cgames 02 – What is gaming addiction? Interview with Dr. Kimberly Young
cgames 02 - What is gaming addiction? Interview with Dr. Kimberly Young [ 12:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadSummary
In this episode we talk with Kimberly S. Young the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery about the nature of online addiction.
Here are some of questions we discuss:
- What are the symptoms of gaming addiction?
- How do you know if you are addicted?
- How do you help a loved one who is addicted.
Links
- Center for Internet Addiction Recovery
- Breaking the Denial: Confronting a Loved One Addicted to the Internet
Transcript
Welcome to cgames.com podcast. My name is Thomas Umstattd Jr. We’re on the line with Dr. Kimberly Young an internationally known expert on internet addiction and on-line behavior. She is currently the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery. She is also the author of Breaking Free of the Web, Catholics, and Internet Addictions.
Thomas Umstattd: Dr. Young as a physiologist what is gaming addiction?
Dr. Kimberly Young: Well, one of the things that we’ve been seeing here in the last few years is the growth of gaming addiction which really seems to be people who are staying on line longer than intended, they are people that are very pre occupied with gaming, they are people who will jeopardize relationships, careers, or even sleep to stay on line.
One of the strange things that we’ve seen is that it’s not just young people but also a lot of older adults as well. It seems that the warning signs need to be looked at both for the kids that are doing this and the adults.
Thomas Umstattd: What are some of those effects on those older gamers; like their families and such?
cgames 01 – The Dangers of Digital Gaming
This is a talk that Thomas Umstattd Jr. gave at the West Austin Rotary Club on the dangers of digital gaming. We talk about the chemical triggers of gaming addiction such as dopamine and adrenaline as well as the emotional addictive triggers such as the longing for significance. We also discuss gamer widows.
Links
Transcript
Welcome, in this episode we are going to be listening to a talk that I gave at the West Austin Rotary Club on September 5th, 2007. This will provide a good overview of many of the dangers of digital gaming. Unfortunately I didn’t start my recorder right at the beginning of the talk so we have to catch it part way though. Alright, let’s get started!
He had been playing games all day. Basically he would wake up and he would play in the morning and the afternoon. He started playing this game called War to World Craft and he stopped going to class. He stopped going to work. He stopped going to the cafeteria. In fact, he stopped doing anything but playing the game.
After a while he just disappeared from school because he knew that he was failing all of his classes. Unfortunately, Danial, is not at all an isolated instance. There are organizations on line called “World to War Craft Widows.” When I saw these organizations I didn’t take them seriously. I was like, “what on earth?”
But together they have over 10,000 members. These are who feel like they have lost their husbands because their husbands are horribly addicted to video gaming or computer gaming. The stories that they share break my heart. They get married. They’re happily married and then say, their husbands go off to war and he starts playing. He comes back a different person. He’s playing the game 80 hours a week. He doesn’t want to talk with her. He doesn’t want to have any sort of conversations. These marriages are crumbling and these women are getting divorced. It’s a tragic story.
We’re like; “Where are these people? Why haven’t I seen them?” The thing is is when someone is playing for 80 hours a week they are invisible to society. They might work or they may not but we don’t see them. It’s not like gambling where there’s a foreclosure sign in the front yard and we can detect it economically. Still it’s destroying families in a very similar way that gambling is. Many parents and grandparents don’t feel equipped to help their children though this issue.
cgames 00 – Introduction
This is our very first episode. Let me know what you think!
Transcript
Welcome to the very first episode of the cgames.com Podcast. This episode will serve as an overview and introduction to what we will be talking about in this Podcast. We are going to explore the dangers of computer and video gaming. And you are probably thinking video games? Video games, they aren’t dangerous. And for the most part we don’t see games as dangerous as a society.
But digital games can be dangerous and that I exactly what we are going to be exploring throughout this Podcast. We are going to talk with current and former gamers as well as various experts and authors in the field. We are also going to talk with gamer widows and discuss the effect of gaming on families and society in general. This includes a lot more to do than just violence, sex, or other content issues like that. We are going to look at the whole effect of gaming.
My name is Thomas Umstattd Jr. and I am a former gamer and the director of cgames.com. If you have any questions you can contact me on this blog or at my email.
