Eee, my first rant! :3
I’m scanning about Gamefaqs looking to see if the Resident Evil 5 downloadable content is worth it or not (jury’s still out on that) and I see a link featured somewhere near the top that says “The truth about game addiction.” Honest to Buddha I thought it was going to be an April Fools article I’d not yet read.
Go ahead and read the whole article if you like.
Upon reading the article I was pleasantly surprised. It was very informative, not at all biased, and cited a variety of sources on the issue. It was the last page that really caught my attention. If you’re not going to read the whole article, at least read the last page because my lazy ass isn’t gonna copy and paste for your lazy ass.
I can relate to those two guys. Only my “problem” isn’t video games. I play video games, yes, but my “problem” is a bit different. I like to think, I like to learn, I like to write. These are my obsessions.
Sometimes I lie awake at night pondering something I’ve read. When left to myself I often sit around just listening to music while creating and refining different fictional characters and story lines in my head. Sometimes I sit down and feverishly write about them. Sometimes I get heavily interested in some new topic and spend hours learning everything about it that I can find. This is my tendency, as gaming is the tendency for the two people mentioned in the article .
I’ve lost sleep because I prefered to lose myself in thought. I’ve postponed studies because I prefered to write out my ideas. I sometimes skip a meal because I’ve completely lost track of time while looking into some new and interesting concept.
This is who I am. If I sound a bit pretentious or even prideful, believe me, I’m not. I like to think, learn, and create. I express this through introspection, writing, and research. Other people express it through playing video games. Setting labels like “addiction” aside, what’s the difference?
What makes one habit or tendency arbitrarily “healthy” and the other arbitrarily “unhealthy”? Where do we draw that line and why? I’ve never read a serious article addressing potential addiction to music, or movies, or books, or art, or any other hobby. If you overindulge yourself in whatever you do for entertainment there’s a bevy of of terms that can be used to describe you. Adding “addict” to those terms only shifts the focus to the symptoms rather than the root problem itself.
Obsessive behavior is not the fault of the obsession but of the obsessed.
