One In Nine MMOG Players Addicted?

Gamespot is running a piece looking at a UK study which may indicate serious addiction problems among a large number of Massively Multiplayer gamers. The study, conducted at Nottingham Trent, showed that almost 12% of a 7,000 person study group showed symptoms of serious addiction, as laid down by the World Health Organization. From the article: "The survey was filled in by a self-selected sample comprising mainly males with an average age of 21, and was concerned principally with the potential for addiction to online gaming. [Director of the International Gaming Research Unit Mark] Griffiths said, 'I'm sure if we'd done this survey looking at non-online players, looking at gamers that play on stand-alone systems, my guess is that... addiction-like symptoms would have been much less prevalent.' According to Griffiths, the problem with online games is there will never be a point where the player has battled the final boss, tied up the story, and can turn the computer off with a feeling of satisfaction."

I Can Quit Anytime...

Just after one more ding...

Not an addiction, more like a cult

Seriously. If you want to look at the "symptoms", being an MMOG addict is more like joining a cult: you've got all these new friends, you've got to learn all these new things... instead of knowing verse 3.14, you need to know the cleric's level 44 spells. OMFG, you don't have Celestial Healing? [att.ne.jp]

But in our cult, you get to kill dragons, not wait for a judgement day that just never seems to come (next year maybe!). Yes, you lose touch with family like a real cult-- guildies will even scorn you for leaving for family time ("WTF, you're logging? Come on, we've been planning this raid all week. We need your DPS, dude.").

In our cult, we don't go door to door spouting crazy nonsense that would get our asses kicked if people didn't feel so bad for us. We stay indoors, like good crazy people should.

And like a real cult, the other members may feel real sadness and loss when you have to "disconnect". "What do you mean FlowerGirl quit cause of RL issues? But she... but she... she was our recruitment officer, and she laughed at my jokes :("

I'm not addicted...

Just because I quit my job to play WoW, that doesn't mean a thing...Besides, I'm moving to China.

can't RTFA

Gamespot seems dead to me, so instead:

yes, ofcourse we show "symptoms" of addiction, my question is what does the WHO say about the number of these symptoms that we need to show before we are clasified as addicted, and howmany people showed those signs.

Meh, can't say more with out TFA beign up

Have you played Oblivion?

Now, that is what I call addictive.

Isn't it like 1 in 9 drinkers who are alcoholics too?

Follow on study...

also... 8 in 9 MMO players are liars.

Wish I could read the article....

One addiction is as bad as another. The suggestion that people who play bingo are less "addicted" than people who play "wow" is simply wrong.

Many people just seem to have a natural propensity towards addiction. For many, this is easily controlled by substituting one stimulus for another. For some however, the desire to continue with a specific behaviour is overwhelming, and not easily supplanted.

This can be said of smoking / drinking / golfing / driving / mmorpg'ing / etc.

Identifying an addiction in someone around them is simple enough. Identifying an addiction in yourself is much more complex, as we all believe that we are in full control of our impulses.

I was

I had to quit playing WoW because that's all I did with my free time. I was in a serious raiding guild, and filling out my tier 2 set and getting ready for Naxx was all I seemed to care about. One morning, I woke up from a dream about killing Onyxia, and I decided that was too much. I got out of bed, deleted the WoW from my hard drive, and canceled my account. My wife was pleased as punch. But now, everything in my life seems so much duller now. I have taken to playing ATITD since it is too boring to become an obsession. Perhaps I should take up heroin? *shrugs* But, I do have to say that unlike many addictions, WoW was fun until the end. But, I no longer think WoW == RL.

Re:I was

Sure, you played the hell out of it. I myself played the hell out of WoW, and may again at some point in the future, but my life got in the way.

If you stop, cold turkey, you're not addicted. I love games, I love MMO's...I've played a dozen. I stay up all hours, I play hardcore.

I went through a period between contracting jobs after WoW came out where I played 60+ hours a week, and that lasted all the way up to the day I started the next job, then dropped to maybe 8 hours a week. I kinda wished I could play more, but I had other things I had to do.

