gaming, I have taken a short time to compile the evidence on why online games are so addictive, using science as the basis of explanation.

Before I begin, I would like to declare that I was once a compulsive and addicted online gamer, ever since the release of Starcraft in year 1998. I’ve followed up with BroodWars, the Starcraft expansion pack, Diablo 2 and its subsequent expansion pack, Warcraft ROC (Reign of Chaos) and TFT (The Frozen Throne), and finally settled on Final Fantasy 11 (FF11) Online. Up to now, I can safely say that I am no longer hooked to online gaming and this article will cover the topics how this addiction starts off, its consequences and the methods employable to curb the paroxysm of gaming addiction and assuage the temptation of logging on into your online gaming account.

Why I started playing

It all began in the year 1998 on Starcraft when I was facing my secondary 2 years. For those of you don’t know Starcraft is a real time strategy (RTS) game in which it is designed such that you oversee your colony’s economy, defense and offence and the objective is to secure your victory by destroying your opponent’s base. Initially, when the game was released it was the hot topic my class. Even if you are not interested in online gaming, you would simply buy the game to play for social reasons- to not be left out when people are talking about it. As I played on, I realized that I was pretty good at the game. Who doesn’t like winning right?

It extended to 8 years back and personally, I think that the addiction did not start off at this point since Starcraft’s game design does not call for addiction as much as other Mass Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). One typical game ends in around 10-15mins average and once it ends, it ends there. The only thing that can keep you going is for better stats ratio. The real addiction begun with the release of Diablo 2, where you can create a character and get stronger and stronger with the passage of time. Also because, there is never an end for the game, so what construed as beginners interest and the curiosity to go on to find what happens next, becomes an activity which is carried out for the banal sake of carrying it out.

Consequences of playing

It was around JC1 when I started out with Diablo 2. I would categorize it into a semi online RPG unlike the major (MMORPGs) such as FF11 or the current hit World of Warcraft (WOW) since it operates on a much less scale with fewer quests and lesser interactions (up to a maximum of 7 other players at once) as compared to MMORPGs which interact you up to thousands of players at once on a much larger emotional scale.

Now, although the potential for this game to addiction is much less, being hooked into this game has caused me dire consequences on my school grades mainly because of the huge amount of time I spent on it, the lack of sleep, and the psychological distractions I faced in school pertaining to it which resulted in me skipping school a lot to head home or to the lanshop to play the game, heading home to sleep, or sleeping in class because of fatigue both contributed to the lack of sleep and from my CCA involvements.

I’ve read articles in the papers and other sources of addicted gamers who actually skip crucial examinations and other important events because of irrational behavior resultant from gaming addiction, suicide cases because of spurned romantic advances or murders because of online fraud. In South Korea, a 28 year old man reportedly collapsed and died after playing an online game for 50 hours straight! Thankfully my addiction has never mounted to such a great scale. However, it was obvious that my school grades had met a huge decline because of it, from “A”s in my school grade to moderate passes and towards the end of JC1, I was almost retained a year, with 3 “F”s in my preliminary examinations! Also, although my JC2 grades met an improvement after I quit Diablo2, it wasn’t something that makes a person proud of. In the year 2002 of JC2, my MCs hit around 27 for the year, not including the days that I skipped school unofficially, lessons that I escaped from and the days I left school prematurely and such.

Although I’ve mentioned that I managed to quit Diablo 2 effectively by JC2, the thing about online addiction is that once you’ve actually painstakingly, managed to quit a game, it leaves and empty void in your habitual schedule which leaves you seeking to other forms of online addiction. In my case, I simply moved on to Warcraft 3 ROC in which the game design is very similar to Starcraft. Amazingly and also unfortunately, with the release of Warcraft during the middle of my JC2 semester near my preliminary examinations, I played a total of over 2000 games in 3-4 months, in which it timing crossed over to my A levels preparation timetable. That’s about 20 games a day, with an average of 10-15mins a game. Multiply that by 20 and that’s the time I spent on Warcraft 3 a day.

For some Southpark WOW addiction humor, visit, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvy5FJX4z1g

Why Online Games are so addictive

Genetic Makeup

I read in an article in Reader’s Digest that online addictions can be a result of a person’s genetic makeup, which means to say, that person A can be more susceptible to addiction than a person B because they suffer different levels of disturbances naturally occurring brain chemicals called neurotransmitters.

The article states this: “These chemicals influence impulsive feelings and behaviors. The main neurotransmitter involved in all addictions is dopamine”, says Winslow. People with low levels of dopamine are more prone to anxiety and cravings. Advancing to the next stage of an online game gives them a buzz that causes an increase in dopamine and makes them feel better and more motivated. This winning feeling is so reward that its memory takes great intensity and becomes more desirable every time it is recalled.”

