ArsGeek

In this recent article at Bohemian.com, Gabriel Fransisco describes a lifestyle lost to an overwhelming obsession with video games. But is this attempt at a heart-wrenching anecdote evidence of the addictive nature of video games, or is it evidence of a man with an obsessive personality who has the uncanny ability (or curse) of overwhelming focus on his personal goals?

Gabriel tells of a relationship that starts early in his childhood with an Atari 2600 and plays out much like the story of every adult gamer’s life. During his teenage years, he discovers two overriding passions: freestyle club dancing and Blizzard’s classic RTS Starcraft. I can’t personally sympathize with the former; the club scene has never been anything for me except a mindless churning of intoxicated bodies, a dead-end excersise who’s only real virtue is the physical discipline it requires. Too many people I knew in high school went down that bottomless spiral of meaningless social mingling, destructive relationships, and drug and alcohol addiction and found themselves in their late 20s with no skills, no family, a dead-end job and few true, reliable friends.

You might then imagine my confusion when Gabriel characterizes his relationship with dance clubs as a constructive force in his life and his personal obsession with video games as a youth-stealing, mind-rotting, addictive plague on modern society. You see, in my case, video games defined my life, my career, and my passions in a positive way that led me to a successful career, a happy marriage, and a great group of friends who share my interests. Like Gabriel, I started off with the Atari, worked my way up through the Nintendo, the Super Nintendo (still my all time favorite console), the Playstation, and then the plethora of online PC games that grew in popularity during my teenage years. As dedicated gamers, my friends and I became heavily involved in PC modding and tuning, always trying to squeeze out that extra frame per second. It built our technical skills and provided the foundation I needed to to eventually get a job as a PC technician, after years of dead-end work in civil service I’m still trying to forget.

That experience also led directly to my eventual career choice as a web software developer and web designer. As the geekiest and most technically inclined of my group, I assumed the responsibility of building guild websites, handling server administration, and a brief stint of game programming when we spent some time off from Command and Conquer and Quake to build a MUD - a Multi-User Dungeon, a prototypical MMO with an all-text interface, for those of you who came along after Ultima Online and Everquest. The skills and social connections I developed while pursuing my gaming hobbies are more valuable to me than any other character-building experience in my life.

Without video games, I can’t predict exactly where my life would have ended up, but they provided me the focus that helped me develop my own personal talents into a successful career much the way Gabriel developed his based on his passion for dance. The similarity and contrast between our lives leads me to wonder, once again, at the impact articles like his will have both on gaming culture and on clinical and popular psychology - by further diluting the meaning of addiction and confusing cause and effect in the case of obsessive behavior, involving video games or anything else. The plight of real addicts with debilitating chemical addictions is mocked every time someone characterises an obsession as an addiction, and likewise people with unhealthy obsessions may be suffering from a fundamental misunderstanding of the cause and consequence of their problems which prevents them from seeking and finding the help they need.

I also worry that it provides a skewed view to the already misinformed older generation, as well as the members of our generation who never quite got on the boat, who are still playing the politics of fear we gamers are oh-so-familiar with. Every generation in the past century has been the first to embrace some amazing new technological or cultural advancement and each has had to deal with ignorance and fearmongering that big changes like these bring about. It’d be nice if we could look past generational lines and find the common ground we share as the children of a rapidly progressing society. Certainly Gabriel is welcome to tell his story. I hope that he, and others like him who have allowed a single facet of their life to become an overriding destructive obsession, will someday have the maturity to admit that the problem is theirs, and accept responsibility for their actions and their lives instead of placing blame on the object of their obsession.

(thanks to QJ.net for the image, used without permission, sorry!)

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