Video game addiction
Everybody seems to have at least one friend who has been lured into a video game not to be seen again for months or even years. This is the ugly face of video game addiction.
Like all addictions, the people that are most likely to fall prey are those that have a predilection to addictive behavior in the first place. This doesn’t mean that if John the addict is an alcoholic he’s also going to become a video game addict. What it means is that if someone is in a bad place, they are much more likely to drop deeper into that bad place if the escape mechanism is there and readily available.
How does it start? Take one of my favorite test cases, a close friend of mine, who we’ll name Chachi for the purpose of this example. He found himself in a loveless marriage. Chachi has a couple of kids out of it but wasn’t predisposed to be driven to the bottle or other drugs, so instead he escaped into one of the many online fantasy games out there. He got into the guild thing and somehow these online avatars became more important to him than his family and his real life friends.
Chachi is one of these guys that is naturally charming in a self deprecating fashion that drives women crazy. When he got into this awful relationship the charm wore off and instead of going out and participating in life he pushed those efforts into an online world and shut himself off from the real world. The result was an ugly divorce. She blamed the video game.
Blaming video games or those that develop them for the potential of addiction they might cause is ridiculous. That’s like claiming that violent video games cause kids to go out and hurt people. There is nothing in the many research studies done that supports this.
People need to take responsibility for themselves and for those that they care about. If depressive behavior begins in a loved one, find the true source behind it. Talk it out. Nip it off at the bud. Don’t blame outside causes that you can’t control. Please, please avoid the impulse to contract out the litigious sleezeballs in this country to start a frivolous law suit trying to gain some lame sort of retribution from those that provide the escape.
Addiction comes in many forms. There is no disputing that there are those that are addicted to video games but the game itself is rarely the reason. Take the time to figure out the real one.
Related posts: