[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Sasha Hart]

Lots of people talk about addiction and mean something very much
like 'demonic possession.' But there are difficult cases - for
example, you have a physical dependence on water (though water
clearly seems not to be 'addictive'). You habitually ingest your
favorite foods, but the people you love are often actively happy
that you have favorites and that you get to enjoy them. You might
want more than anything to get a better job, and you might even do
unethical things to get it, but this is understood to be reasonable
motivation, and the things you do to get it are understood to be
your decisions. You might spend many hours building model planes or
just working but these are not supposed to be addictions for the
mere reason that they take up a lot of your life.

It might be useful to clarify what we are aiming at. Definitions
given by true believers with suicidal children are probably not the
most measured or considered.

We might try to adapt from the definitions given in the DSM-IV.

  http://www.psychologynet.org/dsm.html

Here is my gloss of what I read about alcoholism and how it might
make the jump. I don't know anything about clinical psychology.

Abuse is essentially defined as a destructive pattern of use. That's
bad because it hurts the person. The alarmists have a lot more work
to do in demonstrating that people are actually hurt by Everquest,
rather than simply being hurt Everquest players or people who played
Everquest and were hurt, etc.

Dependence is defined using a DSM-style "3 of the below 7." These
encompass :

  1. tolerance (strictly meaningless in Everquest, which is not a drug)

  2. withdrawal symptoms (for alcohol this involves things like
  vomiting and grand mal seizures; compare Everquest's merely
  metaphorical 'withdrawal,' consisting of perhaps loneliness and
  desire to play Everquest)

  3. great deal of time spent using (again, you need more than this
  - I spend lots of time working and sleeping, and you could say
  that I was dependent on them but it's not pathology)

  4. Often taking more than was intended

  5. Persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down on use (I
  would connect the above two, as for example watching a movie
  longer than intended is not at all pathological)

  6. Important social, occupational, or recreational activities
  given up or reduced because of use

  7. Continued use despite knowledge of persistent problem (physical
  or psychological) that is worsened by use 

  (I would lump together the above two as harm).

So the basic problem is simple: use can be harmful, and we would
like people not to be harmed, so we want to curtail use (at least
insofar as it is necessary to curtail harm - note that DSM alcohol
dependence has nothing to do with the sizable number of people who
have a glass of wine with dinner, and that we haven't shown hardly
anything about Everquest's harm anyway, not in strength of
causality, not in severity of effect, and not in incidence).  Of
course, we have to assume that we are doing more good than harm
here, and that it is acceptable for us to intercede on other
people's behalf to change their behavior so they are not harmed
(something a lot of us will accept, and certainly things which are
part of the normal medical view).

OUR situation is even more clear cut when use is 'unintentional,'
e.g., when the person wants help not using, or the person cannot
naturally use in small enough quantities to reduce harm to
acceptable levels. We help him because he wants help, or doesn't
mind it and other people want him helped. I think this is most
properly what we should address as 'addiction' to the games, whether
or not it has any particular relation to the criteria and nature of
drug addiction. It has the clearest cut methods (very few to none of
which involve letting the person play at all). Maybe people like
this need not to have net connections or even computers!

Issues like tolerance and withdrawal and hangovers have nothing to
do with Everquest AFAIC. They are usually overextensions of the
metaphor. The metaphor isn't what's important, the problem is what
is. It doesn't really matter whether or not it's addiction per se (I
believe it isn't, it just has a couple resemblances) if people need
help.

> Just looking at the time I spent playing Everquest, I think online
> game addiction is probably a wider problem than currently
> acknowledged. The number of people I knew who regularly played > 7
> hours a day was incredible.  They haven't all lost their jobs etc,
> but I can't see a case for it being healthy.

If they don't mind and it's not affecting their life in any bad way,
it's as healthy as anything else which people do on their own time.
You are taking for granted that it can't be particularly good, but
people may have good reasons for playing that much. It might help
them relax and stay sane, it might provide them with valuable and
healthy social contact that they CANNOT get otherwise.

A lot of the things I like doing take a lot of my time. That's good.
If they didn't I'd spend a lot of my time doing things I didn't
like.  Where it's a problem is where I am harming myself and can't
help it.  Reading books, seeing movies and playing MUDs for most
people and for me are things which *could* in a kind of indirect way
be harmful (e.g., I'm not eating because I'm reading) but since I
have the power to regulate my own activity quite effectively, it's
not a problem.

If (as I speculate) it is the case that only a few people have
trouble regulating this, and that only a few people are harmed at
all severely even if they aren't entirely in control, and that some
of the measures under discussion are really annoying and might be
bad for people's lives (you have to take responsibility for the good
you are doing if you take responsibility for the bad - if the game
contains your community, logging on an hour a day is a fairly
seroius social privation) ...  then perhaps most of the work should
go into helping the few people who can't control themselves or are
harmed.

Which, if I recall, is something small game operators, and friends
of players, and families and so on, often do already.

I don't think that game designs are a good way of attacking this
problem. Some things are just not within a designer's scope,
although we would often like them to be (e.g., "how do I get PvP
without the negative stuff about PvP, or attracting PvP audiences",
other problems that are really the design of people and the
communities they form and can only be lightly and obliquely shaped
by design, if at all).  The company is responsible, but the design
is probably not.  If it is, I want to see more earnest evidence than
"my chum dropped out because of MUD" (as actually interesting as it
is to hear these stories).


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