Dawn of a New Light

           

Krakowiak          8

Michael Krakowiak

April 28, 2012

Dawn of a New Light

A faint radiance pierces the veil of darkness, revealing a dutiful servant of the light. The dimly lit sanctuary features the servant submitting himself in reverence of the light with blind devotion to the tenets of his faith: fasting to enable prolonged worship, the endless pursuit of the light's euphoria, and achieving this euphoria at any cost. Sadly, blind devotion and addiction are interchangeable.

The servant yearns not for liquor's silky smooth caress to pass his thin, sickly lips. He is devoid of the ecstatic rush felt when a needle pierces his malnourished, leathery flesh. Undeterred by the allure of precious crystals rendered to soothing stardust in a pipe's infernal cauldron, our servant finds himself at the behest of a far more demanding master: A TV screen, a video game console, and a "controller", aptly named for its supreme powers of persuasion over said servant. The controller/controlled dynamic's bittersweet irony fails to stir the dutiful servant from his catatonic state, for such is the fate of someone who suffers from video game addiction. Indeed, if overlooked and under-researched, video game addiction can become the next widespread addiction epidemic to ensnare the world in the coming years of the new millennium.

The history of video game addiction can be traced back to David, the quintessential college student described in Kelly and Rheingold's 1994 article in "Wired" magazine. David's behavior, much like public perception of video game addiction, seems harmless at first glance: "David spends twelve hours a day as Lotsu, a swashbuckling explorer in a subterranean world of dungeons and elves. He should be in class, but he has succumbed to the latest fad sweeping college campuses: total immersion in multi-user fantasy games." MUD, or Multi-User Dungeons, offers irresistable satisfaction for those seeking escape from life's daily rigors, asking in return only the paltry price of 12 hours a day in neglect of essential real-life activities such as attending class. Of course, college students neglecting class is hardly an uncommon or necessarily detrimental activity, and can be caused by a host of beneficial activities. Following that logic, the stress relief and sense of reward gained from playing MUD should be viewed no differently. This very logic, however, allows the issue's warning signs to be made light of...until the darkness of death claims its first victim.

Andersen's Gamespot.com article sheds light on the story of Lee Seung Seop, purported to have "seemed to lead a typical gamer's life." Park Chul Hun, the office manager of Lee's former employer, mentions "There was nothing odd about him except that he was a game addict. We all knew about it. He couldn't stop himself." Video game addiction, however, would soon lead Seop to take an atypical turn: On Wednesday, August 2005, Lee entered a PC Internet cafand sat down to play Starcraft. During this time, he reportedly ate and drank very little (if at all) and left his PC only to take restroom breaks. Suddenly, Lee coiled over from his chair and fell onto the floor; a witness recalls he was conscious with his eyes open. He was rushed to nearby Taegu Fatima Hospital where he died a few hours later. Park Young Woo, a Taegu Fatima Hospital psychiatrist, describes the cause of death, stating "He was so concentrated on his game that he forgot to eat and sleep. He died of heart failure brought on by exhaustion and dehydration." The attraction of conquering violent alien races in vividly rendered intergallactic warfare proved to be Seop's undoing. His death, however, wasn't entirely in vain.

Seop's untimely demise provoked precautionary actions around the world to forcibly prevent others from meeting similar fates. Andersen's article details how "A local law prohibits minors from entering Internet caf between the hours of 10 p.m. and 9 a.m" is enforced to discourage video game addicts from marathon gaming sessions, while BBC news recounts how China is taking proactive measures to discourage the development of video game addiction by hitting addicts where it hurts most: their characters. The new system will impose penalties on players who spend more than three hours playing a game by reducing the abilities of their characters. Gamers who spend more than five hours will have the abilities of their in-game character severely limited. Players will be forced to take a five-hour break before they can return to a game.

The Chinese aren't restricting their efforts to a player's character, however. Humphrey Cheung elaborates in his article on tgdaily.com how the Chinese government has "opened clinics for people who are addicted to online games, chatting and web surfing." and goes on to mention that "here, patients are subjected to yelling, psychiatric counseling and the ever so helpful electrical shock treatements." Despite their best efforts, the measures taken by the Chinese and Korean governments simply treat symptoms instead of looking deeper to find the source of the problem: Lack of research into this rising epidemic and overlooking the gravity of the situation. Likewise, sceptics could argue that Seop was a responsible adult in control of the decisions he made, and that, after all, he did it to himself. Perhaps, then, the blood of the innocent could persuade the naysayers?

Seop's death, though tragic, was admittedly self-imposed. The same cannot be said of Gregg Kleinmark's twins and the fate these innocents met due to neglectful parenting brought on by video game addiction. An article on Toledoblade.com tells us how "Prosecutors say Gregg Kleinmark left the babies in a bathtub at a home in Fostoria for at least thirty minutes while he played a video game!", which led to both twins drowning. However unintentional their deaths were, they were directly caused by video game addiction. As with all addictions, the momentary necessity to sate a primal desire for euphoria overrides all sense of logic or responsibility. The lack of intent on Kleinmark's part could support the case of the incident being an unfortunate accident by those unconvinced of video game addiction's dangers. Tyrone Spellman's mutilated 17-month old daughter was afforded no such luxury.

