The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

ok follow me here it's a bit early but i was eating some bran and watching for the weather report (report: awesome) and i caught a piece on the AMA quantifying game addiction as a genuine disorder. it had the woman who set up that online gamer's anonymous site after her son killed himself due to everquest, iirc. (one major problem with the addiction model right off the bat is that while drug use goes in waves according to availability and "fashion" to some degree, cocaine never became obsolete.)

so i began to think shit, what does this mean for two things:

1) liability? basically some enterprising chap will sue blizzard (i would be shocked if they hadn't already retained some kind of firm just for this potentiality) for making wow too fun or rather, "Addictive." they will charge that blizzard knowingly made the game to be really, really compelling and uh, yes, game companies will get sued for making games people want to play.

2) insurance? will insurance companies pay for anti-VG therapy? (what that would involve, i don't know) will they refuse to cover people who work, let's say, in IT or are of a certain age for having a "prexisting" condition? (whenever the AMA finishes quantifying the set of qualities which make up vg addiction we'll also get a profile of those "most at risk") which ties into my next point.

now what does this have to do with sicko? well, it's going to popularize a single-payer system that would - if this cockamamie "disorder" takes off - be forced to deal with a potential explosion of this condition. and do not doubt for a second that we will see more and more qualifications of what is and is not healthy behavior as things go along. now, i have no idea how you treat this, but i'm sure someone will find a way to make it expensive and hilarious. maybe a drug like "gambegon" combined with aversion or replacement therapy?

but what i could see becoming common are timed-locks on programs. at least, or especially on consoles (pc stuff would be immediately cracked) due to a fear of being sued for making GTA V too exciting, the console will auto-save every 45 minutes or so and won't be able to be turned on for an hour. maybe a pleasant maternal voice will remind you to go outside or have lunch with a loved one. we may see a new ratings system divided up by how compelling a game is, or one that rates its AP (addiction potential)

i know i am minimizing the perils and depths of "game addiction" (as well as many "addictions" that lack the sort of physical reminder that something like cigarettes or heroin does) but that's the name of the game. i don't think it's an addiction so much as an example of people living lives and having obligations which are less compelling than an enveloping fantasy and distant friends, who can be turned off or otherwise ignored. it may be sad, but so are a lot of things. it doesn't mean that people don't genuinely fuck up their lives (in an asocial manner, leaving aside criticism that these "addictions" merely deviate from a standard middle-class lifestyle memeplex etc etc and so forth) or that their behavior isn't legitimately seen as fucked up. but whatever. your addiction can be unplugged, literally. (also, if we're not going to start rounding up the people who collect japanese figurines that are half robots and half lactating nine year old girls for suffering from "burgeoning pedophile syndrome" then i don't really want to hear about it.)

anyway, so imagine an american single payer system attached to a government that can hold online gaming revenues hostage (the irs no doubt plans to figure out a "virtual property tax" so as to maximize their take) while asking for things like child locks, play timers and special ratings and the like AND tie game playing in with obesity and even drug abuse (marijuana + chips + games = fatass who supports terrorism) is going to have themselves a grand old time trying to enforce it.

another potential outcome is that after a while this and other lifestyle compulsions will be dropped from the rolls because it is simply too expensive to keep medicalizing every bullshit nonsense disease people can make up. what then? without their gambegon treatments and being able to shout at plushie figures of game mascots, what will these addicts do in search of their next fix?
_________________

[not a zombie]

It all depends on what about games addicts find so addicting. They could possibly have another addiction/disorder, but it manifests itself in the form of videogame addiction; the kleptomaniac with Pokemon or the gambling addict with rpg battle systems etc. It's interesting that there hasn't been any cases of Tetris fatally addicting players. I can't think of a more compulsively playable game than the Russian samizdat. The phenomenon seems limited to multiplayer games, which probably says more about the addicted players than the games themselves.

[Redeye]

They took it back, a bit.
_________________
I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

[dhex]

Nev. couple blame Internet for neglect

the nut graf: