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2006 Games + Learning + Society Conference: 3:30 PM session: Motivation & Addiction

(I got into a long conversation at lunch and missed the 1:30 session. Sorry. If you go to the GLS website, though, you can find webcasts of all the sessions!)

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Presentation #1: Wow, addiction psychiatrists from Cedars-Sinai.

Uh, oh, “intrusive thoughts about gaming” from an audience member. Um, sometimes when I am chatting with someone, my fingers twitch at the number keys, like I am trying to cast “Tesla Cage” at you. Interpret this as you will.

Overall, audience members are producing negative definitions of “addiction” that focus on impediments to functioning in other areas of life. I think they are trying to please the psychiatrists, who are now trying to motivate us to come up with more positive definitions–after all, ad copy frequently describes games as “addictive,” and that’s supposed to be good.

I once went to a cocktail party populated almost entirely by psychiatrists. It was weird.

The key criteria, as you would expect, is when an activity disrupts other areas of your life. Anal people are not obsessive-compulsive unless they have trouble leaving the house because they can’t stop washing their hands, yada yada yada.

They’ve got a biological model for substance dependence up now. It has to do with dopamine, which mediates the pleasure and reward pathway, is increased by effects of drugs and whatnot, and then decreases markedly in withdrawal. This probably also leads to decreased sensitivity to natural reinforcers (e.g. sex). It’s not that you’re getting less dopamine, it’s just that it doesn’t affect you like it used to.

God, I am so tired. Two nights of inadequate sleep just KILLS me now. Ah, adulthood.

Slides of neurons. Cocaine makes you happy by keeping more dopamine active, I think. Here’s a slide with brain imaging showing how cocaine functions in the brain. Some research subjects got free cocaine. Possibly rats, I guess.

Meth breaks your decision-making brain parts.

Proposed criteria for online gaming dependence with the salience model:

• Preoccupation with online gaming
• Needs to play online games for longer periods of time in order to achieve the desired excitement
• Has repeated unsuccessful efforts to control online gaming
• Plays online games longer than intended
• Lies to family members, therapist or others to conceal the extent of involvement with online gaming
• Has jeopardized or lost a significant relationship or job because of online gaming
• Some others, but he went through the slides too fast. Basically, things that fuck up your functioning.

Historical background of cognitive-behavioral therapy studies–may be possible to use games in diagnostic and therapeutic ways and actually introduce positive changes in the brain.

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Presentation #2: Nick Yee. I’ll be seeing him at PARC in the fall; he was also at my table at lunch today, and encouraged me in my new plan to build a sex MMOG for women who want to have gay male sex (the original plan was just to market to gay men, since the central problem for the new sex games coming out seems to be how the hell to get straight women to participate, but as Nick pointed out, it might be too easy for the gay men to just get face-to-face sex, so: slash fans and rural gay men are my target market).

Lots of screenshots of various games, including a gay pride rally on CoH. (You know what I’ve learned over the past two days? CoH has like the best avatar customization of all the big games.)

Some stats on MMOG players; here are a few that interested me: only 25% are teenagers. Age is not correlated with usage. 80% of players play with someone they know (friend, family member, or romantic partner).

When you ask people about various things they enjoy in MMOGs, they tend to shake out into three categories: achievement, socialization, and immersion.

Achievement: advancement (leveling, getting loot, etc.), competition (beating the snot out of other players), and mechanics (mastery of the system: min/maxers)
Socialization: socializing (chatting), relationships (deeper connections, emotional support, etc.), and teamwork (group achievements)
Immersion: discovery, role-playing, customization (avatars, etc.), escapism

Age is negatively associated with achievement motivation. Male players also score higher on the achievement motivation and lower on the relationship motivation–these differences are stastically significant but very small. There’s 87% overlap between genders.

Many people’s motivations also shift over time–you may come in wanting to do one thing and gradually discover you also enjoy something else.

So how do games make you want to do stuff?

Start with behavioral conditioning: B.F. Skinner!* Things are made satisfying through rewards. Leveling starts out as a very quick process; it gets slower and harder, but eventually the action of attacking mobs becomes intrinsically rewarding.

Games may also give users a sense of control and agency that they lack in meatspace. Wherever you are, you know what to do next and how close you are to the next level–and in the newer games, you never LOSE ground. In CoH, for instance, you incur experience debt that has to be made up with half the experience you earn following a death, but you don’t lose experience like you used to on Ancient Anguish, the MUD I played in junior high (you lost a whole level there every time you died).

Younger and male players are more likely to show signs of problematic usage. People motivated by escapism and advancement are more likely to develop problematic usage, but escapism predicts twice as well than advancement (and about the same as number of hours played per week predicts for it).

A lot of MMOG players play 20 hours a week–but the average American watches 28 hours of TV a week.

We talk about MMOGs in a different (more alarmist) way than we do about other media–but this isn’t really surprising; we read an article in virtual worlds about the typical patterns of new technology adoption, and new technologies are always presented by the media in alternatingly idealistic and alarmist ways. Connecting back to some stuff that was said earlier today and Belleweather’s comment on the subject, it’s entirely possible that MMOGs are seen as more threatening than console games simply because they’re newer. Yee goes on to say that he thinks the paranoia is new; obviously, I’m not sure about this, but on reflection, it’s possible that the accumulation of technologies now available to us makes it easier and faster to spread this kind of paranoia, making it SEEM more pervasive.

In general, the literature suggests that “internet addicts” typically suffer from other, pre-existing psychological conditions: depression, anxiety, etc. One could view the internet addiction as similiar to self-medicating with alcohol (and probably less physically harmful?).

Ultimately: is it pathological to prefer being where you have social status and respect?

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*Remember this for the prelim.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 4:19 pm and is filed under internet, conferences, liveblogging, technology, media, links, musings, academia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.