A World of Excesses

Online Games and Excessive Playing

Faltin Karlsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317186212
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores gaming culture, focusing on competent players and excessive use. Addressing the contested question of whether addiction is possible in relation to computer games - specifically online gaming - A World of Excesses demonstrates that excessive playing does not necessarily have detrimental effects, and that there are important contextual elements that influence what consequences playing has for the players. Based on new empirical studies, including in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography, and drawing on material from international game related sites, this book examines the reasons for which gaming can occupy such a central place in people's lives, to the point of excess. As such, it will be of interest to sociologists and psychologists working in the fields of cultural and media studies, the sociology of leisure, information technology and addiction.

Chapter 1
Introduction

This book is about games and gaming culture and will address one of the recent and most debated topics in relation to computer games: the possibility of becoming addicted to online games. By online games I am referring to the genre known as Massively Multi-Player Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs), where World of Warcraft (2004) is a well-known title. These games are often set in fantasy universes where magic and heroic deeds have a prominent place. A central objective is to develop an avatar through which the player can explore vast expanses of land, in a game universe populated by thousands of other players. Cooperation is common, sometimes a prerequisite, and players often band together to engage in challenging tasks. The game worlds are persistent, and the player can spend months, or years, without exhausting the possibilities they offer. Tight bonds are often forged between players.

These games typically reach the attention of the general public when something has gone terribly wrong. From Asia we receive stories about players who are found dead in front of the computer after days of continuous playing. Teenagers quitting school or work in order to play are topics that are dealt with on a regular basis. One particularly disturbing news story was when South Korean police reported arresting a couple for starving their 3-month-old daughter to death while devoting their attention to an online game. Adding absurdity to an already dreadful story, the objective of the game was to raise a virtual character of a young girl (Tran 2010). The couple had reportedly lost their will to live a normal life because they had no jobs and had given birth to a premature baby.

These stories differ in gravity but share some characteristics, most notably that the games are depicted as holding a certain power over their users – to such an extent that they are sometimes turned into ‘game addicts’. The public debates concerning this issue are often heated and the positions polarised. Some accuse online games of being cunningly designed compulsion machines that force youngsters to play endlessly. Others praise online games for containing rich and immersive gameplay, and vigorously defend them as just another – albeit more time consuming – type of computer game. Within the research community the tone is subtler, the arguments more elaborate, but the same positions are also present here.

Computer game playing in general is a complicated matter to approach, as playing, like overall media use, is ingrained within layers of psychological, social and cultural context. Political, economic and technological aspects also influence how games are developed, distributed and used. Playing, therefore, concerns a large number of theoretical and empirical matters and crosses several academic fields.

When we narrow the topic to ‘excessive playing’ or ‘online game addiction’, contributions from two research areas are especially relevant, namely psychology and game studies. And they are relevant for different reasons: game studies because of a context-sensitive focus on games and playing; psychology because of its focus on problematic sides of gaming. These research areas will be the basis for this book, where the aim is to engage a cross-disciplinary discussion regarding what is often referred to as online game addiction.

Psychological research on computer games is predominantly occupied with adverse effects, which is also recognised from within the field itself: ‘As a general observation of the psychological literature on video games, it may be argued that there has been a distinctly ‘negative’ slant, emphasising the harmful aspects of video game playing, such as increased aggression or risk of addiction’ (King, Delfabbro and Griffiths 2010a). This may seem natural since psychology is primarily concerned with mental illness and to a much lesser degree with mental states that are regarded as harmless or normal.

Game studies often tends to be more forgiving of problematic sides of gaming culture than psychology. It may even be regarded as surprisingly uninterested in adverse effects of playing. The MMORPG genre in general has been subject to increasing attention from academics. From a few studies at the turn of the century (Castronova 2001, Yee 2001), the genre has been the object of a vast array of articles, books and conference papers over the last few years. Different sides of gaming culture have been researched (Taylor 2003, 2006) and hardcore players and hardcore practices like raiding have received quite some attention (Karlsen 2009, 2010, Mortensen 2010, Paul 2010, 2011). Even here, where the focus is on instrumental playing practices and the most dedicated part of gaming culture, it is seldom framed as an addiction or even a problem.

While understanding gaming culture and how games are used is important, the aim of this book is to look specifically at problematic aspects of gaming. I am writing this book because I think we need to better understand when playing becomes a problem. Regardless of whether or not players of computer games can be categorised as addicted in a strict pathological sense, there is a general acceptance that some players show a level of involvement in computer games that can be characterised as problematic (Griffiths and Davies 2005, Wan and Chiou 2006). As much as I wish to understand why playing is meaningful, joyful, social and important to people, I also want to understand what happens when playing spirals out of control and has serious adverse effects on people’s lives. I think it is necessary within game studies to carve out a larger space for discussing problematic sides of gaming, and to offer contextual perspectives that psychology is not able to provide. Computer games, like other media, have the possibility to furnish both healthy and unhealthy activities and this book is dedicated to some sort of twilight zone between excessive, harmless playing and playing with serious detrimental effects.

