> Better to be addicted to video games than heroin, right?
Only in terms of your physical health. Otherwise iirc addiction is defined as having negative effect on your life (work, social, personal) so it is as bad.
> At least video games can teach modular reasoning.
Which will be used only for games, because you are not interested in anything else?
My addiction to video games led me to software development.
Addiction is a peculiar thing. Anything that makes you feel good is inherently addictive. People get addicted to biting their fingernails.
Is it bad to be addicted to reading? Or working out? If gaming is making your synapses fire faster, if for nothing more than to increase your IQ score (which is based on speed), is it a bad addiction?
Addiction is a compulsion to do something you would not chose to do. It really depends on that something whether it's good or bad for you. Addiction is something everyone will have to deal with at some point in life. Learning it from gaming is probably not a bad thing.
Not every addict makes something out of their addiction but every addict gives a lot of their potential away, often their health too.
A lot of people become software developers without being addicted to games. Great software developers bring things on the table that they learned doing stuff that is not software development, gaming is one of those but people are capable to do so many great things.
Nerding over something is cool but when it becomes an addiction, it's dangerous.
Hard disagree there. Yes, gaming can be addicting, but that is also the case with basically all habits. If you easily get addicted to games, then I would suggest sticking to shorter single-player games.
I would add reading (fiction or non-programming books) and traveling to the list of things to spend more time and money on.
I disagree with your interpretation of OP's comment. Sure you can argue that playing a video game can be addictive to some people. But game developers are not getting addicted to playing the games they make.
Creating a video game is probably as close as you can get in the software space to art. It's the culmination of hundreds of different skills into a single package that has the off chance to shift and affect culture across the globe. Its exciting, and has the potential to fill someone who works on it with an intense amount of pride. That, in my opinion is not addiction.
Unless you consider artists, musicians, designers, actors and hundreds of others who work in purely creative mediums, addicts.
There is a lot to be proud of by shipping something that is used by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and especially more so if it makes people happy. It's that intangible feeling of creating and seeing it successful that keeps people working in the video game industry despite the very obvious downsides.
For a lot of people, it's attempting to create something for players that fills them with as much emotion as they once experienced playing another game.
> Which will be used only for games, because you are not interested in anything else?
Or programming, having a job you have passion for and are good at, being able to produce work people see value in, sustaining yourself, you know, not living in a gutter and stuff dying of a heroin overdose?
> Only in terms of your physical health. Otherwise iirc addiction is defined as having negative effect on your life (work, social, personal) so it is as bad.
Well, if you love video games and everyone around you hates video games, and thinks video games are as bad as heroin, I could see how that could have a negative effect on your work, social, and personal life.
> "Developers" don't "need" to agree with your stance
Which in turn is your moral stance.
> Would you rather someone gets addicted to Candy Crush or to alcohol?
I'd rather have those "receptors" occupied by things that make people deeply happy while they do them, and then not make them cringe when they think back to them. That is, I'm assuming there is a certain lust for life and growth which can get hijacked and misdirected by addictions. Sure, what is an addiction may not so much depend on the activity as why and how it's done, and of course I can't draw the line for others; but on the other hand, let's not pretend there is no such line, or that there is no problem worthy of discussion.
I'm glad someone called out this "addicting" as a positive adjective nonsense. First of all, the word is "addictive". Second, how is this a positive for the user?
I got addicted to Clash of Clans after starting to play for market research. I spent $400. It didn't hurt me financially, but it was very interesting to observe myself engaging in classic addict behaviour.
"I can buy another gem pack because I'll just come in by transit tomorrow, so I won't have to pay for parking."
"If I bring my lunch tomorrow, then that will cancel this other item."
... of course, knowing that I wouldn't do any of these things...
I upvoted your comment because I find it genuinely interesting and I do see where you come from, though I didn't see that kind of aspect to it myself when writing my comment. I simply see myself as a gamer who happens to be lucky enough to get to work with something I love.
The addictive nature of games and the tendency of games to be designed to deliberately get you hooked is a very common topic of conversation at work. Especially since several of my coworkers have a background in the development of casino games. I find the ethical aspects of it fascinating and a rather intellectually challenging topic.
When playing games I don't want to feel like I'm consuming a drug engineered solely to be addictive and I certainly don't want to see myself as a developer of such. On the other hand, I want games to feel engaging and entice me to keep playing and come back for more. As such, addictive is often used as a positively loaded word when talking about games. I feel that I have a good sense of what aspects of a game make up the good kind of addictive and what contributes to the bad kind, but I can't quite formulate a general rule to describe it.