So what would this study say about me? That I was super addicted one day, and not the next? Addiction doesn't WORK that way. It's just stupid. These studies vary so wildly in their results, I can't help but think that they're completely full of it.

Re:I was

I don't consider "wanting" to do something other than work to be a sign of addiction...Now if I blew off work in order to play/drink/smoke, then hell yes, addiction.

Addictions aren't manageable, by definition. They take over all aspects of your life. Just because you blow off a social function so you can play a game, that means nothing. It's when you blow off something that actually matters, whose blowing off has stark consequences, that you need to think about addiction.

1 in 9 play a game too much

I don't think there is a chemical substance driving the MMO market (other than caffeine) so I have a hard time calling it addiction.

BRB

I'll be back to discuss this very serious topic ... after Naxx!

Not necessarily a problem but...

I know for some people it's not the fact that there is "no end" but rather they enjoy the online friendships they create and log in just to talk to their online friends. I know I've logged in just to ask a friend how their surgery went, if they had their baby yet, how their day at work was, etc and not even step foot out of the main city area.

Some people just use MMO's as a glorified chat client too with leveling as a side part of it.

Glad I saw this coming

I'm just glad I had the foresight several years ago to recognize this MMORPG phenomenon as a potential problem. I am a gamer, and I have the tendency to finish what I started (I won't really want to put a game down until I've seen it all the way to the end). When I was first introduced to the concept of Everquest and being able to play online (with many other people) in a massive (and growing) environment, I was intrigued. The 'Ever' part of its title does indicate a problem that the article points out: it never ends. That's a problem if I want to finish something. I didn't buy it, and I'm glad. I probably would have failed out of college if I did!

1 in 9 are addicted...

... the other 8 are hopelessly addicted.

Don't forget

Some people are gil-sellers that pad their income by playing MMOs. So some obsessive playing could be considered a second job.

But given how much actual legal tender rookie and would-be gil-sellers make, I'd say that only drops the figure to 1 out of 8.5 addicted.

Does this mean...

That eight in nine are bored to death with MMOG after playing for two months?

Another Stat

4 in 7 journalists addicted to putting meaningless statistics in headlines?

99% of world is addicted to enjoyment

These "gaming addiction" studies are getting annoying.

Addictions that involve the taking of a substance are one thing. Quite a different thing are pseudo-addictions that are merely "addictions to enjoyment" without any artificial chemical agent.

We are ALL "addicted" (in a sense) to enjoyment or pleasure or happiness or whatever turns us on --- we are always trying to maximize these things, at the expense of those that we do not enjoy. "Addiction" to our pleasures is the normal human condition.

The alleged "gaming addict" is just a gaming enthusiast who takes his or her gaming enjoyment to an extreme, but that doesn't make it a medical condition unless you are eager to find medical conditions in everything.

What is an addict?

This all goes back to using vague terms to label people as "bad".

I can't see the article, so I'll ask: do they have specifics? Are we simply judging by the amount of time? If so, who are we to judge how people spend their time?

Or are they basing it on real things, like losing jobs, flunking schools, etc? If 1 in 9 wow players have either lost a job or flunked out of school in the past year, that's a pretty ugly stat.

-Jeff

Slashdot editors murderous vampires?

Obligatory Jon Stewart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNbOG4t31FA [youtube.com]

Feeling of satisfaction, huh?

According to Griffiths, the problem with online games is there will never be a point where the player has battled the final boss, tied up the story, and can turn the computer off with a feeling of satisfaction.

While this may be true to some extent, I myself (and, I am sure, other players as well) DO feel a good deal of satisfaction whilst playing an online game, such as WoW. One could argue that a good MMORPG can and will create a feeling of satisfaction upon attaining important in-game goals, and draw that out as long as possible. WoW is an excellent example of this: it takes time and effort to gain every level and every item in the game, as well as every gold piece (leaving aside power-leveling services and gold buying sites!) Indeed, even after getting to lv60 on WoW (and soon to be lv70 with the release of the expansion, The Burning Crusade,) there is still plenty of activities and goals to keep you occupied, which I shall not list here... there are way too many.

