December Daedalus Project is out
(Visited 22060 times) Game talk
Dec 062006
Really light on stats this time around. The main statistical finding is that youngercplayers tend to be more rigid in dealing with dilemmas and minor infractions, kicking people from groups and so on. On the other hand, there’s a fascinating interview on the topic of game addition with a practicing therapist. Worth reading. The link: the DAEDALUS PROJECT: MMORPG Research, Cyberculture, MMORPG Psychology.
8 Responses to “December Daedalus Project is out”
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That addiction article is amateurish. I was expecting something more.
Come on, the pleasure you feel from heroin is already in your body, the heroin just releases it. Alcohol stops oxygen from going to your brain and alcoholics get addicted to that “feeling” – not something in the beer.
When are people going to understand this? Is this 1930?
Facinating. I went from thinking this guy was doing just that when talking about a president with one leg and half a brain and football players dying “regularly” to wondering if he wasn’t making the example on purpose.
This article took me from being surprised at his lack of depth to intrigued by what may have been something much deeper.
As far as the main point, addiction, I have to agree. We, as people, tend to stick simplistic labels on things, just as I was starting to do to him at first. But when we widen our field of view, so to speak, we can see a totally different set of patterns instead of just one easy to tag pattern. And this too is where I went after finishing the article and widening my view.
I’ll point out one more thing about addiction to games. While some might say that I am addicted to MMORPGs, it could also be said that I am addicted to sports, politics, history, etc. My wife could be said to be addicted to crafts of a wide variety. In both cases, she and I can sometimes be found in a near mindless state of “next-page-itis” late in the evening surfing from page to page on any of these subjects. Is it addiction? Or just too damned easy?
I don’t know about any of you, but when I was growing up saying you were addicted to a given game would have been the ultimate compliment to its developers.
… and IMO anybody who is addicted to a game to the point it starts adversly impacting their real life, would have found something else to be addicted to. It isn’t the fault of the game or the developers, but instead something wrong with the wiring of the person playing it.
And perhaps we’d all be better off if people took the time to figure out how to help these people instead of instituting a witch hunt.
(btw I can’t wait for the Jerry Springer “my high warlord teenage with tier five armor doesn’t leave the house!” show.)
As a chemically dependent person entering his third decade of recovery, I really liked this article, and I like the solutions offered in both articles. They focused on the person with the problem, rather than on the ‘addictive substance’. The editorial (vs the interview) was a bit too subtle with the one-legged man point, although it did bring it back nicely at the end, but I really felt that the differentiation between addictive and non-addictive substances* is something that has really been lacking in the discussion of social/behavioral addictions, vs chemical addictions.
*Either of these substance types can be the focus of an addiction, but only the latter is inherently addictive – if you use heroin repeatedly, you develop a dependency, no matter how resistant you are to becoming addicted, but not everyone who works becomes a workaholic.
Err, the should read ‘only the former’. Ooops.
Good stuff, Nick Yee continues to deliver….
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