Addiction

I must admit that I, at various stages in my university life, have become temporarily attached to certain games available on certain social network sites… I never played them because they were particularly interesting or exciting, but because they offered a ‘rapid feedback loop’. The last one, which I was prone to for a week or two, was called ‘Gnome Town’. I repeat; ‘GNOME TOWN’. Like any other Facebook game, it offered XP for menial tasks like such as clearing leaves and building cabins for forest creatures…(?!?). What is so cunning (and annoying) about the design of the game is that when you plant seeds to grow food, you must come back to water them every fifteen minutes or so. Such an awkward amount of time means that leaving the computer would be pointless because you can’t really get much done in fifteen real world minutes. While Gnome Town had a satisfying reward system that made it hard to break away from, when I did detach myself from it, I felt no compulsion to return to it.

Rob Cover says in Discourse of the Gaming (Ad)diction Myth that people who fear massively for those who they think have become addicted to video games worry about ‘an illusory dichotomy between the “real” and the “virtual”.’ The fear that the player may begin to blur their perception of what is in the real world and what is ‘fake’. Now, I never thought that it was possible to become so immersed in such a situated way in a Facebook game that you spend more time and money on it than you do in the offline world, but apparently it is.

In this video, it is apparent that this woman falls into the ‘problematic user’ category. She doesn’t her son who is filming her and is totally involved in what is happening on the screens… All four of them.