NHS opens clinic to help child addicts of computer games

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/oct/08/nhs-opens-clinic-to-help-child-addicts-of-computer-games

by cmsefton • 7 years ago

87 77 7 years ago

grenoire3• 7 years ago

I used to think that I was addicted to video games when in high school I would get together with my friends and play Civilization all night long, every single day.

Nowadays I keep hearing about younger brothers and sisters who are literally unable to get off their computers, consoles, and devices. I do relate to them a lot, but I don't know if it's becoming more serious over time, or if we are more attentive to it.

I hope it's not the former; I made a lot of friends playing and making video games, but it's not a particularly productive pastime if you're only playing them. Of course, you can disagree, but I am personally a little regretful that I didn't end up picking up an instrument or spent more time on my drawing skills. My programming developed quite a lot during my teens, but I definitely could have toned it down and 'played outside.'

kypro• 7 years ago

I made a lot of friends playing and making video games, but it's not a particularly productive pastime if you're only playing them. Of course, you can disagree, but I am personally a little regretful that I didn't end up picking up an instrument or spent more time on my drawing skills.

Sounds like you had a very similar experience to me. I was addicted to MMORPGs from around age 14-18. Almost every moment of free time I had I was playing these games.

I realised when I got to university how much time and potential I had wasted and I was becoming more interested in entrepreneurship which helped shift my addiction to something a little more productive.

That said, I also regret spending most of my late teens and early twenties working on hopeless startup dreams fuelled by the delusionally over optimistic self-help books I was reading at the time.

After going through a bit of a crisis in my mid twenties I finally feel I've reached a good balance between, but arguably I've wasted many of my best years. Even productive addictions can be bad. You often hear professional sports stars and business people echo these feelings about not prioritising the important things in life: family, friends, etc.

tcbawo• 7 years ago

Don't be so hard on yourself. Kudos for taking a chance. I know many successful people, but the happiest are those that found something they were passionate about and learned to excel at it, rather than chasing what they though would make them rich/famous. I've also seen many sacrifice relationships and experiences in their pursuit, such that I would never trade places with them.

sammeboat2• 7 years ago

Ask me on my deathbed what I regret the most and I will say: everything (in hindsight).

dazzawazza• 7 years ago

It's a bit of both mixed in with games companies explicitly using techniques in honed in gambling industry to keep kids attached to their product.

I've worked in videogames for 25 years and the industry is "oblivious" to the harm it is causing because it's very profitable. There has been little innovation in games for the last ten years compared to the innovation in the business model used by the industry which has seen rapid change to grab children attention for as long as possible.

sjwright• 7 years ago

On the contrary, there has been plenty of innovation around how to make games more addictive and profitable.

hrktb2• 7 years ago

but it's not a particularly productive pastime
picking up an instrument or spent more time on my drawing skills.

As a pastime, I am not sure I see the "productive" part of playing an instrument or drawing. For the instrument part in particular, while any piece has an interpretation part, does it warrant a "productive" label, more than paying a game a specific way ?

Drawing can have a commercial aspect, but then is it a pastime ? (we'd also then have to take pro gaming into account if we go into these length)

jacquesm• 7 years ago

Making art is about as productive as it gets. It's also the only thing that we still appreciate many years after the original was created.

Playing a game is pure consumption, drawing or making music is pure production.

swiley4• 7 years ago

I've failed classes playing music rather than studying. What's productive to one person is an enjoyable waste of time to another.

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

Twenty years ago games companies didn't employ psychologists and economists to ensure their game currencies and loot boxes were suitably addictive.

You were addicted to Civ or old school Defender arcades because it was too much fun (for a while), not because they had a team exploiting every weak point. Somewhere along the line (f2p with premium currencies, maybe monthly subscriptions) it switched to cutting your fix with some heroin to ensure it's addictive enough.

To me that's qualitatively different, and in need of regulation.

benj1112• 7 years ago

What is the biological difference though? (genuine question)

It's all well and good rationally formulating a difference between fun and addictive, but if our monkey brains can't tell the difference, should we really be treating them differently?

Buttons8402• 7 years ago

I've heard it said:

Games used to be about making the computer do what the user wanted, now games are about making users do what the computer wants.