In short: Mr Griffiths, have you ever considered that precisely BECAUSE there is no ending point to an online MMORPG is why players get addicted to it? Because it continues rewarding them for playing long after a single player game would have been over with and finished? Frankly, I don't think you have.

-Parallax

Sensationalist!

While I can't read the article probably because it was slashdotted, the quote above looks like typical media exageration. If you want a study on "addiction" to MMO's to be taken seriously, you might want to classify it on several different levels:

1) Destructiveness of the addiction
2) Severity of Withdrawal
3) Prevalence of addiction in general

Saying 11% of player are addicted to MMOs means nothing without quantifying what you consider "addiction". It's also meaningless without considering the side effects of addiction. 100% of people are "addicted" to oxygen, but that's not a very useful claim since there's no quantifyable affect of that "addiction". The severity of the withdrawal is important to consider, because a destructive addiction that is very hard to drop is more dangerous than one that is easily quit, like MMOs. Lastly, before you go all hog wild about how 11% of MMO players are addicted, I'd like to some useful background material like how many bingo players are addicted to bingo, how many musicians are addicted to music, how many quilters are addicted to quilting, and how many hockey players are addicted to hockey. After all are they amateur atheletes or are they just addicts waiting for their next exercise fix?

Many people have a tendency to invest a lot of time in individual pursuits for a while, whether it be atheletics, school, work, sex, or TV. The question with these studies is always going to be are the people addicted, or just enjoying themselves and socializing with friends online?

WoW vet here...

I was in the closed beta and open beta. I remember having LAN parties that summer with some other friends who were in the closed and open as well...plainsrunning, the kodo stomp bug, the whole bit... FANTASTICALLY wonderful time. Then release day. Each of us got a copy. For that entire weekend, it was all we did.

Time goes by.

I've created a multitude of chars, I have made hundreds of in-game friends, I have made hundreds of in-game enemies...I have hosted and been hosted at many many RP events...I have laughed with excitment at finally getting that drop, and cried when a good friend in my main's guild died. I have quit for 2 weeks, only to return to it. I have quit for two months, only to return to it. I have been at the point of playing only 8 hours a week. I have been at the point of playing 8 hours a day (with a full time job and a family mind you)

I have experienced every angle and part of WoW. About 6 months ago, I slowly weened myself away from it. I had realized I had missed out on a large volume of games as a result of WoW. I am as we speak going through all the amazing xbox ps2 and gamecube games that I missed...even a dreamcast game or two that I never got around to finishing.

I do not regret a single minute spent playing WoW. Some of my most fond and cherished gaming memories (and even a couple in-general life memories) came as a result of my WoW addiction...an addiction which I shall never be over nor one that I ever wish to be free from. There is not a single day that I do not think about playing it again.

Some day, I will double-click on that icon again. Some day, I will thrust myself back into that amazing and fantastic world. Some day, the extensions of my concious and soul shall live again.

Until that day arrives, keep a space around the campfire for me. I have a hilarious story involving a kodo, a troll, and a dwarf's kid sister.

Article

Seems like the host is hosed; however, I did find an interesting article on WebMD about gaming addiction found here [webmd.com].

An interesting note FTA:

According to the Center for On-Line Addiction, warning signs for video game addiction include:

* Playing for increasing amounts of time
* Thinking about gaming during other activities
* Gaming to escape from real-life problems, anxiety, or depression
* Lying to friends and family to conceal gaming
* Feeling irritable when trying to cut down on gaming

