by Fernando Mendez

There were no clocks in the room, no way of telling just how long I had been sitting there playing that game. The ache in my back told me I had been there way too long though. My thumbs throbbed and thumped, rubbed raw by the video game controller. The television, the only source of light in the dark room, bathed me in its glow; my face was only inches from the screen. My blood-shot, heavy-lidded eyes jerked left to right, scanning the screen, trying to stay focused. I had survived hordes of zombies, mutated dogs, and other monstrosities, only to discover that my greatest battle would be against the need to sleep. I had foolishly chosen not to save my progress at the last few save points, thinking my then seventeen-year-old body had enough gas to go all night long. Onscreen, my character walked down a carpeted, door-lined hallway.

“One of these damn doors has to have a place to save behind it,” I groaned, as my character opened the left door at the end of the hall.

Waiting for me behind the door, a bus-sized alligator jumped out killing my character. A few seconds passed; I stared at the screen, my jaw hung to the floor, my brain trying to register what had just happened.

“You gotta’ be shitting me?” I shouted, jumping out of the chair, throwing the control to the ground. “Damn, I seriously just spent at least five hours playing this game for nothing,” I thought, letting out a lunatic’s laugh.

“Forget this, I’m going to bed,” I said, turning off the game.

Back in high school, I discovered myself teetering on the brink of addiction to video games. After my mother thought I was asleep, I’d turn on my game and play a few more times before finally calling it a night. It never went so far as to negatively affect my life or schoolwork, but looking back now, I can see how close I came to falling into the chasm of addiction.

There is no denying that video games are addictive. Hell, pretty much anything enjoyable can become an addiction: sex, drugs, TV, alcohol, gardening. In my opinion, addictions aren’t necessarily bad. Aside from such obvious things as drugs and alcohol, if a person overly enjoys something like TV or collecting coffee mugs, why not let them do it? However, the addiction becomes a problem when it negatively affects a person’s personal or professional lives, and when it induces irrational behavior, irritability, and disorders such as insomnia. In the past, video game developers didn’t seem to care how long you played, just as long as you bought their game and enjoyed it enough to buy their next one. While videogames have taken countless hours of peoples’ lives since their introduction, the last ten to fifteen years have seen a dramatic change in how they have affected people’s lives.

One of these effects, videogame addiction, has gained worldwide attention due to extreme cases of deaths in the news. It is an addiction that has crossed over into the mainstream; videogame addicts are no longer the overweight, basement-dwelling thirty-somethings once portrayed in popular media. Thanks to online social sites like Facebook, mothers, grandmothers, pretty much everyone now has access to potentially addictive online games. Farmville, a popular game on Facebook, is both user-friendly and easy to play for casual gamers. The game has players planting crops and selling them in order to get access to more profitable crops as well as virtual buildings and decorations. The object of the game is never-ending and highly addictive. Even more mind-boggling to me than its popularity is the fact that a “farmer” can use real money to buy virtual goods in the game. Need gas for you tractor? Why wait for it to refuel for hours for free, take out that credit card and buy some.

Trying to wrap my mind around this idea of using something real to buy something that isn’t, I decided to ask my coworker, who is indeed a “farmer” and has bought stuff for his online farm with real money, why he does it.

“It’s really no big deal. You know that diamond you bought for your wife? Well, that diamond is only valuable cause we say it is. We, people I mean, gave it its value. If we didn’t say it was pretty and valuable it would just be a rock. While what I bought online wasn’t real like you or me, it had real value to me, and served the same purpose as your wife’s ring. You can look at your wife’s ring and think ‘that was worth it,’ and I can look at what I bought and say the same ‘cause I gave it value,” he explained, his face reddening, and his tone becoming noticeably defensive.

“Alright, calm it down. I get what you’re saying. All that ‘reality’s only real ‘cause we believe that it’s real’ stuff, I get it. But I still think it’s stupid,” I replied as he walked off in a huff.

However, with over eighty million “farmers” online playing, and a growing number of imitators, it would seem that at least the developers of games like Farmville are anything but stupid.

While my first effort to get inside a gamer’s mind didn’t go as well as I would have hoped, I decided to visit and talk to my friend, Victor, who is an avid gamer. He and I graduated from high school together in 1998, and out of our little group of friends, he was the only one I kept in contact with since. Our group used to play videogames a lot when we were in high school, but I had lost interest shortly after graduating. I’ve tried to look back and reflect on why I chose to stop playing video games as much as I had used to, but I can never find a reaon; like many young people, I simply lost interest and stopped doing it. I’ll still play the occasional sports videogame, since these games seem to have a definite ending which allows me to do other things in my life, but I’m not familiar with any of the MMOs that are popular today. Unlike me, Victor kept up with the gaming world, and is a regular MMO player. Over the past year my life had become extremely busy and I hadn’t seen him over that time, and really hadn’t talked to him that much either.

I showed up at his parents’ house on a bright Sunday afternoon, and he greeted me at the door. I tried to hide my shock, but it seemed that over the past year, Victor had slowly transformed into the picture of an addicted gamer. An overly vain gym rat before, his once lean physique looked more at home now in an IHOP than a Gold’s gym. His perfectly coifed hair had been replaced with a greasy black mop. After greeting his parents, I followed him back to his room; the gamer’s den. Vintage “Return of the Jedi” curtains blocked out the sun, giving the room a smoky, hazy feel. The floor was littered with miniature mountains of presumably dirty clothes, empty Doritos bags, and a pile of videogame magazines. The Glade room deodorizer he generously sprayed when we entered was no match for the damp, moldy smell that punched me in the gut. He sat down in his chair, put on a headset, picked up his controller, and seemed to forget I was there.

