Having uncovered the fishy doings of FIFA, why is the BBC's flagship investigative programme telling us something we already know - that some people get addicted?
Check your calendar for a second. That's right, this is 2010. Video games became a commercial reality in 1972, the year Atari distributed the first Pong arcade cabinets. They have been a part of mainstream culture for 30 years. Why, suddenly, is the prospect of "games addiction" a suitable subject for the BBC's flagship current affairs programme?
I asked this question before watching the Panorama programme 'Addicted To Games', and having seen it, I'm still baffled. Reporter Rafael Rowe talks to several young men whose lives have been blighted by obsessive games playing. He travels to South Korea and looks at how the country's fast broadband access has created a generation of keen online gamers, 2% of whom have been described as addicts by the Korean government. He talks to Adrian Hon, founder of games studio Six to Start about 'the hidden techniques' developers use to ensnare gamers. Except they turn out not to be hidden techniques; they are the psychological mechanism known as "variable rate of reinforcement", tested on rats in the 1960s. It seems humans respond to non-predictable forms of reward. An incredible revelation.
Rowe chinstrokes his way through the interviews with a look of ponderous concern. I could only marvel at how self-defeating it all seemed. Chris Dando kicked his sister's bedroom door in when his parents turned off his connection to World of Warcraft; Joe Staley dropped out of university when he became addicted to his Xbox. But focusing on these extreme cases just showed me how abnormal games addiction is, and how these sad stories are so unlike anything I've encountered in the 30 years I've been playing games.
"That was the point we started to realise, God, this is dangerous," said Chris's mother, commenting on the door-kicking incident. Somehow, she'd missed the fact that he was playing WoW for 16 hours a day. At home. In his bedroom. I don't want to judge someone else's parenting ? at ages three and five my sons are too young and daft to be left unmonitored longer than about half an hour. But 16 hours a day? I'd hope my alarm bells would have started ringing slightly before any sort of foot-furniture interaction.
In South Korea, Rowe visits a boot camp for recovering game addicts; he watches the kids doing star jumps on a beach. One mother, referring to her son's online games addiction, says "I've tried hitting him a lot" ? it's a moment of Brass Eye-like surreality that says more than any child psychologist ever could about the potential causes of problem games playing. Some kids need to escape.
One valid point. South Korea, with its solid, fast broadband service, may well present an image of our future: maybe the problems that are being encountered there hint at problems coming our way in the UK? But then maybe not. Panorama reduces the whole issue to a technological level ? the insinuation is that the only reason we don't have 2 million online gaming addicts in this country is that our broadband isn't up to the job.
It's a ridiculous argument. There are enormous social and cultural differences between South Korea and the UK, and the way entertainment technology has evolved there is bewilderingly different to the way it has happened here. We don't have masses of teenagers sitting in PC Bangs every night, and that's not because our internet connection is crap; indeed, the games they're obsessively playing over in Korea ? massively multiplayer online titles and real-time strategy games ? are often specifically designed to scale according to the capabilities of the systems they're running on. World of Warcraft will run on any piece of shit PC you can buy, and does masses of work to overcome latency and lag issues. How weird, how reductive, to suggest the only difference between us and a country several thousand miles away is bandwidth.
I'm not rubbishing the whole concept of the programme. As Dr Mark Griffiths, an oft-quoted expert on the psychology of gaming, says at one point, "people seem to display the signs and symptoms you get with more traditional addictions". I'm prepared to believe that games can be a problem to vulnerable people, just as drugs, alcohol and gambling can be. Just as television can be.
But here's the thing: what was the point of this documentary? Wide-scale scaremongering is unnecessary, given the rarity of the problem. And let's face it, if some parents haven't cottoned on to to the fact that games can trigger compulsive behaviour in children, will a half-hour current affairs programme do the trick? Will the slight hand-slapping that Rowe gives UKIE director general Mike Rawlinson about not having the dangers of addiction flagged up on his website really turn things around? And why should UKIE take such a step, when there's no reliable evidence on the subject? Why should the industry fund research into games addiction ? a request made by Rowe ? when that's the surest way to make any outcomes questionable? Objectivity is a key element here, surely?
I think that games industry news site MCV perfectly sums up this inconsequential and at times manipulative investigation:
"People have addictive personalities. Said people can conceivably become addicted to games. As games become more popular that risk increases."
It's nothing new. It's nothing profound.
Meanwhile, on my last two trips into London, I have seen massive student protests; I have seen anti-capitalist activists staging a sit-down protest outside Top Shop on Oxford Street, enraged by corporate tax avoidance. Surely, here are the stories the BBC's leading current affairs strand should be investigating? And surely this report, and last week's on the FIFA World Cup voting system, represent little �more than the tabloidisation of a once hugely important television institution?
The programme ends with a trip to the Eurogamer Expo in London. Rowe says, in a voiceover cut with images of people playing and enjoying games: "It's easy to forget the benefits and pure joy games bring to people's lives. I don't want to stop my boy gaming, but I'm going to keep an extra close eye on him to make sure he games safely."
And, hey, I had that same idea about my own sons. But I didn't need a documentary to tell me this was a good idea. The fact that someone felt that we did need it says that there are much, much bigger problems in British homes than a box in the corner that plays games.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2010/dec/06/bbc-panorama-games-addiction-review
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