Video Games & False Significance
Why do we long to be significant? The desire fills us all, manifested in a million different ways. Some people feel significant through athletics, others music, and others money. How we choose to satisfy this desire makes us all unique.
The majority of the significantizers exist in the real world. Video games offer a digital substitute for those real activities. If you’re into music you can become a Guitar Hero. Into sports? Try Madden NFL.
Rock Star Sensation
Tragically, gaming keeps gamers from learning the skills that actually make them significant. They become a guy playing in the living room with a cheap plastic guitar with colorful buttons. The Wall Street Journal says, “Many professional rockers, however, say the game lets them act out a fantasy that their real lives don’t quite match. Sometimes, pretending to be a rock star for a few minutes can be more fun than being one.”
Like aspartame, these games taste more potent than the real world they reflect. But are artificial at their soul.
The Wall Street Journal wrote an article that talked about how dozens of top tier bands like Korn, Incubus and Donnas became wrapped up in Guitar Hero. Real rock stars pretending to be fake rock stars. According to the Journal the band Three Days Grace struggled with Guitar Hero cutting into their recording time for their new album.
Guitar Hero gives the rock star sensation as much as, or more than being a true rock star. The game constantly gives players feedback through cheering crowds. The better you play the more they cheer. It cuts through the boredom of traveling from gig to gig and the responsibility of honing the skills needed to become a real rock star.
The game just drops you on a stage in front of an audience ready to lavish their affection on your skilled playing. If you can get the buzz playing a game, why go through the years of practice needed to become a real rock star?
This may be an extreme example since not many people can become rock stars but it illustrates the point:
Virtual activity becomes a substitute for real activity.
In the game… I’m special
After hearing me give a talk about gaming, one child admitted to his mother “In the game I’m special. In real life I’m not.” This simple statement points out a tragic truth. The more we invest in a non-existent world, the poorer we become in the real one. King Solomon said this a different way, “The man that soweth food will have his full share, the man that chases fantasy will have poverty.” Video gaming is a bad investment. Why waste your time, the most precious treasure you have, trying to level up.
Leveling up in real life
Imagine how much you could accomplish if you “leveled up” your real life abilities with as much intensity as you do your online abilities. If you spent the same amount of time studying, working, and taking risks in the real world as they do in the virtual world. How more effective would you be as a person? I can tell you that my life improved dramatically when I started leveling up my real life character. I started reading books like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey The book can show you how to level up your life. It changed my life.
Deep down we want to change the world. Video games tell us that we can change the world, but only it in the game. This is a lie. The truth is that you can change the world. But, it takes hard work, which you won’t have time for when you waste it online. People who get distracted by the virtual world will have little impact on the real one.
When we lack purpose we tend to squander our time on useless pursuits. The pursuit of happiness is a sign of a purposeless life. People spend their life pursuing happiness because they have nothing more important than themselves. The live for no ideal. No higher purpose.
Video Game Addicts Tell Their Stories
Here is a video that gives you a look into the life of a game addict.
Candadian Runway Found Dead After Xbox Confiscation
Article by TimesOnline
A teenage boy who ran away from home last month after his Xbox was confiscated has been found dead in Canada.
Brandon Crisp, 15, went missing on October 14 after his father forbade him from playing his video game console after becoming concerned about the teenager’s obsession with the online game Call of Duty 4.
Steve Crisp said he removed the Xbox 360 after his son’s behaviour began to change. He said Brandon’s grades were slipping, he had started skipping school and stealing money.
Brandon fled his home on his bicycle and was last seen in a popular hiking and cycling path near Barrie, Ontario, north of Toronto.
A local newspaper and Xbox creators Microsoft offered a $C50,000 reward (27,000pounds) and 1600 volunteers searched the local area, but all they found was his abandoned bicycle with a flat tyre.
Brandon’s body was found by hunters in a cornfield on Wednesday.
