You may soon suffer from gaming disorder

[vienna]

Originally Posted by Von Due

I really believe any excessiveness be it addiction to gaming, drugs, whatever, is more a sign that something is out of whack to begin with. A few years ago, there was a news story about some kid comitting suicide after his parents told their kid he couldn't play his fav game anymore. That's not about gaming addiction, that is something deeper and the game took the blame. A lot like how movies have taken the blame when someone went postal, this idea that it is the games and movies that make monsters, not the other way around, that this whacky world is what gives the creators of these games and movies the inspiration to show how mad it all has become.

A different thing is that when a person is already far gone, then games or movies can be catalysts for sinking in deeper but the issues were already there and the unwillingness to accept that is what ticks me off.

There is something to your first sentence. There is something called "addictive personality" where a person has a proclivity to excessive attachment to a behavior; the cause of this has been debated at length with some saying it has a physical source (genetics, 'flawed wiring' in the brain, etc.) and others saying it is a psychological manifestation of other conditions. Basically, a person with this condition is addicted to being addicted; they need to have some fixated object and will often transfer their addiction from object to object. I have been told by psychologists I probably have an addictive personality, which, looking back over the entirety of my life, may not be far from wrong. There are many behaviors over the years that have been centered around intense attachment to actions or substances; this is one reason I never got into drugs, even though I came of age in the 1960s; I know only too well what the extent of my possible attachment to anything may take and I am very vigilant about monitoring. The main way to see if an addictive personality exists is took take a history and see if intense attachments and/or fixations have progressed over a protracted period; an example would be something along the lines of a person addictively eating a certain food and then suddenly shifting the target to another food and then another; this is benign and probably just make one a bit heavier, but the principle is dangerous if it manifests in a progression through harmful substances or actions...







<O>

[Hitman]

There are like 3 kind of people now when you consider their relationship with internet/videogames:

1) Those who are old, grew up and matured without it. Internet could fall down and they wouldn't even notice.

2) Those who like me (45 yo) grew up without it, learned later to use and enjoy it, and can easily go on with their lives if there is no internet. I don't have facebook, twitter, whassap or the like, and could not care less. My cell phone is still a pre-payment dinosaur with no internet access, and most days when switching it off before going to bed I notice it ha been off all day as I forgot to turn it on - and never noticed......

3) Those who have grown up with and integrated it in their lives. If you remove it from them, they are lost and face a serious crisis.

Some day in the future everybody will be in group 3

At the same time, the anti-social consequences of excessive use of Facebook and Twitter and what it means if the avertgae Joe, so they say, looks 150 times per day at his smartphone and does so almost by reflex, is being ignored.

+1000

It's not just videogames, it's being hooked to a device all day and making your life turn around it. Those things are smartly created and developed with the aid of psychologist and trained personal to produce addictiveness as many other things, and yet nobody seems to care. It's being sucked into the lack of continuous attention to anything for more than 5 minutes, losing loads of comprehension when reading and not being able to ellaborate reasonings or have the tools to construct then, and relying on 140 characters for a debate. THAT is what is really dangerous for society and freedom, not videogames.

[vienna]

I forgot to post this link as part of my prior post:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addictive_personality


Sorry...





<O>