Rather, games used to be about packing in features players and the developers thought would be cool and fun, and then the game would be sold for a flat price. Now games are about extracting as much money as possible with a minimum of interesting game mechanics and a maximum of psychological tricks. It's not true of all modern games, but is definitely a growing trend.

watwut• 7 years ago

play Civilization all night long, every single day [...] my programming developed quite a lot during my teens, but I definitely could have toned it down and 'played outside.'

This on the whole is extremely unlikely. First, if you developed programming skills, you was not playing civilization all the time. You was playing civilization some and coding some. Second, if you would really literally spent playing all night long and then went to school and then spent all night playing etc, you would be extremely sleep deprived and you would not learned much - not in school and not coding.

The distinction matter. The thing that distinguish addiction from playing a lot is consequences on rest of your life - school, work, relationships with family or friends or ability to find mate.

I knew people who were in latter category - failing in college, going to work sleep deprived to the point of being drag on team, divorcing. It is different then high schooler wasting time.

kache_• 7 years ago

For me it was playing video games all day while writing scripts for those video games to play them better. I learned some real skills from video games. For example, I was leading huge teams size 48 in real time, part of an organization with 300 people at 15 years old.

mattlondon• 7 years ago

I was in a kind of similar situation. I perhaps wasn't "addicted" but I certainly messed about on computers a lot.

But was it a waste of time? I don't think so.

Granted there was a lot of brain-dead time spent in Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization, and other games, but that time triggered a general interest and curiosity in what is happening. That leap from just playing to wondering what is going on was invaluable IMHO, and you wouldn't have got it without some serious screentime.

First you start poking around inside the *.cfg files for Doom and DN3D, and the next thing you know it is a couple of years down the line and you're a late-teen sitting up late into the early morning fiddling around with laser-pointers and webcams naively trying to write machine vision algorithms from scratch, or using Wireshark to to try and reverse engineer the server browser in the initial release of Steam, or strapping crappy wireless 9V cameras (1) into water bottle rockets and trying to process the video coming back via also-crappy USB video capture devices (2) (...some personal anecdotes for you there).

Now fast forward a few more years and I've got a degree in computer science and a pretty well-paid job as a software engineer that means I don't really need to worry about money, and I still have some good headroom left in my career to grow still without too much effort.

Would I have got here if I had stopped messing about on the computer and instead diluted that learning time with trying to play the violin or piano? I doubt it - that spark of curiosity as a teenager started a life-long (I presume) interest and set me on a path for a well-paid and desirable career. I wouldn't change any of that time at all.

1 - You can still buy similar things I was just amazed to see: https://uk.banggood.com/Wireless-Mini-Surveillance-Camera-Mo...

2 - no-longer available apart from ebay it seems: https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/183280630638

non-entity• 7 years ago

The reason I got into programming was Runescape leaving stack traces on my Desktop circa 2010

bdamm3• 7 years ago

Yes, I can relate! My first real reverse-engineering effort was hex-decoding font files for the Descent series. My first collaborate programming project was writing a cross-section editor for a guy writing an extrusion engine that could be used to create Descent levels. My first attempt at commercial software was a mission packaging program for the game. All that stuff was great cornerstones for the career that came afterwards.

thrower1232• 7 years ago

At least in the 90s, trying to play PC games was a great way to figure out how computers worked and how to troubleshoot them when they went wrong.

Things are so much easier now... You don't have to touch an autoexec.bat, or deal with extended memory. The amount of system tweaking you have to do to get decent performance is minimal. And installing a game almost never borks your computer so badly you have to madly try to do an OS restore, trying to preserve everything and make it look like you hadn't broken the family computer...

swiley4• 7 years ago

I think games like civilization and openTTD are addictive but there's something different about it that results in the "addiction" naturally ending.

These smartphone games are just so incredibly mindless in ways that those optimization games aren't. While you're not doing anything important you are actually doing things and solving problems.

tomatotomato37• 7 years ago

I wonder if a career in software engineering is the difference between a functional computer addict and nonfuctional addict. It really gives a new perspective to the concept of developers jamming out in a hackathon for 24+ hours while sleeping under desks and trying to stay in a flow stats as long as possible

friendlybus• 7 years ago

Can't help but agree. The health effects of computers are not really understood. We've been rushing to harness their power to great effect, but what is the cost of having a computer? I know some people in therapeutic sphere are terrified of technology, saying it replaces people. You only need to dip into some Baudrillard or philosophy in general to see arguments about the impact of computer use, and they basically mirror real life.