Addiction is very complex

It seems to me like there are all sorts of studies talking about how X% of people are addicted to this, or Y% of people are addicted to that. it also doesn't surprise me that there is some amount of addictive behavior exhibited by MMO players.
Articles like this always seem to oversimplify addiction though. A lot of the articles on gaming and information addiction seem to just go for the "OMG Technology is Teh Bad!!!eleventyone111!" fear mongering luddite angle, but other times it seems like people are just playing too fast and loose with the definition of addiction.
I'll start out by saying that I am not- as far as I am aware of- addicted to anything, nor do I have an addictive personality. I have however dealt with a number of close friends and family members who have suffered with various addictions (alcohol as well as numerous drugs).
The first thing to take note of is that there are really two sides of addiction. There is the psychological aspect of it, as well as the physical/chemical aspect of addiction. I'm sure that, much like a gambling addiction, MMOs can have some effect on the chemical balance of the brain- and lead to some form of minor change in the chemical balance in the body. I would also guess that MMOs have much less of an effect than many other forms of addiction that basically cause your body to dope itself up.
That leaves us mainly looking at the psychological aspects of addiction. This is where things get tricky. The problem is that you have to seperate out things that basically psychologically addictive in the game, and things that people with addictive personalities latch onto - which really raises the question:
How many MMO addicts are addicted because MMOs are addicting, and how many people merely have addictive personalities and play MMOs instead of drinking/gambling/shooting up/etc.
My guess is that for at least half of the people who are addicted to MMOs, it's not that the MMO itself is that addicting, but rather it's that they are going to be addicted to something, and that something turned out to be a game. A big reason for people to become addicted to things is as a way of escaping their real life instead of fixing it, and it's easy for me to see how someone who was going to do that already could just as easily pick up a copy of WoW as a bottle of Wild Turkey.
For the other half, I would say it's pretty evenly divided. Some people have so much invested that they hold out for a payoff. This is sort of like what leads to gambling addictions. I think a lot of these players eventually tell themselves that they are going to quit and sell off their characters/loot/etc, but it becomes a matter of constantly investing more time in order to recoup their investment.
For the other half, I would say that the addiction is really more social than anything else. They say that one of the reasons that it's so hard to quit smoking for people is that they have to give up not only the cigarettes, but the people they hang out with on smoke breaks. I would also guess that for a fairly large number of people, they continue to play MMOs not because they are really addicted to the game specifically, as much as it is that they have personal relationships with people through the game that they may feel that they will be unable to continue on with if they were to choose to quit the game.
I think that far too many studies don't consider all of these aspects of gaming addiction, and instead try to use it as yet another reason why games should be outlawed and burned. I do respect that some people recogonize a legitimate need to study the addictive nature of games and get help for the people who are truly hard core addicted, but I do wish they would go into a bit more depth and study the reasons behind the addictions. Of course, a small part of me also things that these people just need to stop complaining about addiction and take some personal responsibility- but that is the part of me that has never experienced a real addiction.

very serious addiction

i got WOW when it first came out, and I played it non-stop for a year. I lived in that game. I would come from work at 6pm and stay in the game till 3am the next morning. I would eat at the computer and rush back to the game anytime I was away for even a minute. These online games are incredibly destructive to social life and most likely to health as well. it was a year of life wasted and the only thing that broke my addiction was a realization that i would never finish my degree if I didnt stop. Now some people probably can play for a few hours and then stop, but a lot of people like me can't, and as I realized, when you get that absorbed into a game, its better to just turn off the game, cancel the account and stop. If you are in the position I was before I quit, do yourself a favor, cancel your account, stop playing, and go outside for a while. do whatever it was you did before you started playing like go out with friends or surfing (im in california), snowboarding, etc. Dont waste your life and your money on this.

Satisfaction

According to Griffiths, the problem with online games is there will never be a point where the player has battled the final boss, tied up the story, and can turn the computer off with a feeling of satisfaction.

While that is somewhat correct, isn't the insidious feature of most MMORPG's the continuous low level satisfiers? Instead of being addicted to the need to "finish" something, players are addicted to the constant high of accomplishment due to the "ding" factor?

It just goes on and on and on?

According to Griffiths, the problem with online games is there will never be a point where the player has battled the final boss, tied up the story, and can turn the computer off with a feeling of satisfaction.

Oh, is that why? Is it really? You mean the lack of an end is somehow enticing for people? It compells them to play indefinately? What you're saying is that something without an end never ends? Well I suppose that makes sense.. Thank you. Thank you for your brilliant insight into why things that never end never seem to end. Are you perhaps a laureate of some sort? AAAS? Nobel? No? Ah.