News.sky.com recounts a vile narrative of how Tyrone Spellman, a 27-year-old Philadelphia resident, "killed his 17-month-old daughter in a rage over a broken Xbox" "with at least five blows to the head" and how "the force of the blows cracked the toddler's skull several times." What exactly was the fatal error the toddler made to seal her fate? "In a police statement the next day, he said he became enraged when the girl pulled down the game console and broke it." Unsupervised exploration of her environs resulted in a sinister rage snuffing the life of an innocent little girl from this world forever. Unsavory as it proves itself to be, there are those who task themselves with explaining how rage can be induced from any stimulus at any time and therefore can't be inextricably linked to video game addiction in particular. Daniel Petric's brutally murdered mother and wounded father beg to differ.

The sordid affair can be found in an article on news.com.au, where: Daniel Petric, 17, planned to kill his parents because he was angry that his father would not allow him to play Halo 3. On the night of the murder, the Ohio teenager used his father's key to open a box and remove the game, plus a 9mm handgun, the Associated Press reported. Petric went into a room and said to his parents: "Would you close your eyes? I have a surprise for you." Petric's father, Mark, said he was expecting a nice surprise. Instead, his head went numb from the gunshot, the Associated Press reported. In preparing Petric's defense, his attorney, James Kersey, attempted to plead insanity for his client, only to be rudely awakened to the nefarious nature of the crime, as Judge James Burge mentions: " I firmly believe that Daniel Petric had no idea at the time he hatched this plot that if he killed his parents they would be dead forever." Video game addiction has warped Petric's mind to the point where the reality of his mother's death is unable to register as it would in a sensible person's. Knowing that video game addiction can result in negligent manslaughter, crimes of passion and even cold, premeditated murder, can we, as a society, truly afford to continue turning a blind eye to the emergence of this epidemic? Have we the leeway to scoff at the validity of these claims on the basis of "insufficient research" into the matter? We certainly do, if we don't mind allowing the opportunity for this addiction to present itself in the next generation of gamers.

Lindsey Tanner's article on msnbc.msn.com cites "Up to 90% of American youngsters play video games, and as many as 15% of them - more than 5 million kids - may be addicted.", revealing that, if further research into the matter is obstructed, these youths could be left to their own devices. Addicted youths left to fester will almost certainly display the symptoms mentioned by the American Medical Association's Report of the Council on Science and Public Health report 12-A-07, such as increased "aggressive cognition, affect, and behavior, and [decreased] prosocial behavior in the short term", "symptoms of time usage and social dysfunction/disruption appear in patterns similar to that of other addictive disorders", and "dependence-like behaviors can also occur in minors, and include preoccupation and family/school disruption." Allowing these symptoms to spread to a greater segment of the American youth population is sheer folly that would certainly lead to widespread addiction. Yet, with the video game industry reporting record profits year after year, it's more critical than ever to act now.

According to the Entertainment Software Association's 2005 Sales, Demographics and Usage Data statistics, 75% of heads of households play computer or video games. 53% of players expect to play more than they do now in 10 years' time. In 1996, U.S. computer and video game sales totalled 3.7 billion dollars. By 2004, that number doubled to reach 7.3 billion dollars. As Lev Grossman from "Time" puts it,

Whatever these games 'mean' to the people who play them...they mean a lot. Fifteen years ago, video games were barely more than a cottage industry, if by cottage you mean the sticky back corner of a stripmall bowling alley. Last year game sales hit $7 billion, in the same exclusive ballpark as movies (about $9 billion). We should

count ourselves lucky. The video game is a brand-new medium, and we get to see it evolve from the very beginning.

The positive correlation between the video game industry's meteoric rise in profits and the number of American youths who are addicted to video games can only imply that, if the industry itself is allowed to grow uninhibited, we can only expect grisly deaths like in the Kleinmark, Spellman and Petric cases to become more frequent and widespread. Anything else would be pure and simple denial. Ironically, it's this very same denial that's part of the solution.

In order to truly begin taking the steps necessary to stop the spread of this global epidemic, we must stop turning a blind eye to the problems at hand. Living in denial and claiming that compulsive gaming, which disrupts a healthy lifestyle, interferes with basic social relations, and leads to murder isn't an addiction. In an addict's quest for redemption, the first step must always be acknowledging that he has an addiction. All the revelations in the world, however, serve as little benefit to society and offer no solace to those who suffered at the hands of video game addiction when applied by themselves. Indeed, once recovery has occurred, drastic legislative action must be taken.

Legislation that calls for the inclusion of video game addiction as a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems will offer video game addiction research the validation, and therefore the possibility for financial support, it needs in order to provide those who suffer at the hands of this disease the healing they require. As it stands now, video game addiction research is restricted to private funding as its chief source of support, but granting the addiction nationally recognized disease status, along the lines of alcoholism, gambling, sex and drug addiction, will allow and provoke the interest of the federal government to finance future research that will prove crucial to understanding and preventing video game addiction.

Ignorance, however, shall always stand firm as the enemy of progress. If our society continues to suppress video game addiction research by starving it through lack of funding while simultaneously writing the disease's symptoms off as "unsubstantiated" or "exaggerated", the tragic deaths of all those who suffered under a video game addict will only serve as the first lambs to the slaughter in the coming years.

The dutiful servant continues to uphold the video game addict's creed, never questioning how or why as he stares into the radiant ether, his fingers twitching furiously along his "controller". As a doomed slave of a false idol, just how much "control" does the video game addict exert in this new technocracy? About as much as anyone who believes in what is arguably the greatest lie ever told: There's a chemical solution for a spiritual problem.