I don't know how much of that is the deep dark truth, but there needs to be some separation between the harnessing of computing power for political, social & economic progress and living a normal life.

thefounder• 7 years ago

The main issue with games addiction is that at the end of the day/night/week you are poorer both socially and financially. The financial aspect is quite important and often makes the difference between a "devoted" worker/workaholic and a "junkie".

benj1112• 7 years ago

Is there much difference between doing that and doing an ultra marathon or whatever?

I suppose the marathon is 'healthier', but it's the same basic drivers, pushed to a somewhat unhealthy degree.

chongli• 7 years ago

It’s actually that. I would even go so far as to say “functional addict” is a bit of an oxymoron. People compulsively repeat all kinds of different behaviours. Some of those have a lot of people willing to pay you (programming), others less so (gaming), and some none at all (intravenous drugs).

matheusmoreira• 7 years ago

It's really no wonder. Way too many games are straight up designed to create habits in the players.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_gam...

Rewards and punishments are used to create schedules. They make player do the things the company wants them to do when they want them to do it. A simple example:

- playing every day rewards the player with bonus items

- taking a break punishes the player by making them weaker relative to other players

And of course there are those wonderful companies which reward players that spend money and punish those that don't.

WHO already recognizes the existence of a gaming disorder:

https://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/

It's only a matter of time before this industry is regulated.

braintic• 7 years ago

Will it be regulated, its profits are a reward for controlling a section of the population when their hormone levels make them hard to control? Do you not think the military and law enforcement like citizens staying still playing a game so they cant get into trouble? Of course, what future opportunities are lost because society took an easy option and kept them dummed down? Its like parents who don't like their kids being hyperactivity when consuming Sodium Benzoate in drinks and foods even though hyperactivating is a sign the kid is healthy and Sodium Benzoate (cinnamon) is a nootropic.

t34543• 7 years ago

Should lump socal media into this, too.

jtms• 7 years ago

Perhaps. “The feed” certainly shares many of the same qualities of intentionally addictive games.

grawprog2• 7 years ago

I'm glad I got out of playing games like that when I did. Having diablo 2 when I was young was bad enough. I wasted a good amount of my teenage years on that game. It pioneered a lot of those Skinner box mechanics that those pay to win, I can't even call them games, scams have refined to a tee and use heavily. I'm glad I never grew up with games like that everywhere. At least I see them for what they are these days, I'd hate to think how hooked I might have gotten on those things.

joelx• 7 years ago

I am really struggling to ever put my phone down. I get stuck in a loop of checking email, then Facebook, then a series of news websites including hacker news. Then repeat all day.

unicornfinder• 7 years ago

As ridiculous as it sounds a serious benefit to me of owning a Mac is that it's utterly useless for gaming.

jotm• 7 years ago

Purchasing boxes that have a chance of giving loot. Upgrading your gear in the game depends on chance.

It's just getting the players used to gambling and filtering out those who are resistant (they won't make money by going on a spending spree).

Ban virtual gambling.

52-6F-62• 7 years ago

I love playing the NHL games with my brother who lives several hours away.

But dammit if that didn't describe them exactly.

knightofmars• 7 years ago

Include timed content that occurs on specific schedules (bi-weekly, monthly, etc).

goatinaboat• 7 years ago

This is why the NHS is permanently underfunded... because it is always called on to do additional things but it can never ditch any existing obligations. Any serious discussion of funding must start with stopping taking on more until the existing functions are budgeted for, then we can talk about extras.

Tobacco was taxed to cover the cost of healthcare associated with it, so games and social media should be taxed the same way.

vertex-four• 7 years ago

In this case, these kids were likely seeing psychs anyway - maybe even the same psychs. Setting up a clinic basically amounts to setting aside an amount of time in the month for a doctor to take existing caseload on from the existing system and hiring a receptionist.

The problem is that highly specialised clinics breed power imbalances - you don’t usually have another option for where to go because other doctors refuse to touch the subject matter now that there’s a specialised clinic for it, so getting treatment involves conforming to whatever the clinic doctor demands of you, no matter how undignified or inhumane.

