THE FUTURE OF IMMERSION, IN MY MIND

            This may sound contrary but drawing on my own personal experience I would argue that as virtual worlds get more realistic and intense (which they will) videogame addiction will fundamentally stay the same. For some background in high school I went to boarding school. I was considered one of the smartest kids in my class and didn’t find the work challenging. I had a lot of free time on my hands and very few friends. During this period my parents and many relatives and my psychologist all diagnosed me with videogame addiction. I was playing games 6 hours a day many days, having trouble sleeping and so playing for hours before bed and when I got home I would do nothing except play games.

            In my view (and I have convinced some of them to my view now) their diagnoses reflected a fundamental lack of understanding for why I played video-games. Especially why I played them so much at home. For me video-games were not an addiction in themselves but something that offered an escape from boredom and social anxiety in the real world. Coming home from boarding school (especially on short breaks like thanksgiving) was a massively stressful experience where it felt like I had no ground to stand on and where everything in my day to day life completely changed.

            This is the crux of my argument that videogame addiction will stay the same. Videogame addiction—for most people—has never been about the games themselves but instead about escapism from the difficult and stressful realities of often shitty lives (e.g. the loner nerd tortured in school or whichever other trope you choose). Obviously there are people with extremely addictive personalities who get hooked by games designed to hook people but I’m not sure this counts. I’ve found addiction prone people always find something to addict them to. Putting on my amateur neuropsychologists hat here addiction is generally a function of a messed up brain, which overvalues mental “rewards” through dopamine or other neurochemicals. As such the addiction really isn’t about the videogames themselves, but about the person being addicted.

            This concept of escapism is fundamental to my understanding of my understanding of my own videogame “addiction”. I was clinically depressed when I became “addicted” to videogames. I didn’t really like my life and it was very easy and comforting to have an alternative “life” in a mmorpg I could return to. A life, and this is the crux of it, where I wasn’t fettered and could make real progress (albeit artificial) on a day to day basis. In subsequent discussions with my psychologist he has come to agree with my point of view and admitted that he was incorrect to diagnose me with addiction to videogames and that it was just an outlet to get away from my life which I didn’t like. Or as he put it “your videogame play was a symptom of your depression and the anxiety disorder you still possess”. While this offers a different view from the articles and case study you had us read I believe it is an important view for the class (and future classes to appreciate). Nothing so complicated as addiction is ever simple and every case of something like addiction is individual from all others and should be treated as such. In my case (and I believe in many others) videogame addiction is totally symptomatic of other unaddressed problems, issues and disorders and should be treated as such rather than as the media or older people with less experience in the issue would treat it (possibly out of fear of this newer medium of videogames) as this amazing and terrifying new “interactive” media sucking our children (because videogame addiction is overwhelmingly diagnosed in children) into virtual worlds.