Where gamers have gone too far
South Koreans were the first society to have recognized Internet and video-gaming addiction as a mental illness. It’s easy to understand why. Gamers there have gone too far. In 2005, a 28-year-old South Korean gamer died after playing Starcraft for hours and hours without eating or sleeping. In 2009, a South Korean couple returned from a twelve-hour gaming marathon to find their three-month-old daughter dead of real-world neglect.
In the United States, psychologists still haven’t come to a conclusion on whether the so-called Internet Addiction Disorder is even real. Some say it is. Others think it might be a symptom of other mental illness. They point to the fact that people who complain of Internet addiction almost always suffer from something else: substance abuse, depression or anxiety.
I came to this article as a skeptic. I’ve played video games since the days of Atari 2600 and the Nintendo Entertainment System. When CD-ROMs were brand-new in 1994, my family unwrapped a new Packard Bell with a 486 processor. When we opened Microsoft Encarta, I remember looking for a second CD. There was no way they could have fitted all 22 volumes of an encyclopedia onto one disc.
Back then, the wonders kept coming. CD-based games were almost unimaginable. “Myst” presented an open world to explore, rendered in stunning CGI. In my dreams, I can still hear Achenar screaming: “Bring me the blue pages!” “The 7th Guest” let you explore a haunted mansion filled with puzzles so difficult they made you want to cry.
As a kid I spent time in chat rooms on CompuServe or AOL, getting to know people from across the world. My fifth-grade teacher was surprised and excited to find out that I had a met a pen pal in England online. During high school, the fads were AOL Instant Messenger and stealing copious amounts of music through Napster.
When I was in college, the fad became social networking: Friendster, MySpace and “The Facebook” as it used to be called. Back then, you could only get on Facebook if you had a university e-mail account. My college was one of the first to be added.
From “The Legend of Zelda” to “Resident Evil” to “World of Warcraft,” video games have been a part of my life. Today, you are unlikely to find me anywhere without either an iPhone or iPad. I’ve embraced technology. I champion technology. I have had avatars. I have lived a digital life.
Games and the Internet tend to be demonized by people who don’t understand them. During the Columbine High School massacre, the world pointed a collective finger at first-person shooting games like “Doom” as the “reason” Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on their rampage. After that tragedy and other shootings, the media has tended to grasp at straws to find an answer why.
All the gamers I know aren’t violent even when they play violent games. Is it so hard to imagine that a shooter is just insane? Is it so hard to imagine that a person could be malevolent, broken beyond repair and without reason? “Crazy” has no reason.
When deaths started to be linked to MMOs like “EverQuest” or the deaths in Korea, it seemed like the mainstream press jumped through hoops to overemphasize and highlight the tragedy. Those handfuls of cases became a banner for kneejerk parent groups and policy makers.
According to Forbes, the video-game industry had sold $335.2 million in software as of May this year. And due to the economy it had been a slow year. At roughly $50 per game, the cost of a new title, about 6.7 million games were purchased in the first five months of 2012. Of those people exposed to those games, how many died of self-neglect, became criminals, or became mentally ill and went on a shooting rampage? I doubt anyone’s done the research, but I would wager it’s much less than one percent – and probably closer to none.
It would seem to me that if someone plays “FarmVille” or “Bejeweled Blitz” online for so long that their beloved cat dies, then they must have underlying mental illness unrelated to any Internet or game exposure.
The dark side of connectivity
On June 15, the band Cake played at Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown. Better known for their songs like “The Distance” and “Never There,” the indie band has been connected to the Internet for years. Well before blogging took hold, they were engaging fans through polls online and posting news stories. Even so, their frontman John McCrea has a harsh message for people burying their noses in their cellphones.