DrScientist4• 7 years ago

If your are solely data driven, without any higher vision ( eg creating enriching experiences ) then this is what you get ( and Coca Cola and high sugar and fat burgers and fake news ).

The question is - is it solely buyer/user beware or do the vendors have a duty of care? Note these games products are often aimed at children.

The opioids and tabacco lawsuits would suggest people expect companies to have have some duty of care.

In the gambling industry, governments tend to strongly regulate, and place duty of care rules on companies.

As data and machine learning leads to optimization of exploitation of human weaknesses for gain, what do we do?

There are already open source games - how would you manage that? make it illegal - imprison people?? ( like for drug use )?

This problem is at the heart of the question of freewill/or whether the strong should be allowed to ruthlessly exploit the weak.

swiley4• 7 years ago

There are already open source games - how would you manage that? make it illegal - imprison people?? ( like for drug use )?

That is interesting, I've definitely gone through periods where I felt "addicted" to freeciv and openTTD. I wouldn't make them illegal though, they can be helpful tools for managing your mental state.

DrScientist4• 7 years ago

Not suggesting freeciv should be made illegal - just a thought experiment.

So if it was decided they are harmful - you could consider the drug analogy. Making with intent to supply is illegal or being involved in distribution - not actually sure about creation for own use.

It might sound like a silly idea - but some countries have actually banned video games. Malaysia banned arcade games about 20 years ago. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/957636.stm

bwang008• 7 years ago

In a parallel universe I'd like to know what these people would do with their lives if they did not become addicted to games.

I. E. What percent would lead normal lives, what amount would become addicted to something else like gambling, drugs, or television, and such.

What I am wondering is how much of this is due to games being at fault and how much of it is on the person + biological inclination to become easily addicted?

Yea, games do design tricks to get people to keep playing, but so do casinos and there is very little sympathy in society for people who are addicted to gambling.

Gaming addiction is still relatively new and needs more studying. The question I pose is, if someone was going to get addicted, would it be better for a person to be addicted to games, or would you prefer something else?

pbhjpbhj• 7 years ago

Seems like a pretty dystopian outlook: "might as well be addicted to something less harmful than gambling/drugs/sex"?

If we could inhibit the exploitation of addictive characteristics for profit, that would be good.

(Cue slippery slope arguments!)

DrScientist4• 7 years ago

Perhaps amongst many, there is little sympathy for people addicted to gambling or indeed drugs, however the government still regulates these areas.

This is because government understands while there is obviously variation between people, the key drivers for these things are not innate, rather social. ie opportunity, environment.

This is highlighted by other addiction patterns - painkillers, tobacco, even caffeine - these are not limited to a small group of 'losers'.

Faark• 7 years ago

Targeting 13 to 25 year old's seems awfully young. Near all in my media addiction self help group are older, quite a few of them significantly.

Such help only works if the individual actually wants to change itself, and the realization for this to be necessary can require quite a bit of "damage" to occur. Especially if parents (inadvertently) enable the behavior. They themselves got to fight in that dispute as well, just sending your child to therapist tends to be a waste of time. Didn't work on the few anecdotes I've seen/heard. Didn't work on me when my parents tried long ago. Took embarrassingly long for me to finally seek help with the intent to change.

Btw, if anyone near Berlin (Ger) is willing to give a Dev with little professional experience and lots of blank space on the CV a chance, please shoot me a message.

mschuster91• 7 years ago

Btw, if anyone near Berlin (Ger) is willing to give a Dev with little professional experience and lots of blank space on the CV a chance, please shoot me a message.

Munich-based so can't help you directly, but look for the various marketing agency networks. They all have offices with openings in Berlin and have a constant need for new staff.

lanevorockz• 7 years ago

Would much rather have a clinic for Social Media mental diseases.

Angostura• 7 years ago

You're in luck - this is for gaming and social media.

C1sc0cat• 7 years ago

MM this new "gaming disorder" that's been invented and pushed by certain countries.

You could make the same argument about hardcore soccer fans.