Classical Conditioning

Also, the rapid gratification of winning not only helps a player forget their problems but also becomes a powerful trigger, creating an urge to play in the 1^st place. Psychologists describe this trigger response mechanism as classical conditioning which I learnt in school last semester. Basically, an association between the pleasant feeling of winning and the respective game is created. When an individual is not playing online and is experiencing negative feelings such as anxiety and stress, one’s mind will naturally seek more pleasant thoughts and will recall the positive feeling associated with playing the online game. I opine that this is the contributing reason to why people shift from addiction of one online game to another which I mentioned earlier. This is to fill the empty void of negative feelings by a substitute online game.

We know now that online addiction is contributed by 2 factors namely:

1. Personal Genetic Makeup
2. Classical Conditioning

Game Design

The 3^rd factor that contributes to online addiction is a topic that game designers upon interview decline to comment upon. Upon contacted for interview by Reader’s Digest, none of the online game developers would talk about whether or not they are using behavioral psychology to strengthen the emotional appeal of their games, thus making it addictive. However, Liz Wolley, founder of On-line Gamers Anonymous, an organization dedicated to helping people addicted to online games, strongly believes developers use complex psychology to make games addictive, for the sole purpose of increasing profit, since a lot of these MMORPGs like WOW, main income stream is from the continual subscription to the service on a monthly service. The online game market is worth around $1.4 billion in Asia alone and is expected to grow to $3.6 billion by 2010!

Other games like Water Margin Online, which a personal friend of mine plays, has certain items that is only attainable through online purchases and my friend has spent several hundreds of dollars for the purchasing these online pixels.

Liz Wolley commented that “Game designers have said that they were hired simply because they have psychology degrees.” If this is truly the case, certainly the ethical considerations and moral obligations have been bypassed when designing the game. Personally I feel that when designing the game so as to give the player the greatest amount of pleasure is a good thing. However, designing the game, to get a player addicted to it, as the underlying purpose, is abysmal and should be greeted with opprobrium.

Random Reinforcement

One of these methods designed in online games in which I have experienced and influenced into addiction involves a complicated conditioning response as what psychologists refer to as “Variable Ratio of Reinforcement”, in effect random reinforcement. This is very different from Vicarious learning/modeling which involves rewarding or punishment directly to induce or reduce a behavior such as the rewarding of a dog with a biscuit for performing a trick well, or punishing a child for bad behavior. With random reinforcement, the rewards are just that- random and unpredictable. This is how the best games are programmed: to keep the player interested by promising predictable outcomes. For example, in FF11, to get certain rare weaponry, one has to take part Notorious Monsters (NMs) hunt and each time you kill the NM, there will be a chance of the weapon dropping as loot reward. The probability of some of these weapons dropping can be as low as 1%! The thing about random reinforcement is that since this uses a probability chance of obtaining the item, the more and longer you camp an item, the greater your chances of getting it.

Regret Aversion

Random Reinforcement when combined with another psychological behavioral response known as regret aversion which I have studied in the book “The Paradox of Choice”, once you have spent say for example, 3 days of your time camping for a certain weapon, and you did not get your weapon, you are faced with 2 choices. The first choice is to continue camping for the weapon, and the second choice, to stop camping for the weapon.

To avoid feelings of regret, most people will opt to choose to continue camping for the weapon, because to stop would mean to say that you have wasted a whole 3 good days of your time camping the NM for nothing and the possibility of regret. Also you would be susceptible in facing the possibilities of the “What If” and “If Only” scenarios. You say to yourself, “If only I had not started to camp the stupid NM at all” or “What if the NM drops the weapon on the next try but I decide not to stop camping it?”

Flow Theory

This theory was explored and discovered by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1990s. He coined the now famous idea of “the zone” – the special place between ability and challenge where an activity is not too hard that it causes anxiety and stress but not too easy that it causes people to feel bored. Game developers now use the flow theory in developing games that pull players in and keep them there.

For some games, the artificial intelligence (AI) in-built the game senses the players difficulty in overcoming certain obstacles and automatically reduces the game difficulty without letting the player know of the changes. This is a now known fact in famous games such as Pac-man, in which ability and challenge are balanced to keep a person inside “the-zone”.

Now we know the three psychological behavioral sciences taken into consideration by game designers which keep gamers addicted.

