The Washington Times has an interesting piece about videogame addiction. Link. Excerpts:
A neglected baby cries alone. Crazed by lack of sleep, a young boy threatens suicide. A marriage crumbles over a lone obsession.
Yet another grim tale of 21st-century social breakdown? No, these are the victims of America's newest social scourge ... video-game addiction.
Gamers who take their obsession too far show symptoms similar to alcohol or drug addicts, says psychologist David Walsh, founder of the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis.
In his popular new book, Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson defends videogames on grounds that they make people think, but in an entertaining way. Videogames provide repeat shots of dopamine to the nervous system, which makes the player feel good, which in turn pushes him to keep playing. Johnson doesn't talk about addiction, and we don't know what to make of the whole addiction theory, but this dope-stuff sounds like it has merit.
(We're still reading Johnson's book, but so far, we think it's clever and well-written and hopelessly flawed. He basically defends popular culture because it has become more sophisticated, which is no doubt the case. He thinks pop culture is making us smarter and better people, for which his evidence is scanty and his argument weak. But we'll discuss the book in more detail when we finish it in case he writes something at the end that changes our opinion.)
