dedrateryum's Weblog Site • NuTang.com

NOTE:
i personally didn't write this article. I found it, and felt that people should read it, because whoever DID write the article is biased. (i did add my own opinion all the way at the end, after the ============'s
--Anna

~~~~~~~~~~
The Addictiveness of Virtual Violence
Does the Violence Spill Over Into Real Life?

By Tom Glaister
ConsumerAffairs.Com

April 29, 2007

I was in Thailand recently and, after a few beers and a night on the town I started feeling sentimental and decided to email an ex-girlfriend.

The only internet café that I could find open, however, hardly provided the kind of atmosphere for letters from the heart – it was full of smoke, flashing lights and the sounds of swords clashing, warriors yelling and intermittent explosions.

When my eyes adjusted to the dim atmosphere I saw a crowd of Thais in their teens and 20's playing a variety of computer games that involved the maximum of noise and action – the gamers, however, were all silent, staring at the screens with a single-minded intensity, their faces devoid of emotion.

I tried to write the email anyway but the words refused to flow as I kept watching the 5-year-old girl next to me play Grand Theft Auto, a game where the hero drives around on a motorbike with a prostitute on the back, attempting to track down his missing cocaine…

I gave up and looked around at all the elves, dwarves and dragons playing out their dramas on the monitor screens and wondered if any of these youths had school or work the next day. It was 2 a.m.

In somewhere like Thailand, this kind of thing is more visible as few families can afford high-speed internet connections at home. But similar scenes are being played out across America in the privacy of gamers' bedrooms.

While computers have been hailed as great learning tools and business aids, from the start they have been used more for playing games than anything else.

Does this scenario -- children playing violent video games far into the night -- sound a little frightening to you? It does to Eric Storch, Ph.D., an assistant professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Florida.

Connection to Violence?
Storch warned parents doing their holiday shopping last year that too much gaming puts children at risk for behavioral and health problems.

Children and teens who play excessively often do so at the expense of homework, and playing solo can isolate children from their peers, potentially causing problems for them later in life, Storch said.

"Social interactions teach you how to deal with other people as well as what's appropriate and what's not," he said. "You learn how to handle situations. Social interaction is also one way of coping with stress and receiving emotional support."

It's been suggested, though not confirmed, that the Virginia Tech shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, may have played the popular first-person-shooter game Counter-Strike in high school.

There've also been reports that shooter Lee Boyd Malvo played the game Halo before he began shooting people at random around the Washington, D.C., area. Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold reportedly loved Doom.

Certainly these individuals were loners with poor social skills and an addiction to fantasy. Would they have been more likely to work out their problems if the computer had never been invented? As all but Malvo are dead and he is locked away in a Virginia super-max prison, we will never know.

Geeks Get Real
Initially, gamers had to contend with the geeky image that came with training up onscreen warriors to hunt down orcs in the forest. Did they have no real life to attend to? But then came the filming of Lord of the Rings and suddenly the secret lives of orcs, elves, dwarves and hobbits entered mainstream culture and RPG's (Role Playing Games) seemed a fairly innocuous hobby.

I played a good deal of computer games myself as I was growing up. I was an only child and killing a bunch of skeletons in a dungeon on my computer helped me pass many a lonely hour. Best of all, though, was when friends came round to play 2-player games and we could laugh and joke about what was happening on the screen.

Yet whether alone or with friends, the games only held interest for so long. we'd complete the mission, kill all the bad guys and then go outside to play soccer. The games were finite, there was only so far they could take you.

The internet changed all that.

For while RPG's have been popular for years with names like Ultima and Everquest topping the computer gaming charts, the advent of high-speed internet connections suddenly added a whole new dimension.

Instead of playing against the limited responses of a program, players can now interact with other gamers on the same playing field, no matter if they were next door or half way across the world. Gamers can talk as they play via messenger or Skype and they no longer feel so alone.

WOW
The most popular of these is WOW (World of Warcraft) and today it boasts 8 million users, some 2.5 million from the US.