1. Regret aversion
2. Random reinforcements
3. Flow Theory

I don’t study psychology but there are probably a lot more known psychology behaviors which are designed into online games by game designers to keep gamers addicted. Although what I have just covered- biological makeup, classical conditioning and game design by producers which are all external influences and factors influencing addiction, this does not exonerate the gamer of his addiction and leave him defenseless and continually hooked to online gaming. These simply show the correlation between gaming and addiction, which differs significantly from cause and effect.

Social Factors

Social Circle

The social side of multiplayer online games keeps many people playing for long periods of time. They are the type of games that completely engross the player and some of them are not the type of games you can play for 20 minutes and simply decide to stop. To be serious in the game would mean that you have to spend time playing it. Also there exist social handcuffs, because in certain situations, your existence in a gaming event may be paramount for the team’s survivor and because you are dependent upon. For example, in a simple game of Dota, where each team consist of 5 players max, your convenient exit from the game would make the game imbalanced, leaving a 4v5 match up. By leaving the game you would be considered as a “noob” (newbie in short) and also a pariah in which case, you are likely to be blacklisted and banned from participating from future games.

Learned helplessness

Goh Chee Leong, dean of Department of Psychology at Kuala Lumpur’s HELP University College says: “Many people feel powerless in society, but in online games they’re in control of armies, of cities of other people”

In the 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman and his collaborators performed an experiment that involved teaching three difference groups of animals to jump over a little hurdle from one side of a box to the other to escape or avoid an electric shock.

Group 1: No prior exposure to such experiments.

Group 2: Had already learned to make a different response, in a different setting, to escape from the shock. Seligman expected and found that this second group would learn a bit more quickly than the first, reasoning that some of what they had learned in the first experiment might transfer to the second.

Group 3: Also in a different setting, had been given a series of shocks that could not be escaped by any response.

Remarkably, this third group failed to learn at all. Indeed many of them essentially had no chance to learn because they did not even try to escape from the shocks. These animals became quite passive, lying down to taking the shocks until the researchers mercifully ended the experiment.

Seligman and his colleagues suggested that the animals in this third group had learned from being exposed to inescapable shocks that nothing they did made a difference; that they were essentially helpless when it came to controlling their fate. Like the second group, they had also transferred to the hurdle-jumping situation lessons they had learned before- in this case, learned helplessness.

My point here is that, many people desire to be in control of their situation and also for success. However circumstances often rob people of the necessary choices to meet their need for control and success. The consequences can be dire and consequently, these people may seek alternative forms of control and success, in which exists in a virtual world. You can build your own guild and organize your own raids etc. Also the feeling of “pwning” a “noob” can be an exhilarating experience. Try playing Dota if you don’t believe me.

How to curb and/or prevent the addiction

Choice and Freewill

Ultimately, the main cause of gaming addiction is contributed by the power of choice and freewill.

If you choose NOT to play in the first place, knowing the consequences of playing is online addiction, you are unlikely to get addicted. Even if you did not know that it is possible to get hooked to online gaming, and inevitably get addicted, with freewill, you can “unhook” yourself anytime you want by simply choosing and dedicating yourself to the choice. I can say that confidently because I am a living example of a person who managed to purge myself of this craving.

Awareness

To stop the addiction, one must first be aware that he is addicted to it. Also, he needs to know the severity of the addiction and the consequences that he faces. Low dopamine combined with another brain chemical, serotonin, that normally causes calm and controlled behavior, can give irrational urges even greater free rein. This is why people continue to play online games without regard for future consequences in school grades or social relationships.

Visit http://www.rdasia.com to take an online gaming addiction test.

Seek Help

You can also seek help internally from friends, family or loved ones and also try to build up your social circle. Asking people out more frequently may also help. There’s a known 2 week rule of breaking a habit, in which for most people once you stop a habitual activity for 2 weeks, you have a very high chance of breaking that habit. However, this varies from individual to individual and the 2 week duration may need to be extended. Also, since you are likely to curb one gaming addiction by moving on to a different game, make sure you do not start playing another game!

Personally, when I want to stop using the computer for example during the examination period, I ask my sister to hide my keyboard or if I want to stop playing a game, I ask my sister to hide the CD and instruct her not to return it to me at any circumstances! It works!

If internal help is not sufficient or perhaps you are too shy to ask for help from your internal circle, you can try to seek external help. There are a lot of online addiction help services online such as On-line Gamers Anonymous (http://www.Olganon.org).

Friends or girlfriends, whom you know or feel that a person you care about is addicted to the online gaming predicament, should also be encouraged to help out by asking him/her out more. But please remember to be tactful. I hope this article proves useful!