[Air-l] VG Addiction

[Dmitri Williams]

I can't speak to formal definitions of addiction, but I can shed some 
light on the more social and anthropological nature of how we look at 
addiction and games. I've recently done some content analysis research 
into how video games have been represented in the media over the last 20 
years.

What I found was consistent with Wartella & Reeves'  theory about new 
media (cite at end). When a new medium appears, it tends to go through 
stages of vilification before either being phased out or accepted. The 
fears generally come first from how the medium is displacing some more 
valuable behavior, e.g. playing outdoors, reading great books, etc. Then 
the fears manifest themselves in health risks, physical and psychosocial.

This is what I found in coverage of video games, suggesting that there 
is a social process at work, instead of, or in addition to, actual 
effects.

What I found interesting was that video games actually had a grace 
period in the media from about 1972 to 1981ish. In this time frame, the 
users (a telling term, no?) were mostly adults socializing in bars and 
clubs. But around 1981 or 1982, games suddenly became deviant, 
especially for adults, and became socially constructed as child's play. 
At this point, the articles began to use this addiction language 
strongly, going so far as to suggest that arcades were sources of drugs, 
gambling and prostitution, and that players were "junkies."

My suggestion is not that "games" are or are not addicting. I don't know 
(although I would really hope that we could recognize game content as 
highly varied across many dimensions and qualify our stimuli more 
rigorously than just "games"). Like others, I would be interested in any 
citations.

But what I do know is that how we think of video games--and any other 
technology, for that matter--is certainly a social construction. It's 
probably not a coincidence that the shift in attitudes towards video 
games in 1981 and 1982 was concurrent with a rise in fears about a 
breakdown in families and a generally conservative movement in US 
politics.

-Dmitri

Cite:
Wartella, E. & Reeves, D. 1985. Historical Trends in Research on 
Children and the Media: 1900-1960. Journal of Communication 35:118-133.
****************
Dmitri Williams
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Michigan
Department of Communication Studies
dcwillia at umich.edu
http://www.umich.edu/~dcwillia
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