Gamers buy or download the initial installation of WOW and then pay the producers -- Blizzard -- a monthly subscription fee to access the online servers. With 8 million users paying $20 or so a month for their fix, Blizzard can afford to pay the best programmers, story writers and graphic designers in the world to create ever-expanding environments and plotlines, maintaining the interest of the WOW gaming population.

For the uninitiated, playing WOW works something like this: you develop a character (or several characters) and choose, for example, whether he or she will be a human or an elf, a priest or a warrior.

Your character starts off as a pretty lowly entity in the WOW world and you start to develop his skills and experience as fast as possible by training with other characters, looking for gold and special items and going raiding with other gamers for booty.

As time goes by your character begins to progress and becomes more powerful, his level increases and so does your prestige in the eyes of other gamers. It's not all fun and games, though, much of it requires dedication and rather tedious industry – such as repeating a single action like leather working or fishing a few hundred times until your character progresses.

In fact, the more time the gamer puts into a character, the more it seems worthwhile. It's a huge investment of time and energy, sometimes even of money – gamers often put up for sale on E-Bay special swords and mallets that get hundreds of dollars in fierce auctions.

In short, it's something like the sunken investment trap of putting coins into a slot machine, convinced that the longer you play the better the odds are in your favor. The very need to get a return on their investment of time pushes the user closer to gaming addiction.

Social scientists are beginning to take note.

A recent study by the University of Rochester found that games can provide "opportunities for achievement, freedom, and even a connection to other players." The study downplayed any negative impacts but did find evidence the games were habit-forming because they filled basic psychological needs. Of course, the same could be said for heroin.

Although internet addiction has yet to make it into the psychiatric textbooks, most people will be able to recognize the tendency within themselves. While writing this article I had to fight the urge to check my email on at least a dozen occasions. And just knowing there are pictures of naked girls on beaches a few clicks away makes it that much harder to maintain my train of thought.

More Insidious
But for the millions who play WOW for hours and hours each day, gaming becomes far more insidious.

Flying dragons across the Lands of Karazhan and battling rival guilds, it's not surprising that the importance of RL, or 'real life', begins to fade away. All that matters is the game and your identity within it.

Online, you can be anyone. You can leave your real world persona and problems behind you and invest all your self in your onscreen avatar. The wimp can become a warrior, the lonely can make a hundred 'friends' and the lost and alienated can discover a whole new meaning to life, all within the virtual world created by Blizzard.

Blizzard hasn't been slow to understand this and soon realized that the best way to convince gamers to renew their monthly subscriptions was to encourage a sense of pride and belonging to the world in which they played.

The greatest of these strategies was allowing the formation of 'guilds', organized gangs of online gamers who never need to actually meet but have a highly structured society within the world of WOW.

Joining a prestigious guild is almost like passing a tough job interview. The top guilds demand utter dedication from their members and may insist that you stay online for 12-hour stretches to train up for an important raid on a rival faction. The chiefs of guilds threaten to throw out characters who don't meet the grade and the fear of being outcast keeps gamers in the virtual rat race, busily working on their healing skills to gain acceptance.

'Guildies' imagine that they have made friends online, that they're part of something bigger, something glorious.

But they soon find that if they miss a few days of playing and don't meet the guild's expectations, their 'friends' soon fade away, shunning the type of loser who's content to only reach level 40. And would you just look at the state of his armour…

It Didn't Wow South Park
"You can just hang outside in the sun all day, tossing a ball around – or you can go sit in front of your computer and do something that matters!"

Such was the encouragement of Cartman in the South Park episode that was based on WOW, curiously enough made with the cooperation of Blizzard.

Featuring graphics from the game, the gist is that the South Park characters all become fat from eating junk food and sitting in front of their computers all day, to the extent that they dare not even go to the bathroom for fear of missing a few minutes of play.

I was once a geek in front of a computer, playing simulation games for company as I was pretty unpopular at school.