Eve Online

Not really a problem for me or any other Eve players I know, simply because there is no sense of level building by EXP like in other RPGs; you train skills, and the skills train until they're done whether you log in or not. Also, they keep your character / property intact for a very long time if you cancel the account (I once went over 6mo. without internet and still had all my stuff when I came back). Taking a break is no problem...set a long skill to train and forget about it. The only penalty for not logging in is that you can't kill / mine for money (you can put stuff on market or auction and sales will be managed by the market / auction system whether you log in or not), but you can easily make 'enough' money if you only play 5 - 10hrs a week. Aside from money, which as I say isn't a big issue anyways, there's no punishment for not being able to play as many hours as the average 14 year old. On the flip side, of course, there's no reward for being able to play as many hours as the average 14 year old (aside from more money and technical skill at the game) so the playerbase, on the whole, seems to be significantly more mature than other games I've played. As it happens, strategy and planning have more bearing than a quick mouse finger, though, so even at that you get a bonus for being older. Lots of ex-mil folks play.

I am Raynor, and i'm a game-a-holic

Hi. It's nice to meet you all. I am an addict... I have thankfully been able to resist WoW (I only played in the Stress Test at the cost of my Summer Assignments)... but with WAR and Dragon Age coming out... I'm doomed. Both will (hopefully) have the extra zing that WoW doesn't... or I mean, hopefully i'll be able to resi... must... play... *hack*... *slash*... *hack*... *slash*...

They need to look deeper.

I think that most of the allure to MMOs is that you are playing with other real people, of course if you compare MMO results to an offline game there is going to be a staggering difference.

Why do people get "addicted" to MMOs? I think it is because of the interaction with other people. Someone joins a guild, they play with other people frequently, they become friends with people in their guild. Now they aren't just playing a video game, they are playing a video game WITH FRIENDS.

I play MMOs quite a bit and played World of Warcraft for over a year. When my RL friends stopped playing the game became boring to me because I was no longer playing with friends. I might have a looser type of addiction to MMOs as I can't wait for the next one to come out so that I can play it with my friends. I also tend to quit MMOs maybe a month or 2 after my friends stop playing because I do befriend some of my guildmates. I find myself logging onto the game and checking my friends list; if no one is on then I quit the game, if someone is on then I talk to them and play.

Other people, the people you would consider hardcore addicts, might not have many RL friends so the people in their guilds become good friends, maybe even best friends and talking nearly every day. These people will continue to play as long as their internet friends are playing and if their internet friends are in the same low-friend-count situation then they will keep playing which leads to a group of people whose playing habits become dependent of each other. Since one person will only quit if the other quits, and visa versa, no one ever quits. Perhaps when an unforeseen event occurs, such as a person losing internet access or their computer breaking, then one person is forced to stop playing and the dependent counterpart person decides to stop playing because his friend is no longer playing.

I don't buy into this B.S. about the game making addicts because you can "never beat the last boss" and never truly win the game. These people are addicted, yes, but not to the game. They are addicted to something that the game can give them: a friend, fame, or anonymity.

Hmmm

Who has time to play MMORPGs anymore, I can't seem to get out of this Slashdot website......

Jocks are like that, too. So are some businesses

This is a problem with anything that focuses on winning, rather than doing good work.

Winning is inherently inefficient in an economic sense. The inputs required increase until resources are saturated, rather than stopping at the point of maximum cost-effectiveness. This has serious financial implications in a marketing-oriented culture. Classical economic theory is predicated on the assumption that the cost of production dominates the cost of goods. But, in fact, there are many goods where marketing cost now dominates. Telephone service, for example. The result is frantic overmarketing efforts to achieve a monopoly, in hopes that then, finally, it will be possible to raise prices and make some money.

Jock culture has the same issues. If you play to win, playing becomes all-consuming. In pro sports, that's been the case for decades. It's a modern phenomenon, created by TV. Pre-TV, local teams had roughly the same revenues, win or lose. Today, winning boosts revenues and matters economically. The big sports used to have off-seasons. Now, players train year round. The Olympics was once an "amateur" event, but that hasn't been true in a long time.

