The “we” in the title of this post is maybe a bit presumptuous—I think that people in this class specifically, especially after this past week of discussion, would be a lot less likely than the average person to term something as “addictive” meaning an exclusively good thing. But the existence of “addictive” as a descriptor in popular culture often meaning “good,” or “worth your money,” or “fun” is undeniable. Anecdotally, I think most of us, at some point in our lives, have heard a friend describe a game as addictive. Maybe Animal Crossing is addictive, maybe Stardew Valley, or Minecraft, or Skyrim is addictive, or maybe a mobile game like Candy Crush is addictive, but the terminology is obviously there. A frequently visited website probably recognizable to lots of us from childhood is AddictingGames.com. In this sense, I can suppose people usually mean that a game is addictive in the sense that “it’s so fun you don’t want to stop playing,” but it’s interesting that games are given this very usually negative descriptor. “Addictive” is usually thought of as bad because it can be uncontrollable—a gambling addiction, a nicotine addiction, an alcohol addiction.
I think that, on a surface level, everyone understands this. On one hand, there’s already quite a bit of concern over the potential ills of “game addiction,” and on the other, there’s obviously no nefarious cultural plot to defang “addictive” of its meaning. And I’m sure that countless people who have struggled with honest-to-goodness addiction have also described video games they simply enjoy as “addictive.” But, in my experience, a lot of games most commonly described as “addictive” really can become, well, excessive. I realized this while playing Cookie Clicker this week. Cookie Clicker is fun, sure, but at a certain point I came to feel like my brain was coaxed into enjoying something just because a number was ticking up. I often feel a similar way with strategy games—do I like this in a way that’s enriching or filling, or do I just like the fact that my color on the map is getting bigger?
I’m not totally sure as to the answers to these questions, frankly. And I’m not about to start acting like Cookie Clicker or Civilization VI are akin to cigarettes—these games are genuinely fun, in my opinion, and I wouldn’t want them gone from the world. But, relevant to our conversation on gamification and so on, and in light of the fact that countless games have genuinely exploited addictive strategies to, say, get people to buy stuff in Counter-Strike, it feels worth discussing when something being “hard to put down” becomes a bad thing. Something I’m extremely interested in, in particular, is the arguments for whether or not any escapist video game is ethical at all. This may seem a bit puffed up, and obviously I’m very pro-games myself, but I could absolutely see someone arguing that, say, Breath of the Wild is unethical, because it gives people the rush and joy of exploring a fictional/easy version of nature without them having to actually go out and explore nature. One could argue that most games give people the feeling of accomplishment without any corresponding real-world accomplishment, and that that is, in some way, an unethical form of distracting people from real life, much in the same way we talk about people addicted to MMOs, hikikomori, etc. I, to be blunt, think that anyone making these arguments would have to be a bit of a, well, hardass—there are countless things that give people a sense of accomplishment without that accomplishment being really tangible in real life, or that give people escapism—but I would wonder what the concrete arguments against these thoughts are. Games can enrich our lives, and games are obviously tools for art and expression—and I can think of the ways that I could tangibly articulate why these things are, but I’m curious as to what others might say, and what the concrete arguments against escapism-as-unhealthy-fantasy are.
Given Ashtrick’s mention of it last class, I am cautious to bring up the rat, but it’s happening. The well-known rat addiction experiment found that when left with two water bottles, one laced with drugs and the other uncontaminated, a rat alone in a cage would always abuse the laced water until they eventually overdosed. In the 1970s, this experiment was reapplied with a community of rats in a larger, more engaging environment. In this iteration, the rats much preferred the regular water, and no instances if overdose were observed. When given more sources of enrichment, the rats didn’t feel the need to find enrichment from altered states of consciousness. I’m not sure if we can extend this to the experience of “addicting” games, but I do think that a connection can be drawn in terms of engagement and escapism. When we’re unable to put a game down because of it’s escapist pleasures, its because we are arguably under-stimulated or otherwise stressed, when we desire to escape from a less-than-enjoyable experience. If this is the case, then the problem of “game addiction,” becomes less about the existence of addicting games or game mechanics and more about the extent to which we feel our needs are met by society.
I think that if one says that video games as escapism is bad for the reasons outlines above, the same could be argued for all media. Batman? Sorry, you didn’t actually become a billionaire. Horror films? You weren’t actually murdered by a serial killer. The core of media, to me, is empathy. Media allows you to view someone else’s experiences and connect to them, and understand them. Sure, you can use it for escapism, but that’s not the only purpose it serves, you can also FEEL THINGS and Think about complicated ideas that you otherwise wouldn’t. To condemn it because you can overuse it just for escapism misses the forest for the trees, in my opinion.