This morning, I woke up, made a pot of coffee, padded out to the front porch in my underwear to get the paper, wondered whether my neighbours could see me padding out to the front porch in my underwear, drank a cup of coffee, scanned the paper for stories that might be germane to my work (Bigfoot sightings, two-headed cats, Premier Christy Clark nude windsurfing, etc.), turned on the news, opened my laptop and played Junior Pacman for an hour and 20 minutes. In other words, it was a morning like any other. Then, as usual, a wave of self-loathing washed over me for playing Junior Pacman for an hour and 20 minutes rather than using my time constructively, such as reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or talking to my daughter. (Wait, I have a daughter? When did that happen?) I have spent a significant portion of my life zoning out playing video games. I can’t explain why I have done so — maybe it has something to do with not reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People — but I am pretty sure I have plenty of company. New York Times reporter Sam Anderson, himself a compulsive game player, reported that the chief executive of Rovio, the Finnish company that markets the improbably popular game of Angry Birds, claimed that players were spending 200 million minutes inside the game daily — “a number,” wrote Anderson, “that seems simultaneously absurd and plausible.” I know what he means. A few months ago, my wife discovered Scrabble online. She played it all the time. She introduced me to it. We have a perfectly good Scrabble board at home that we used to play on, but the other night, we were sitting at the coffee table in our den, and both of us were playing Scrabble online on our laptops. Against other people. It felt vaguely sinful, not to mention simultaneously absurd and plausible.
Is it an addiction? I would like to think not. And whether “addiction” can even be applied to game-playing is still under debate, though a growing industry of video game addiction counselling has sprung up to address it.
There is debate, too, around the effects of gaming. The nays see it as soul-destroying; the yeas feel the fun that video games offer is just and only that: fun. Some feel games contribute to the epidemic of obesity, while some believe the mechanics of games can be applied to solving problems like obesity. Depending on whom you talk to, video games are either an escape from reality or an effective way to deal with it.
“I think video game addiction exists in some capacity,” said Kimberley Voll, a staff member and lecturer at the University of B.C.’s department of computer science. “I don’t know that it’s taking over the world as some doomsayers would say, but I do think we have to be conscious of it.
“It definitely taps into the pleasure centres of the brain.
“It’s no secret in the industry that certain aspects of psychology are being used to leverage people’s interest in the games. I know companies that actually employ psychologists to help understand how we perceive games.”
Voll, 34, started UBC’s first course in video game design last year. For a research university like UBC, the course was something of a departure for its commercial nature.
But what a commerce it is: The video gaming industry is now bigger than the film industry. Voll had 60 students in the course’s first year, and expects the number to grow.
She herself is a lifelong gamer.
“I wrested the Atari controls from my uncle when I was two years old and I never stopped playing. As far as I was concerned, it was a whole new world and I couldn’t get enough of it.”
She could, however, get too much of it. She had to “quit cold turkey,” she said, to finish her PhD.
Not that she’s against the occasional break from work.
“There is a real social stigma that still exists regarding these kinds of things. Obviously, if you’re on the clock and people are paying you to do some particular job and you’re frittering away hours playing whatever, that’s a different problem.
“But there’s nothing wrong with taking breaks. I think there are ways to healthfully include games as breaks. There are studies out there that say you take an hour off, you clean up your brain by doing something mindless like playing a game, and you come back and you’re productive again.
“But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying, ‘You know what? I’ve been working hard and looking at this screen for hours. I’m going to play a quick little game for 15 or 20 minutes.’ Why not?”
Exactly. Why not indeed?
So if you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to play a quick little game of Junior Pacman, and I’ll be back in, oh, a half-hour, let’s say, to finish this column.
No comments:
Post a Comment