Now that you can make money in an MMORPG, that bit of economics intrudes there. And it doesn't matter if you're playing for money; as long as some people are, you have to play as well to stay in the game.

Again, this is a relatively modern concept. Rent The Hustler [imdb.com], which is about pool halls and pool sharks. Modern viewers find it wierd that anyone would consider it unfair for a really good player to win over the sort-of-good players. That's life, right? But the dynamics in that movie are different; the pool shark is attacked and crippled for being a winner. The movie views this somewhat favorably. That seems so strange today.

The implications of winner-take-all culture are insidious. Watch for them.

1/9? Is that all???

I would have thought it would be 8/9, not 1/9. I mean, come on, the whole business model of an MMORPG is to generate sustained income. Total Profit = Total Number People Playing * (Purchase price + Average Months Subscribed * Monthly Revenue) Multiply addictiveness and you multiply profit. And what do you get out of it, really? Thousands of hours of your life down the tubes, with time that could have been spent on your other responsibilities such as family, teaching yourself useful skills, or time to reflect. Video games are the opium dens of the 21st century.

Gosh.....

I mean, gosh, if I asked 7,000 people who spent hundreds of hours following NASCAR every year, do you think I might find similar symptoms? Would these folks be afflicted with "NASCAR addiction"?

Or, what if we asked the same thing of teens wrt to talking/keeping in touch with friends...? Would they be suffering from the dreaded "social addiction disorder"?

Warning signs of hype, not news:

1. Self-selected sample. Bias is inherent in the dataset, therefore very little can be said about the dataset.

2. Survey research. Survey research is the weakest form of empirical research (next to single case study narratives). Any time someone takes a survey, very little can be discerned from the survey's results without carefully examining the questions asked, of whom, during what time period, etc. etc. The question, "Are you going to vote for President Bush or one of his opponents?" in the 2004 Presidential election is a very good example of an inappropriately biased question.

3. No peer-reviewed journal cited. Given the fact that no journal is cited in the aritcle suggests this wasn't exactly a peer-reviewed study, like those for cancer research or diabetes treatments. Instead, it appears to be a private survey, without any reference to where one could actually read the full "study." (Yes, I checked the group's website - nada.)

Anyways, I'm preaching to the choir here. There may indeed be people who gamble too much, who watch too much NASCAR, and teens who talk on the phone or IM their friends too often, but none of this is "addiction" nor is it worthy of a news article or a Slashdot mention.

Is no one else surprised...?

So, not one person playing MMOs these days spent any time online gaming before there WERE MMOs? I feel old. I recall, fondly, the days when half of my online compatriots disappeared for weeks on end after being booted out of college for spending too much time online chatting, playing -text based- roleplaying games, -freeform- on chats such as Alamak [alamak.com] and The Keep [nexxushost.net]. Hell, I barely graduated high school thanks to my own idiocy: spending night after night up developing characters, cohesing storylines, sketching out designs for newer, better villains. I know one person who lost out on a fellowship because of the Game - and another who dropped out of university three times because they couldn't (or wouldn't) get a handle on what was going on. And people are making a big deal over this as if it's the latest version of crack since - well - crack? Give me a break. People will always be addicted to something. We're human; we like being altered. Be it caffiene, meth, pot - sex, sports, stock trading. Whatever it is that blows your hair back, you want more of it. Sometimes I wonder if addictions only get labelled addictions because they can't be parleyed into some form of sociological benefit or industry. At least not for those addicted. I'm sure it could be argued that Blizzard falls into the same category as some other Enabling [google.ca] Corporations [google.ca] I could mention. But who cares, right? People smoke and drink in the movies all the time. Who ever saw a hot film-noir leading lady who had a penchent for dungeon crawling?

Never Happy

Damn liberals are never happy. For years now they have been complaining that too many of us Brits have been going to the pubs too often and drinking too much. Now that we are staying home and playing games on the Internet we are still addicted and going to hell in a handbasket.

Personally, I think they should set up Internet stations in the pubs. What a combo that would be.

Reserved

-Reserved till after I down Ragnaros-

Re:So...?

If you're 1 of 9, where's 7?