“Go ahead and have a seat,” he finally said, motioning absently to his couch. “What do you need to ask me? It’s for some paper right? Go ahead and shoot.”

I cleared off the clutter of Handy-Snack containers and Hawaiian Punch cans covering his couch and settled in.

“Well, I just need to ask you about what videogames mean to you, why you like them, stuff like that,” I shouted over the boom and bang of gunshots.

“Huh? What you say?”

I tried to get his attention by telling him about some of the research I’d found about video game addiction. I tell him how video game designers seem to intentionally want to make people addicts. According to John Hopson, a video game researcher at Microsoft Game Studios, developer’s needed to keep gamers gaming for as long as they could, and setting up a system of in-game rewards is essential to prolonged game play. He states that the “more certain they are that something good or interesting will happen soon, the harder they’ll play.” He goes on to say that developers need to keep players motivated because “the desire to play your game is always being measured against other activities,” and that “during play they’re comparing their motivation to do the very next thing in the game to all the other next things they could be doing.” He feels that game developers can solve this problem by always insuring that there are multiple in-game activities for the player to accomplish. If killing monsters becomes unrewarding or monotonous, other activities within the game, such as exploration, practicing a new tactic, or improving equipment, can keep the gamer interested. These lesser activities redirect their interest within the game, maintaining longer game play.

“Sounds interesting and all, but what the hell does that have to do with me? Are you trying to say that I’m an addict or something?” he said, never turning around to look at me once.

I saw that the by-the-books research couldn’t pull him away from his game, so I decided that maybe I would go with a different approach, hoping to shock him back to the real world. I told him about the twenty-eight year old South Korean man who died from heart failure stemming from exhaustion after playing a computer game almost non-stop for 50 hours. The man, identified only by his family name Lee, sat down to play the online battle simulation game Starcraft at an internet café, known in Korea as PC bangs, and stayed there for the next three days, stopping only for brief naps or toilet breaks. Lee’s story was that of the stereotypical addicted gamer. After losing his job due to game-related tardiness, and splitting with his girlfriend, Lee went to the local PC bang, and played himself to death.

“Sucks for that dude,” was all he said.

“Hey, I’m gonna go talk to your mom, okay?” I said, understanding I was getting nowhere with him at the moment.

“Yeah, go ahead. I’ll be he…What the hell? I said protect my backside!” I heard him shout as I exited.

I found his mother outside in her garden, and after talking with her for a while, I realized that she had all the information I needed on Victor. According to her, he had been fired from his job six months before for excessive tardiness. Immediately, a red flag went up in my mind, bringing back the story of Lee, the deceased gamer. Then she told me that his long-time girlfriend, Barbara, had broken up with him almost a year ago. It was all too similar to Lee’s story, but I did my best to keep the worry off of my face. Victor’s mother was obviously very concerned for her son, but she also wanted to give him his space, hoping that he would finally come around.

“You know he used to always play his games, but now he spends most of his time couped up in his room all day, alone. We only catch glimpses of him when he comes out to grab something from the fridge or go to the bathroom. I just don’t know what to do anymore,” she told me, her voice seeming to plead with me for an answer. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t have one.

After finishing up with his mom, I went back inside to see if Victor was ready to talk yet. I was disturbed to see that he was exactly as I left him. Well not exactly. He had changed videogames from a first person shooter to a basketball game. The sounds of gunshots were replaced with the cheers of a crowd.

“So Vic, how’ve things been going?”

“Oh, you’re back? Man, I didn’t even hear you come in. So go ahead and ask me your questions.”

“Man, I’ve been trying to ask you,” I said, becoming a little annoyed, “Can you pause that for a while and tell me how you’ve been?”

Reluctantly, he babbled some nonsense over the headset, turned off his game, and turned his chair to face me. He told me pretty much the same story his mother had given me outside, only now from his point of view. He tried to play off his breakup with Barbara as not bothering him too much, even though it was obvious that it had.

“It had been coming for a long time. I guess I had just got tired of her always around. We had just grown apart I guess. That happens.”

According to him, he wasn’t let go from his job, he quit due to office politics.

“When the new manager got there, I could just tell he didn’t like me. And Pat [one of his ex coworkers] was always out to get me. So one day I said ‘to hell with it’ and went up to the new boss and quit.”

“So do you have anything else lined up?” I asked.

“Man, you sound just like my mom. Nothing right now, just been chilling, taking my time, you know. Like I tell my mom everyday, I’ll find something when I’m ready.”

His eyes seemed to be magnetically drawn back to the TV, and I could tell he was having a hard time focusing on my questions. He rubbed his left hand nervously on his leg, obviously wanting to get back to playing his game. I decided that it was time to go ahead and ask him what I was really there to find out:

“So what is it about videogames that you love so much?”

“That’s it? That’s all you want to know?”

“Yep, that’s it”

“Okay, let me see how to put it,” his left hand went to the side of his face, rubbing his stubbled cheek. “I guess it just lets me get away for a while. My mom’s constantly nagging me about a job, my dad does his own thing, and all my friends have lives of their own. I’m not trying to sound like I want you to be sorry for me or anything like that. It’s just that, I guess, these games allow me to forget about all that.”

“That’s cool and all,” I replied, “but it seems like you’re getting away too much. Your mom says that you hardly ever come out, and you’re up all night playing. And what for? It just seems like you’re losing touch with the real world. The world of jobs, friends, family, responsibilities, all that.”

“I don’t know what else to say, man. The real world sucks.”