Monday 25 June 2007

Pic of the day: Not alone. (City of Heroes.)

I'm not addicted...

Addiction experts say video games not an addiction. This may seem surprising, given the study at Copenhagen University a couple years ago showing that dopamine content in the brain of gamers was up to 3 times higher than in cocain addicts on a high. (Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that among other vital functions also controls the feeling of excited pleasure in the brain. The contented pleasure is fundamentally different and controlled in a different way.)

I have issues with the general slant of the article, but then again this is Reuters, not exactly surfing on the wave of the future. In real life, as it were, playing games is largely a social activity, especially for children, who will often play together in the same room, compete and cooperate at least as eagerly as they do in other forms of play. Adults too increasingly turn to online games like City of Heroes, EverQuest or World of Warcraft where they meet and interact with other players.

Not that interacting with people is necessarily the greatest good. Most people are born to be social, and interacting with people is their crack. They can't get away from it. An online friend of mine is running a small business and has repeated attacks of despair because she finds herself playing World of Warcraft when she should have been working. But before she played WoW, she spent a lot of time on online forums (which is where I met her, not to mention that's where her husband met her) and was also going out more. If she stops playing the online game, she is bound to be filling her social need some other way. And it may not be any healthier for her, or her business, or her marriage, than the game is.

But now if you can have me excused, I'm off to play my game... ^^