One of the leading psychologists in the area of problem gaming, Mark Griffiths, has argued that psychology needs to pay more attention to context. He has argued that we need a biopsychosocial perspective when researching gaming as a phenomenon (Griffiths 2005). I would argue that we also need a cultural perspective to understand how computer games function in our society. This layer is, for instance, crucial to understanding general debates and discourses concerning computer games. It is on this larger level that we more easily understand why some media are regarded as dangerous while others are perceived as beneficial. While I see advantages of spanning the whole spectrum from biological to cultural issues, I have made an effort to at least bring together theoretical and empirical work from psychological, social and cultural perspectives. As a fourth perspective, a certain degree of attention will also be devoted to media structure, and how structure influences how the medium is used. My aim has been to let these perspectives cross-pollinate, as it were, and also to highlight areas where the different perspectives have blind spots.

My academic training is primarily from qualitative media studies and game studies and not psychology. It is therefore with some caution that I have entered the field of psychology to engage in the debates about addiction going on here. The possibility that I do not fully comprehend theoretical and methodological subtleties is always a risk but, nevertheless, I have entered this field because I find it important to add to the interaction between psychology and other types of research on players and gaming culture. Psychological research on this subject would benefit, as I see it, from being supplemented by more qualitative research, where excessive gaming is seen more clearly in its social context. Researchers from game studies, on their part, would benefit from being more aware of the discussions that go on within the field of psychology in order to respond more adequately to claims about online game addiction.

While this book is aiming at discussing academic perspectives on problematic aspects of gaming, it also provides new qualitative empirical material about this issue. Since psychological research often focuses on game structure and empirical data that can support diagnostic criteria, I have focused on context and meaning, as I generally find this to be under-researched in studies where problem gaming is the object of analysis. My material only makes a small contribution to the rapid growing body of research and is primarily meant as an incitement for further investigation. This will be described in the next chapter. In this chapter I will give a short description of psychology and game studies to better illustrate their relevance to our understanding of the phenomenon of ‘online game addiction’. But, first, a few words about terminology.

Terminology

High engagement in games can be described in many ways, and concepts may have different connotations from one academic field to the next. In more neutral and positive terms, game players are described as enthusiastic, engrossed or as being immersed. As with other popular media or fiction, gaming is described as escapism. In game studies, involvement in games has been compared to other types of involvement, through the use of Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) concept of flow (Juul 2005, Mortensen 2003).

Within psychology, we often find concepts with a more negative slant, including where gaming is described as addictive, problematic and compulsive (Kuss and Griffiths 2011). In this book I have chosen to use mainly the word excessive, implying that playing exceeds what it regarded as normal or that playing is done in immoderate measure. The term is not used normatively but as a description of an activity that deviates from what is perceived as the general norm in the given context. It is also distinct from the psychological term addiction, where playing is regarded as having severe adverse effects. Excessive playing, in contrast, can describe players who enjoy themselves while playing and where gaming does not necessarily have significant negative consequences (Kuss and Griffiths 2011).

Psychology

Psychology is seldom occupied with the context of the player but focuses, rather, on the relationship between medium and user. While several theoretical perspectives are used also in psychological studies, like cognitive approaches and social psychology, the research on problem gaming seems to be dominated by a psycho-structural, behaviouristic approach (Griffiths 1993, King et al. 2010b, Westwood and Griffiths 2010). If journals dedicated to addiction are a measure, a relatively high percentage of the research is also quantitative.

When we look at psychological research on excessive playing we learn that the subject matter of this book is of some urgency, as it has been suggested that online game addiction should be included in the internationally recognised psychological manuals DSM and ICD.1 Problem gambling is the only game type that is currently covered by these manuals, referred to as pathological gambling. This was included in DSM-III as a new diagnosis in 1980, not as an addiction, but as an ‘Impulse Control Disorder Not Elsewhere Classified’ and grouped together with phenomena like pyromania and kleptomania. These phenomena do not share underlying motivation factors but manifest themselves in similar ways, which indicates that, when the diagnosis was included, it was a matter of uncertainty how the manifestation of the alleged illness should be understood.2

Traditionally, addiction is associated with substances like alcohol, pills and narcotics. The core idea is that psychoactive substances induce physical dependency in the user. During the 1960s and 1970s, psychologists like Weil (1972) advanced the idea that activities that did not involve substance use, but which people experience as rewarding, also had the capacity to cause addictive behaviour (Milkman and Sunderwirth 2010). It was theorised that people got addicted to the reward mechanism in the brain as an effect of different types of behaviour. This paved the way for the concept of behavioural addiction and, eventually, the diagnosis of pathological gambling. Behaviourism, which focuses on psychological reward mechanisms, was employed as a theoretical framework to explain why people get trapped in specific patterns of behaviour. The research literature has since described a wide range of psycho-structural phenomena that link the game mechanics of gambling games to pathological playing behaviour via their ability to reward players. Gambling types like slot machines are, for instance, often regarded as especially dangerous because of their structural characteristics, as they offer a high event frequency and reward the players with small wins at variable intervals (Turner 2008: 62).3