I remember receiving medals as a submarine commander for a particularly daring raid on a convoy in the Pacific and then wanting to tell the few friends I had about it. Then it dawned on me that it meant nothing at all to anyone else. I had spent my entire weekend playing a computer game and had nothing to show for it. That was when I quit and haven't looked back.

If there's any doubt that gaming is addictive, you have only to read some of the testimonies at www.wowdetox.com where gamers can post their experiences in getting off 'WOWcrack'. One user sums up his reasons for quitting:

"Through all the friends I've lost touch with and all the sunlight I missed, It finally hit me that it is time to stop and move on. It is just not worth it."

A girl reports that she understood her addiction: "Because I ran home from a fun guy on a blind date to raid Karazhan."

A guy counts up the hours he's spent playing WOW and calculates that if he had instead spent them at work earning the minimum wage, he would have had an extra 18,000 dollars in the bank.

And to illustrate it's not just teenagers playing WOW, check out the complaint of a wife who's considering divorcing her husband because he never spends any time with his family any more. She reports:

"But honey," he says, "we DID spend time together today...remember when I helped you get the Mallet of ZF?" Yeah, I remember the 30 min you deigned to give me so I would shut up and leave you alone. I also remember the going on 13 hours you've been on the game today, that fact that you haven't eaten today, and the way your child cried when you told him you couldn't put him in bed tonight because you were busy."

Lingering Effects
Beyond marital strife and time away from work and study, are violent video games really harmful?

A study last year found that adolescents who play violent video games may exhibit lingering effects on brain function, including increased activity in the region of the brain that governs emotional arousal and decreased activity in the brain's executive function, which is associated with control, focus and concentration.

"Our study suggests that playing a certain type of violent video game may have different short-term effects on brain function than playing a nonviolent -- but exciting -- game," said Vincent P. Mathews, M.D., professor of radiology at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

One study conducted by Louisiana State University found that young people who habitually play video video games may be more likely to get into physical fights, argue with teachers, or display anger and hostility.

A study quoted by Slate found that kids who played more violent video games "changed over the school year to become more verbally aggressive, more physically aggressive," and less helpful to others.

A Worldwide Problem
WOW and other online role-playing games are a worldwide problem. The Chinese government has introduced measures to limit the playing times of the young. People have died in South Korea from deep vein thrombosis, a condition caused by poor circulation due to sitting still for too long.

And in the US there now exist organizations like Online Gamers Anonymous who run 12 step programs, just like Alcoholics Anonymous, to wean the addicted off their virtual fix.

Blizzard isn't evil and World of Warcraft is a great game. In moderation. But moderation is a rare quality in human nature and it's an anathema to the business world who want consumers to buy more, more, more.

Neither is escapism anything new. It's just getting a lot more accessible and attractive now that you can hide in your bedroom and pretend you have a whole new social network in the World of Warcraft.

But there's nothing as interesting as real life. The thrills of jumping on a plane to go somewhere new, learning to play an instrument or just walking over to someone you find attractive and saying 'hi', outweigh anything that pixelated dwarves and dragons have to offer.

Barring natural disasters and economic meltdown, technology is here to stay. The cell phone, computers and the internet are a daily fact of most people's lives in America. It's up to us to learn to place limits on how much we let them take over our lives.

Otherwise we'll all end up as 40-year-old virgins in the bedrooms of our parents' houses, developing arthritis on our mouse-clicking fingers as we strive for glory on the fields of Karazhan.
============================================================

--why should they blame the game when it's really the players' fault for not having better self control? aw hell... round of applause to blizzard for practically doing what any business would dream to do: get people wanting more so they can make profits. a business is a business people. deal with it.

also, they titled it Virtual VIOLENCE... uhm... WoW is anything but VIOLENT. maybe the writer should try it sometime.
----Anna

Comment! (1) | Recommend! (1) | Categories: world of warcraft [t], gaming [t], video games [t], news [t]