The online gaming community is growing, with about 57 million potential players in Southeast Asia alone. Its proliferation, however, is accompanied by growing concern over the issue of games addiction.
A report in The Straits Times noted that in Singapore, counsellors and psychiatrists have reported seeing a growing numbers of gamers who cannot stop playing. They go without sleep, stop talking to siblings and even stop doing everyday activities like meeting friends or going to movies.
The report cited a paper published on a top game developer web site Gamedev.net, in which former game designer Daniel Cook described games as a set of stimuli and responses that use risk and reward systems to create addiction. They create "the uncontrollable compulsion to repeat a behaviour", with most online games structured around simple repetitive activities such as shooting to kill monsters, said Cook.
The rewards for successful “kills” include online treasures or weapons, or simply the instant gratification of seeing the monster disintegrate. When such rewards are immediate, the effect is greater and habits could form with the repeated sequence of action and reward.
In the case of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), addiction can develop when gamers look to the virtual world as a substitute to fulfill real-world needs such as the need to achieve something, or to identify with a particular character.
However, American Neils Clark, who is co-writing a book entitled Game Addiction, believes it is not the game, but how a player interacts with it, that determines the absence or presence of addiction.
"Certain gamers will get involved with certain structures in a game," he said. "In my early research of online worlds like MapleStory and World of WarCraft, what we saw was that every gamer would go into the game and initially get attached to one or two things."
But while healthy gamers seemed to be motivated by a desire to play with a social group of people, addicts – those whose gaming patterns affect basic functions like eating and sleeping – seemed to prefer goal-oriented player groups, or so-called “raid guilds". Raids in World of WarCraft can require up to 40 people and take nine hours of non-stop cooperation to complete.
Studies, however, are by no means conclusive. The American Psychiatrists Association, for one, has not accepted that there is such a thing as video game addiction. People who subscribe to this view point to the fact that there are video gamers who play for hours and are well-adjusted with no social impairment.
Whatever the case may be, what is needed is perhaps greater awareness of how games work. Understanding games and how students play will help parents and teachers counsel them to play responsibly.
The online gaming community is growing, with about 57 million potential players in Southeast Asia alone. Its proliferation, however, is accompanied by growing concern over the issue of games addiction.
A report in The Straits Times noted that in Singapore, counsellors and psychiatrists have reported seeing a growing numbers of gamers who cannot stop playing. They go without sleep, stop talking to siblings and even stop doing everyday activities like meeting friends or going to movies.
