No doubt a few parents took Randy Salas' story and waved it front of their teeenager’s face, blocking his view of the screen.
Well, can you be addicted to video gaming? I’m not a doctor, and have no experience the psychology of addiction, so feel free to ignore everything I say. But. I suspect it’s less a matter of “addiction” than the pleasures of familiarity and evasion. It’s the equivalent of a model train set in the basement. No one ever talked about HO Gauge Addiction when husbands en masse disappeared in the 50s and 60s to tinker with tiny electrified infrastructure, but let a few dozen million youths spend their off hours on quests, hitting elves in the head with a hammer for gold while the laundry piles up, and it’s an addiction. People will always get in too deep into something; it’s our nature.
If everyone who was addicted to games spent six hours in front of the TV every night, what would we call them? Right: normal.
I don’t play many games anymore, because I simply don’t have the time. But I know the allure. If I play a game more than half an hour these days, my wrists ache from decades of keyboard abuse. In college I got sucked into Space Invaders, and fed endless quarters into the machine, looking for the singular ping that lit up your brain when you nailed that last speeding pixel-splat a second before he overran your position. Then came Pac-Man and Asteroids and Donkey Kong and the rest of the 80 faves – crude graphics, bleep-boop sound, and gameplay that was always described as “addictive.” Well, in the sense that you wanted more, perhaps. But we quit when the money ran out. We always found something else to do.
Every kid has a misfit stage, unless they’re a pearly-toothed Class President type. Every kid spends some time in a fantasy world. In the 50s they worried terribly about comic books, and the effect they had on tender minds; kids were getting hooked on the gore and horror. It’s always something. The difference today: we develop names and syndromes and diagnoses, which somehow makes basic human behavior seem like a mechanism we can fine-tune back to perfection. If you play too many video games, you may be avoiding life and indulging yourself, right? Well, that sounds sounds harsh. Better, perhaps, to call it a disorder. That we can fix.
Internet addiction is the next pathology, no doubt. China has begun to face the problem already; supplicants get electric shocks and brain-secretion-balancing IV drips. That’s one way to cure it. Walking the dog is another.
Blame The Parents...Not The Game
Frankly I blame the parents for children being addicted to video games. They didn't do enough to restrict their children from playing only so much a day. Parents today would rather allow their children to spend countless hours in front of the Idiot Box trying to capture 27 new Pokemon creatures than outside playing football, baseball, basketball, or riding bicycles, or some other activity where they might get (gasp) hurt, or worse, (double gasp) sick. Oh no, we don't want that. We don't want our children to play outside in the sun, because it causes cancer, in the grass, because that causes allergies which can lead to cancer, or climbing a tree, because the bugs carry bacteria that may or may not give you cancer, or the birds might fly away, and if you touch where they once stepped, you will get cancer. We don't want our children getting cancer or AIDS or anything else just from being outdoors. We would rather our children stay indoors, spend countless hours in front of the TV with a ton of sugary snacks, and become weak than build character and get fit by playing outdoors. The Outdoors can kill you. Just Say "NO!" to the Outdoors.
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