Wow, that's a stirring paragraph you pulled out there. Gaming does sometimes seize my brain, in unsettling ways. I guess our art and critique is deepened when we aknowledge the mixed bag presented by this unusually engaging medium.

Sometimes, when I'm on hour six of City of Heroes and I have a big deadline looming, or ten other things I should be doing to develop myself as a writer, I think to myself, "Well, Burroughs spent a lot of his time scoring dope and getting high. Playing games is my version of that journey to the unproductive addictive soothing compelling."

I think there should sometimes be an AA group for gamers. If I had a nickel for every time I told myself that whatever I'm writing can wait for me to level up in City of Heroes, finish just this one course in Mario Golf: Advance Tour, or just a few more games of NHL 2004, well, I'd certainly have a lot of nickels now, wouldn't I?

Comparitively, games are a lot less damaging and a lot cheaper than the harder drugs. And hell, perhaps generations past can say their addictions led them to believe they could fly. But only our addiction lets us be Tiger Woods, Martin St. Louis, and the Messiahnator all in one night. And that has to count for something.

Or I could be rationalizing my own addictions.

A quote I just read recently by Nietzsche says:

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

Society's been odd in a way that in encourages us to specialize, to excel in something specific, almost to the exclusion of other things. We get rewarded for this with power, status, money, whatever. So why are we surprised about our tendencies to obsess over only a few things in our lives?

Not only is there sometimes an AA group for gamers, Mike, OLGANON exists nigh constantly!

I suppose I've logged too many hours on City of Heroes and Mario Golf recently to notice it, haha.

Perhaps there's a good reason that gaming is the new "drug." It's completely legal - no chance to get a nice mark on your record. It's cheap, comparatively. And it's a rather social medium. Meet new people, visit new worlds, kill new people inside those new worlds.

At the same time, just about anything can be addicting to a damaging extent. And not just the EVILS (always uppercase) of society as noted by many morality groups. I know a woman that locks herself up in her basement hours a day to make quilts. And she does it as a hobby, usually just gives them away to people.

Playing video games releases dopamine in your brain, which is responsible for concentration and pleasure and is highly addictive. Additionally, dopamine stores can be depleted, leaving you pleasureless and without focus after long sessions of Wind Waking (my current vice).

What interests me just as much as the personal aspect involved in addiction is the - for lack of a better word - corporate one.

To what extent do game designers and publishers (perhaps unknowingly) prey on the addictive qualities of video games?

Bringing it back to Zelda as an example... As much as I love the series, its side quests (and even the main quest at times) require often ridiculous time-wasting exercises. My favorite, thus far, being a birdman who wasn't satisfied with sending his girlfriend the one rare feather I had brought him and demanded I find 20. Of course, the thought of a reward gets the dopamine churning and I'm off to hunt ocean ospreys. The challenges offer no particularly rewarding gameplay, but they do keep you playing the game. And, in the very nature of the thing, that equals "pleasure".

This sort of gameplay has been increasing rapidly. Personally, I think it's lazy design, although it may be justified lazy design (ie how do you fill up the enormous world you've created?). Of course, there is that shadowy possibility that the incorporation of rewarded repetitive tasks is (also?) purposefully addicting.

To place some focus back on gamers, I regularly read critics (ie the vocal members of our culture) pan games for NOT having such menial tasks or for not having an artificial reward system in order to "unlock" game features. Are we screaming for the nicotine when the tobacco is the best we've ever smoked?

Oh yea, doubtlessly people are demanding that games be longer-lasting. I remember one of my friends being pissed off because the first Crash Bandicott was "great but too short". As if the amount of time spent determines the value of the games. I miss those good old games that only took a week or so to finish. I remember Final Fantasy XII and Zelda on 64 as the first games that took "too long".

