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[castlemew]

Generally speaking, I like Leigh Alexander, but does anybody else find her post on video game addiction shitty and ableist? :/ When she started talking about people appropriating "clinical" terms like OCD or panic attacks for the sake of hyperbole I side-eyed because she sort of... dismissed it as exaggeration without also weighing the fact that

Comments

[sanzo_chama]

My reaction to reading through that article is similar to yours. The choice of phrasing she used while discussing psychological addiction, dismissing it as merely people 'refusing to stop' who are 'failing at developing into a human' is incredibly shortsighted and unsettling. By her definition of what addiction is and is not, in my opinion at least, she seems to be utterly dismissing the psychological side of any addiction, the way that the object of your addiction, whether it is a drug, prescription or otherwise, alcohol, television, or video games themselves causes a rewiring of the brain to make the object the one thing that provides mental and emotional relief. As a person who has seen the overreaching affects of physical and psychological drug addiction in a relative, her refusal to admit that there is a psychological side to any addiction is very troubling, and extremely dismissive.

[castlemew]

I'm glad you commented over there. I'm "Dani" on that comment thread but I was too brainfried when I wrote it to say anything other than "omg, ableism all over me like bees." This is basically exactly what I was trying to get at, only better articulated.

[sanzo_chama]

Haha, I'm coming off of my English class essay final high, so my writing at the moment is full of technical phrasing and wordiness.

That and I get really formal when annoyed, that might be it.

[castlemew]

Man, I wrote a film history and theory final this morning and I just do not want to string coherent sentences together anymore. All that's going to come out is blah blah Soviet montage and Marxist dialectics Eisenstein.

[sanzo_chama]

Different strokes, different folks, yeah?