Read the article on TimesOnline.co.uk
Commentary
It is much easier to take the xbox out of the house than it is to take it out of your son’s heart. It is not uncommon for gamers to become violent when their game systems are taken away but this may be the first. The key is to help your gamer say “no” himself if at all possible.
What do you think?
cgames 05 – Gamer Stories from WowDetox.com
In this episode Jessi Johnson from WowDetox.com shares about World of Warcraft addiction. This sobering episode shows just how dangerous World of Warcraft is. If you don’t believe that WoW addiction is real just listen. It will change your mind.
5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do
The more I talk with parents about gaming the more I think they are to blame for a part of the addiction problem.
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EverQuest GNP as Large as Most Countries
Here is an interesting tidbit from our growing bag of research. I wonder what the GDP of Azeroth is. GNP stands for Gross National Product and is a measure of the wealth and productivity of a nation.
“In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called Norrath, populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath’s currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many.
The population is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of emigres from various places around the globe, but especially the United States. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location. Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money — with annual revenues expected to top USD 1.5 billion by 2004 — and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may soon become the primary venue for all online activity.”
Edward Castronova. “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier” December 2001. CESifo Working Paper Series No. 618. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294828
I doubt this is still true since many EQ players have moved over to WoW but it is still interesting.
Labeling
Dr. Dave Greenfield is one expert I came across while researching gaming. He maintains a website, Virtual-Addiction, which looks specifically at Internet Addiction. I found an interview he did with Today where I think he hit it right on the head.
“The bottom line is it doesn’t really matter what it’s labeled, because the reality is that people have problems and many times these problems aren’t labeled or classified, but we in our offices see these problems every day.”
I’ve said this before and I’m just going to say it again: It is irrelevant whether we call it digital dependence, video game addiction, or bug-eye syndrome. Many people have problems with digital games that need to be addressed. Period.
On another note: Thomas just finished speaking at the CHEACT book fair where he addressed home schoolers on the dangers created by digital gaming. You can view last year’s workshop by clicking the “video” tab above.
Chicken v. Egg?
Which came first the chicken or the egg? I think this question is easily answered since a chicken could have survived without an egg, while an egg would require incubation (aka: a chicken) to survive. Whatever. No; I am not going to talk about the inherent lameness of video games involving chickens in this posting. Go ahead; exhale a grand sigh of relief.
Instead, I am going to talk about what is often (very academically) termed a “chicken and egg dilemma:” Are compulsive, addiction-prone people just drawn to video games or do the video games themselves actually promote addiction?
To answer this question, we’re going to trek down a road often fraught with boredom; we’re going to look at research. But, if you’re willing to stick with it and at least read the major parts of this post, you just might even get some great information and maybe even a fresh perspective. What do you have to loose? Two minutes?
Read the rest of this entry »
MMO: A Minor’s Massive Obsession
Originally written as a composition assignment, 8 April 2008.
Cyberspace must be running in its own time zone. What starts as “just a few more minutes to finish this level” soon becomes an hour. When Olivia and Kurt Bruner kept hearing this from their son while he was playing games, they set out to discover the problem. They concluded that video games are like “the digital drug” (Bruner and Bruner xxi).
Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games are especially similar to drugs; not in their chemical makeup, but in the way they affect the young brain. MMO may as well stand for a Minor’s Massive Obsession because of the addiction it can become for many minors who find virtual reality more fulfilling than modern reality. In a way gaming also resembles alcohol. It isn’t evil, and actually can be beneficial, but can easily be overdone.
Contents
- Definitions:
- Addictive or Not Addictive… That is the Question
- A Nasty Acronym with a Nasty Side
- Pixels… or People?
- Tossing Schoolwork for the Game?
- Why Work Out when I can be a Digital Athlete in Seconds?
- Am I Ruining Reality for Virtual Reality?
- The Digital Drug?
- Fast Food Fulfillment
- Risky Playtime
The Problem of Addiction:
Why Games are Addictive:
