Category Archives: Games

Addiction to Games: Is It Serious?

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Breaking rules and lying to play more is a sign of addiction.

Addiction to games like Everquest and World of Warcraft has serious consequences for some young people. More recently, serious consequences of addiction has been noted even among players of casual online games such as FarmVille. Though behavioral addiction (e.g., pathological gambling) are being included in the DSM, online addiction and addiction to games are not formally included yet.

I was curious about this and since I’ve been looking at the players of one casual gaming website for kids, Neopets, I just went ahead and asked some questions. I want to emphasize that this is just me being curious, not publishable research, because I did not have any sort of IRB here. I made a single post on the public Neopets forums asking: “I’ve been seeing a few people talking about being ‘addicted’ to Neopets. How do you know if you’re addicted?” I’ll highlight some of the responses here clustered using the Internet Safety Project questions for Online Game Addiction:

  • Do you play compulsively?

I always have neopets open in a tab when I’m online_ I can spend hours playing. I’ve also tried to quit and never been successful. I also tend to spend a lot on money for neocash or plushies for keyquest. :/

  • Do you play for long periods of time (often longer than you had planned)?

Signs of Addiction: You want to go to sleep but your laptop is right beside you with the neopets main page. YOu go on it for another “10 minutes”(What I’m doing right now XD) You go on neopets for 5 hours a day or more(Hmm…. might be me XD)

  • Once online, do you have difficulty stopping?

Lol I’ve tried quitting and cutting down. I spend nearly half my day on neopets everyday. I haven’t missed a day since….. Uh….. oh! Two days in June because I was on vacation and didn’t have net access. And before that.. er.. I can’t remember lol.

  • Do you play as often as you can?

I am on here every day. Sometimes I am on here for sixteen plus hours and other times I am only on here for a couple of hours.

  • Do you sneak or violate family rules in order to play?

Im not “addicted” I just spend at least 4 hours a day on Neo if I can, usually more. Im very involved in the site however I have taken very very long hiatus which was horrible since I missed so much! I told my family the other day that I would have to run away if they ever “compromised” my account.

  • Do you sacrifice real-world things for your online world?

I would wake up and tune out my family and just exist on Neopets. Neopets was negatively affecting my life. My family and I had a small hitch in our lives because of my time spent on Neopets.  At some point though, I changed. Probably when I got iced a few years ago and never could get my account back. I avoided Neopets for awhile, because it upset me so much. But I had taken things too far. I finally came back, and got caught up in the NC stuff there for awhile, and I seriously wasted a LOT of money. I can’t say at some point I won’t go through this same thing again, but I hope now that I’ve been through it, I will recognize it if it begins to happen and pull myself away.

  • Is your school or work suffering because of the time and energy you spend gaming?

Now the problem is that when I can’t handle the pressure of real life (like day before an exam), I rather escape it instead of trying to fix things.

  • Have your sleep patterns changed since you became involved with online gaming? Are you staying up extremely late or getting up in the middle of the night to play?

When you need a 5 hour energy shot the next day because you stayed up all night playing neopets and only got a couple hours of sleep. *drinks 5 hour energy shot*

If you’d like to read more, more anonymized answers are available here. Again, these are all folks who are currently playing the game, none of these people have managed to quit yet. The tendency in these situations is to blame the player for lacking willpower to stop or just being silly. Nobody ever talks about the game designer bearing any responsibility (e.g., this). Yet, games are getting more and more sophisticated at leveraging psychology and the chemistry of addiction to get people to play more. Are we expecting too much of kids and young people to be able to avoid these pitfalls? What can we do to help people find a way out if they become trapped in the cycle of addiction? Who should be responsible for providing these services?

One last thing, I hate to end on a hopeless note. If you or a loved one are facing online or gaming addiction, there are some resources available here. You do not have to be alone!

Making Current Videochat Technologies Work Better for Your Family

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Photo from NYT article “Grandma’s on the Computer Screen” (November 26, 2008)

As a family communication researcher, people frequently ask me for ideas on making videochat work better for their families (especially between children and grandparents). While I think there is a lot of room to make new technologies in this space, there are ways of leveraging existing technologies, too.

One of the big challenges for videochat is that setup can be problematic and frequently requires a tech savvy adult on each side. For example, a participant in one of my studies described his experience:

Video is nice, but getting it to work from both the ends wasn’t worth it. We’d have the phone going, and I’d be saying “hit that thing on the right” or whatever. It would take forever to get it set up. Especially with people that are not that technical. Like we tried video with grandparents and my dad is the least computer literate person I know. We literally spent and hour and a half setting up a call which lasted 5 minutes. It gets to the point when it’s not worth it. So, our main method is the phone.

One solution is installing TeamViewer on the remote machine (e.g., next time you visit). This free program gives you really easy-to-use remote access so that now you can start the call on both sides at the agreed upon time and do basic troubleshooting without having to do tech support over the phone.

Skype has a setting for automatically answering incoming calls, with video.

Another solution is setting up a dedicated device (such as an old laptop) at a good location in the remote participants’ home. Set Skype to start and auto-login each time the machine restarts and set incoming calls to auto-connect with video. However, the downside of this approach is that you have to use social conventions to manage availability (e.g., call first by phone and agree on a time to connect before trying to Skype).

Another problem with currently-available videochat is that it really gets boring pretty quick (this is especially true while talking to children). The key to making videochat work is coming up with compelling activities to do together, rather than just talking. There is a lot of great research in this space, as well as some existing stuff out there. So, if you’re struggling  to find something to do to keep your videochat sessions more engaging, try a few of these and see if you like them:

  • Story Visit from Nokia is a great free tool to read books together remotely and even gives advice to make the reading experience more engaging!
  • Once you’re done with those stories, you can try to find other books online (you’ll have to coordinate the page-turning yourself, but at least you can see them easily). I suggest using the International Children’s Digital Library which has a huge collection.
  • Yahoo! Multiplayer games can be a good way to stay in touch as long as you can find somebody to help set it up on the other side (or use the TeamViewer trick above). Or try Rounds, which combines videochat and games.
  • If you want to try something that stretches across sessions, I would suggest trying a virtual world together, choosing one that suits your child’s age and interests. The popular ones include: Petpet Park, Club Penguin, Neopets, World of Warcraft, and Minecraft. Unfortunately, the last two are best played fullscreen, so it may reduce the communication to audio-only.
  • You can use an online whiteboard (like Scriblink) to draw together synchronously, or sign up for a specialized social network like Sesame’s Streets familiesnearandfar.org to send asynchronous drawings and messages (this site was made for military families, but is open to everybody)
  • Finally, sometimes it can be fun just to play with regular physical toys over videochat. Some ideas that work well include: puppet show, tea party, playing the game Battleship, showing magic tricks, and dressing up dolls for a fashion show. I’m sure you can come up with other things based on your interests.
If you have other ideas that have worked for you, I would be love to hear them here.

 

How Gamification Works for Me

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Some of the tools I use to gamify my life

Gamification–rewarding everyday behaviors with fun, points, or virtual prizes–is kind of a big deal nowadays. I’m a big proponent of gamification and I wanted to share why it works for me.

The reason I like gamification is because I invented it. I mean, you might have invented it too, but that doesn’t make my personal act of creation any less true. When I was a kid on a long errand with my parents, I would count my steps. That was the first time I ever counted to 1000. I announced it proudly to my parents and they dispensed the appropriate praise (achievement unlocked!). In school, I gamified paying attention by setting and tracking goals, such as ask or answer a question in every class for a month. In life I gamified everyday stuff, like go as long as I can without missing a day of flossing (keep the date written on my bathroom mirror). Of course, all of the points were just in my head and nobody else cared about the games that make my life just a bit more fun and just a bit less tedious.

Today, I use a number of existing tools (and tools that I have appropriated outside of their original purpose) to gamify my life:

  • I check in on FourSquare when I go somewhere to get badges, mayorships, and points
  • I use EpicWin to get loot and level-up a character by completing real tasks on my to-do list
  • I level up my Pokemon by getting high step counts on my Pokewalker pedometer
  • At CHI this year, I used MissionRunner to complete missions, get badges, and get actual prizes while getting the most out of my conference experience
  • I get kudos for saving the greatest percent on groceries by posting my awesome savings on the fridge and also on SouthernSavers.com for their Friday Finals.
  • I have my own set of daily and weekly goals (based on The Happiness Project book) and I track them using Salud! There’s no better reward than seeing a “perfect” day or week (though, this is closer to the way I gamified things as a child — it’s all in my head).

There are four big ways that gamification makes my life better:

  • Gives me an excuse to do what I should — when the thing that I should be doing like exploring a new city, talking to a stranger, or walking 10000 steps a day feels more awkward than the thing that I’m currently doing (e.g., working in my hotel room, talking with people I already know, or sitting on the couch), sometimes the game gives me just enough of an extra push to do the right thing. It also sometimes makes a good excuse to give to others about your activity or changing activities.
  • Burst of energy when close to a milestone — when I get close to the next level, the next badge, or the next round number, I get a burst of energy that helps me get there. For example, yesterday I was this close to hitting level 10 on my EpicWin character, so I actually got some of today’s todos done last night just to get that level-up feeling.
  • Helps me act as the person that I want to be — this is particularly true of games where the achievements and status are shared with others in my social network. For example, I want to be the kind of person who explores new places and has fun during the week and on weekends. If when I look over the week’s checkins on foursquare all I see is “work” and “home,” I’m actually a bit more motivated to put aside the Internet and go exploring with friends, so that my checkins may actually be interesting to my friends and give off the impression that I want.
  • Gives me tracking and reflection for free — most games track your progress, making self-tracking into a fun credit-getting step instead of a boring chore. I track because I like to see my progress in the game, but when I need to, I now have a treasure trove of personal data that I can review for to gain insights about myself (e.g., the longer I plan to spend working, the less I get done), to remember specific details of past events (e.g., what was that restaurant we liked on the road trip in June?), and to see potential areas to improve (e.g., Really? It’s been 5 months since my last haircut?).

So, big kudos to everybody who does this kind of work. I’d love to see more stuff out there to help me make my life even more fun. I’d love to hear about other apps, tools, and strategies that you use to make your life more fun.