The closest I can come is this:
- "Good addiction" is when a game rewards you for actual accomplishments and keeps you coming back because you enjoy playing it.
- "Bad addiction" is when a game rewards you for simply spending time with it and keeps you coming back simply because you feel quitting would mean missing out on more random rewards.
I have at times found myself stuck in one of those bad reward loops, but it usually only takes me a short while to identify it as such. When I do, I quit playing that game. Yes, video game addiction is a serious problem and I do agree that there are very unethical practices going on in parts of the video game industry. But I also feel that this isn't necessarily part of what makes a video game. I'm guessing that's also an argument similar to what a tobacco farmer would say.
I don't know, this resonated deeply with me. I had a crippling game addiction that got turned into a very productive programming career, and giving up that dopamine hit was critical in making the change.
I've had this discussion with a few people: and afaict for some folks it's not actually an addiction, but a passion. I think the difference lies in whether you ever have the thought: "I wish I was doing something else right now", and then continued doing what you were doing. It comes down to whether you're in control of your own motivation and time.
Hobbies are great, and video games are a perfectly legitimate hobby, for some. Just like some people can casually do cocaine and not think about it the next day. For others, it's a different story.
> I too cant help myself from occasionally dreaming of some alternate reality where GUIs were never invented and all the problems of addictive online media were somehow magically sidestepped.
MUDs were before my time, but I have a friend that claims to have spent hundreds of hours playing these text-based games.
Addiction is a human issue and isn't limited to one form or another.
I agree. But also, we shouldn't throw around the word "addicted" so freely. Aside from the argument of if it's really an addiction, there's the issue of framing:
Addicted to video games or simply absorbed in an interactive medium?
Uninterested in learning or simply bored by the un-engaging monologue?
> Addicting behaviour is dangerous, but you can get addicted to TV shows just as well. Gaming tends to be more addictive because it actively engages your brain, compared with traditional entertainment (movies, theatre, concerts) which are static, you just sit and watch.
The mechanism is strongly dependent on the person. I have much more of a problem with TV shows and fiction books than with videogames, because I'm a sucker for stories. A TV show or a book series can offer couple dozen hours of engaging storyline; most story-based video games are either much shorter, or the story is crap; the book-series-quality videogame storylines are few and far between. That's probably why I never got addicted to multiplayer games. By their nature they have no quality stories, so they bore me out quickly.
(I'm aware that there are people for whom the "active engagement" part is a core ingredient in addiction. I'm just saying that it's not the only mechanism, and different people are susceptible to different things.)
By this criteria I've been addicted to chess, reading books, programming, and possibly video games! Not various drugs, though, despite consuming excessive quantities for extended periods.
I absolutely think it's a double standard, where only activities perceived as morally bad (video games, but not reading books, for example) get labeled like this.
I think a reasonable definition for addiction is the compulsion to keep doing something even though on some level you realize that what you are doing is harmful to you because it either gets in the way of life’s basic necessities or there is simply something better you can be doing, whether it’s work on longer term goals or even just enjoying an activity that is more fun or relaxing than whatever it is you are addicted to.
For example, in my case, my technology addiction for the last few years has been hacker news, which I consider to be in the “social media” sub-category of tech addiction. After procrastinating work with an hours long session on hacker news, it is often annoyingly apparent that nothing of value was gained (at the cost of my job) and if I wasn’t going to work anyway, that there were actually much more enjoyable ways I could have spent those hours, like maybe doing a hobby, talking to friends, or even playing a quality video game.
I know it might seem contradictory to play a video game if I’m claiming to be a “tech addict”, but in my case, I don’t count that as part of my addiction because I don’t have a huge compulsion to play video games, and when I do, it usually feels like enjoyable time well spent afterwords (unless the game is shitty, but I avoid those).
However I do know people with video game addictions (which I also categorize under “tech addiction”) that play games even though it doesn’t feel like time well spent for them afterwords and they know they should be doing something else.
It's not physically addictive.
Would you be addicted to a video game that sucks?
"I want to play a game because it's critically acclaimed and has stunning graphics, not because I can't stop."
"I want to read a novel because it's author is a winner of literary prizes, not because I can't put it down ..."
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