Despite being a controversial concept, the idea of behavioural addiction has gained momentum, and is currently proposed as an explanation for compulsive behaviour related to activities as disparate as gambling, shopping, exercise, sex, Internet use or video game playing (Griffiths 2005, King, Delfabbro and Griffiths 2010b). It has been argued that ‘if the clinical nomenclature can accept pathological gambling, then similar compulsive behaviours should be recognised as “addictive”’ (Griffiths 2008). Some advocate the concept of technological addictions as a generic term covering ‘non-chemical (behavioural) addictions that involve human–machine interaction’ (Widyanto and Griffiths 2006). According to Mark Griffiths, the way of determining whether non-chemical (i.e. behavioural) ‘addictions’ are addictive in a non-metaphorical sense is to compare them with clinical criteria for established drug-based addictions. Over the years, this has been proposed for a range of different technologies, and also media such as television (Kubey et al. 2001). Of these different phenomena mentioned, pathological gambling is still the only one that is currently recognised as a genuine addiction.

But this may be about to change. Currently, several psychologists believe that Internet use and online gaming have structural and psychological resemblances to gambling, to the extent that they should be subject to a similar diagnosis (Block 2008). The group responsible for updating a section of the DSM-manual called Substance Related Disorders has recommended that this diagnostic category should include both substance-use disorders and non-substance addictions. They explain that:

Gambling disorder has been moved into this category and there are other addiction-like behavioral disorders such as ‘Internet addiction’ that will be considered as potential additions to this category as research data accumulate.4

Usually, the proposal is that Internet addiction should become a general diagnosis with online games as a sub-category. Regardless of the soundness of this argument, if the group’s recommendation is followed the application of the concept of ‘addiction’ will gain considerable ground. One possible outcome of this process is that Internet addiction becomes a diagnosis by the time the next update of the manual is finished. Or, as they state, as ‘research data accumulate’. If this should happen, it will be the first time in history that a communication medium becomes the object of a diagnosis. The ramifications of this possibility are hard to fully comprehend.

The effect of a diagnosis

The reason I find it important to combine psychological and more context-sensitive research from game studies is because none of these fields, alone, are able to address all sides of excessive playing. However, part of my motivation for researching this issue is that I regard the prospect of a new diagnosis, where games are involved, as problematic.

From a psychological perspective, Internet addiction and online game addiction are questions of mental health, and a new diagnosis would imply acknowledging that people have problems in relation to, or as a consequence of, use of online games or the Internet. From the perspective of the individual, a new diagnosis could be regarded as a blessing, as it would contribute to allocating resources within the health care system, providing treatment that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. A new diagnosis will give individuals, organisations and government a whole range of new opportunities to prioritise this problem.

From a social, political and cultural perspective, a diagnosis involving the Internet or online games will have negative, and many unforeseen, consequences. It will influence how we regard these media; how we regulate them, and to a certain extent how they will function in society. Computer games have, up until now, been subject to regulations similar to other media types – in most countries some sort of self-regulation from the industry with the use of recommended age limits. If online games should become the subject of a diagnosis, like gambling is today, games would increasingly become part of a health rhetoric, leaning on a specific psychological understanding of games, to the possible detriment of other ways of describing the meaning and uses of games. The introduction of a diagnosis could lead to stricter regulation and censorship, in lieu of worrying about the health of the population.

In the West, it is unlikely that the Internet in general would become an object for heavy-handed regulations – at least not for adults – as freedom of expression is held in relatively high regard, and because the Internet is so ingrained within how our society currently functions. But looking to other parts of the world, if some variant of ‘Internet addiction’ or ‘online game addiction’ becomes a diagnosis, governments in countries where freedom of expression is under pressure will have a valid argument for monitoring and regulating the use of the Internet and online games even further.

The exact criteria of a diagnosis of ‘Internet addiction’ or ‘online game addiction’ are also, by nature, very difficult to define. The Internet is a platform for different types of media services rather than a uniform set of usages. The type of behaviour, services and usage that could fall under this diagnosis is therefore significantly heterogeneous, and the target is always moving. Research also shows that people with Internet-related problems often have other psycho-social problems as well: according to the American Psychiatric Association, 86 per cent of Internet-addiction cases have some other diagnosis present (Block 2008). What the primary condition is, therefore, is often difficult to understand. In sum, by establishing a new diagnosis, we might in reality compress a wide range of different problems into one psychiatric mould and reduce the possibilities of addressing this variety of problems properly.

Online games,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Game Genre, Case and Empirical Material
• 3 Media Narratives and Public Concerns
• 4 Addiction and Randomness
• 5 Game Structure and Loyalty Programmes
• 6 Pathological Gaming and Social Context
• 7 Theorycrafting: Between Collective Intelligence and Intrinsic Satisfaction
• 8 Life Phase and Meaningful Play
• Appendices
• References
• Index