Its also common for domestic abuse to happen after the abusers team loses.

izzydata2• 7 years ago

I don't disagree that people can be unhealthily addicted to sports. Those people probably should seek help too.

sylens• 7 years ago

I used to think this was really far fetched but there's a whole subreddit dedicated to folks affected by this. People constantly post on there about how they become so obsessed with climbing a multiplayer ladder or getting achievements/trophies that they miss class, bail on social functions, skip work, etc.

LoveDeathRobots• 7 years ago

Do the parents bare any responsibility?

izzydata2• 7 years ago

I'm grateful I was finally able to kick my gaming addiction. Better late than never, but I feel like I wasted too much of my 20s and now I'm already 30. I used to convince myself that it was fine as long as I was having fun. In hindsight I can finally see how much of a colossal waste of time it was. There is definitely some healthy level of gaming that can be done. However, when your priorities put gaming at the top and everything you do is in order to get back to gaming you should understand that it is a problem.

cs02rm0• 7 years ago

Games or not, when you're relatively young you'll waste time by the standards of your elders. At least it's not drugs or criminal gangs.

Youth is wasted on the young.

bArray2• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, suicide and depression rises for children in the UK [1]. I would really rather the NHS prioritize the massive mental health crisis (affecting children and adults) instead of bad parenting.

There are ratings on the games for a reason. Also, there are already laws regarding children and gambling, they simply have to enforce them.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...

theonlyklas• 7 years ago

Maybe bad parenting results in a massive (mental) health crisis?

bArray2• 7 years ago

Maybe, but the solution for stopping young children getting addicted to gaming is simple - stop giving kids gambling games, monitor any online play and teach them to play games for healthy amounts of time.

I personally can't point to a single thing a parent can do in order to greatly reduce the mental health crisis and I'm not sure it's yet well understood. What is clear though is that behaviours that lead to suicide (e.g. depression) are spot-able and treatable to some extent.

stuaxo• 7 years ago

Great, hopefully one will open for people addicted to the web too.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

This is probably unpopular but I can't help but feel the X addiction framing is reminiscent of drapetomania. No freaking shit that kids would prefer games to schoolwork and chores. I am sure many of us have fathers or grandfathers who would rather fish than work.

Narcistic bad psychology based upon what they want and expect from others as the standard of health instead of trying to understand motivations and incentives. That has been a reoccurring theme with later discredited bad psychology like treating homosexuality as a mental illness to be cured, or infamous uses of institutionalization of "troublesome" people. It betrays an ironically terrible theory of mind.

Now there certainly are uses as unhealthy coping mechanisms and executive dysfunction but addiction loses meaning when abused to apply to literally every source of pleasure.

The pathological cases would be better referred to as compulsive behavior instead of addiction - a subtle but very important distinction.

bdamm3• 7 years ago

Addiction has earned a medical definition in recent decades, and it focuses on the psychological feeling of craving and the persistent compulsive behavior. Thus, under the modern definition of addiction, yes you can experience craving for all kinds of non-substance things, beyond tolerance. (And, obviously, Substance Tolerance as a separate thing has also received a rigorous medical definition, but that came earlier than addiction.)

Of course I'd prefer to play games rather than do chores. And as a father I'm concerned that my son is spending too much time on the iPad playing minecraft. Is he an addict? Should there be intervention? He does seem to experience craving. Could it be a persistent compulsive behavior? For now he's able to put down the iPad and do the homework we all know needs to be done, so no, I don't view that as addiction and I don't think it fits the definition. But if it becomes an overriding compulsion to the exclusion of most other behaviors, then absolutely we should call that addiction and treat it like addiction.

"Big Tech" knows this quite well I think and we all should know that our A/B testing that's focused on user engagement is, in fact, curating addictive behavior.

aszantu• 7 years ago

Addiction is a need for connection that isn't fulfilled. Need peace of mind? Play some ego shooter. Can't get hugged? Use drugs. Looking for appreciation? Go for Facebook Instagram Twitter etc. I'm addicted to gaming. Having a keyboard under my fingers gives me a high. Why? Well people don't know loyalty. Authorities have been abusive. We're told our world is dieing and still politics is unwilling to change anything (feels like it at least). Nothing meaningful to do for a kid. Except maybe go protest for a better future. And even greta seems to be a tool. Which is pretty cynical.

NHS opens clinic to help child addicts of computer games

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