Lazy Design or not, game designers and cooperation are competing with each other for clientele base - people rarely play more than a couple of games at a time, so the longer you can keep someone playing, the better. And if it can be done without a massive amount of money and time spent rewriting a game completely, the better. I think WoTC showed game executives a thing or two with their Magic The Gathering series and how long they can extend a card game franchise that really isn't offering anything innovative anymore at this point.

when management drew up some of the the initial design documentation at the studio where i work, they had made a list of one-word attributes that were to be considered goals for the game design. one of these words was "sticky," which drew snickers from almost everyone outside of the management clan because of how silly it sounded. we all knew that the author of the document meant to say that the game should be "addictive" but didn't have the courage to put the a-word in print.

i don't think that this illustrates malicious people that have intent to make profit from people that are potentially helpless to say no to a product. i do think, however, that there's a certain amount of denial necessary to make greed and pride to live in the same head as ethics (whether those ethics are realistic or not).

it's a long-held fantasy of mine to create something that's that was so well done and so immersive that people *want* to experience it again and again, like i want to see van gogh's mullberry tree over and over again. i certainly don't want people to ruin their lives over something i've helped to create but it seems unrealistic to expect to have that kind of control over other people.

perhaps there is a small equalizer in the fact that specifically mmorpg projects can be a malignant addiction for the corporate entity as well-- to the point of death for some.

One thing that has to be considered about games is that they vary. While we most often talk about more narrative structured games, including games like Everquest, others are addictive simply because they can be played for a few minutes. PopCap seems to specialize in games that are simple, easy to play, and take only about ten minutes a pop to play, yet are completely addictive and long-lasting.

"Strange Adventures in Infinite Space" by Cheapass games is another example.

Sometimes it ain't how long the game is, but how many times you can play it.

I liked the reference to Burroughs, he's my hero. I write about videogames, and I teach "videogames culture" in university. But I am also a "dope fiend", a 35 years old pot head that has always mixed videogames with drugs (almost exclusively pot, I don't do cocaine almost anymore, coke puts you in high gear to socialize, not to play games).

Are there studies of the relationships between videogames and drugs?

It would be very interesting to see the effect of that release of dopamine with what happens in my brain when I smoke pot...

Cheers from Barcelona

jpb ppyt psycholog zdrowa żywność nieruchomości projektowanie stron agencja reklamowa soczewki kontaktowe nauka angielskiego agroturystyka opony klimatyzacja domy opieki akupunktura hydraulik projektowanie wnętrz soha jpk paa ki wypadki tfrd jh sw jft pp fdr

Download eMule 0.47c Program P2P do bezposredniej wymiany plików p2p.
Idealny do wyszukiwania programów, gier, filmów i muzyki w Sieci P2P.Umożliwia wymiane różnego rodzaju plików, np. audio, wideo, graficznych, obrazów płyt CD itp. Jego zaleta jest interfejs w jezyku polskim.Wszystkie wybrane pliki, programy sa podczas pobierania sprawdzane dla wyeliminowania możliwosci wystapienia w nich błedów. W razie, gdy plik emule mods bedzie uszkodzony, aplikacja naprawi uszkodzona czesc co znacznie poprawia komfort pracy z programem instalacja emule. Program umożliwia podglad filmów i archiwów, które nie sa do końca pobrane.
Prosty i skuteczny katalog stron mechanizm wyszukiwania filmów pozwala na szybkie odnalezienie interesujacego nas pliku. Zapraszam do pobrania i przetestowac samemu :-) Wiecej informacji na najwiekszym Polskim Forum eMule Pomoc gdzie znajdziesz wszystko co dotyczy emule, linki ed2k do emule mase filmow muzyki itp.ServerList - Czyli spis Najlepszych i Bezpiecznych serwerów eMule, ich ipfilter na jakim pracuja, adresy portów. W razie problemów mozesz sie dowiedziec jak miec hight id w emule aby nie dostac low id.Modyfikacje eMule miedzy innymi znajdziecie: 0.47c ScarAngel 1.7, 0.47c MorphXT 9.2, 0.47c Xtreme 5.3.1, 0.47c StulleMule 4.1, 0.47a FRTK EVOSTAR, eMule Plus 1.2a