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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.

[peefy]

Game designers create compulsion loops on purpose. They want you to feel invested in goals and satisfied by achieving them. ... The metric of an online game's success is how many hours people are spending playing. Engagement metrics are how projects get funded and remain commercially viable. It is in the designer's best interest to make sure you stay playing, that you keep coming back.

Someone else in the comments there mentioned it, as well, and I'm really glad she's getting called on it there, as well: how is what she is describing, based on the known intent behind the development of many games, any different from say, gambling addiction?

And... um... hold on...

"a person refuses to stop repeating a behavior and denies it is harming them." ... is someone who's just failing to develop as a human.

Doesn't that... actually... describe a legitimate stage of addiction?

I'm so baffled and uncomfortable with her whole post.

[castlemew]

This, totally. When you design something that is MEANT to make people keep coming back to play, it is GOING TO MAKE PEOPLE COME BACK TO PLAY, and some of them are going to get addicted, and how the hell can you blame gamers when products were designed this way in the first place omfg

And as to your second point, I forgot to mention that in my post lol. I was talking about this with my friend and I was like... how is that behaviour NOT addiction? Addicted people keep doing things and sometimes deny that it's hurting them... what. What is this. Dear Leigh Alexander, educate yourself and in the meantime stick to representation of women, you're generally better at that.

OT but what is your icon? :x

[peefy]

It's from the cover of X-Men: Unlimited Vol. 2 #12; I don't have the actual comic, unfortunately, but I really love the cover art for the series, so I know it's Wolverine, I'm just not positive who the woman is :(

[castlemew]

He looks so... so snuggly. what the. Hahaha. That art is gorgeous though.

ick

[ostentations]

The type of people in this documentary, people who play 20 hours a day of WoW until their relatives become concerned, are not addicts. They're just losers.

I stopped reading there. Don't feel like raging today.

Re: ick

[castlemew]

Luckily that is one of the ragiest lines so you don't even need to click to feel more ragey! You have maxed out on rage on this post. I hope. :D

[mssarcasm]

The whole ableist vibe of this fucking stinks.

"a person refuses to stop repeating a behavior and denies it is harming them." ... is someone who's just failing to develop as a human.

No no no no no. What the hell is this shit? Refusal to stop repeating a behaviour and denial that it is harming them is a part of addiction. Her extremely limited definition of what 'real addiction' is is also troubling: some people never try to stop their behaviour unless forced. Under this definition, people can't be considered 'really addicted' until they try to stop and suffer extreme emotional or physical stress as a result. I have had a number of addictions that didn't do that but I still kept doing it even though it was seriously unhealthy. Fuck that shit.

"The type of people in this documentary, people who play 20 hours a day of WoW until their relatives become concerned, are not addicts. They're just losers. And if they didn't have WoW, they'd probably be doing something else to the unhealthy exclusion of all else." Holy shit. Does she not

[emily_goddess]

And if they didn't have WoW, they'd probably be doing something else to the unhealthy exclusion of all else."

And this, to her, indicates someone who does NOT have addiction or mental health issues? REALLY?

I no longer even have the energy to be angry at these armchair shrinks declaring that "I don't understand your illness so you must be totally fine!" But I do wonder why it's so important to them to insist that sick people aren't really sick. Really, what does this lady care if these really are WoW addicts or not?

[kisekileia]

Because if they're not sick, then she gets to blame them for their "poor decisions" and think she's better than them.

[castlemew]

Seriously, she is a game journalist, not a psychologist or a doctor or anything else. She is talking about shit she doesn't know about and she's doing it in a shitty way. Just because she knows about video games doesn't mean she's qualified to discuss video game addiction. Their relatives are not concerned because they're losers, they're concerned because they are recognizing damaging behaviour, and it's not like video game addiction should be inherently easier to kick than a gambling addiction or like, I don't know, a backflipping addiction. Seriously. I don't understand how she can recognize that if they didn't have WoW they'd be engaging in something equally damaging and assume that the problem is loser-y loserface loserness and not LEGITIMATE ADDICTION.

[emily_goddess]

frame people who may have it as losers who are failing to develop as humans

I have never understood this argument. Even if it were true that people with addiction or other mental illnesses were in fact not mentally ill, but "just" underdeveloped/unable to cope/whatever - they would still be people in real need of help and deserving of compassion, yes? Or am I being a bleeding-heart progressive again?

[kisekileia]

THIS.

[castlemew]

Like, oh my god, they obviously don't deserve compassion because they are ruining it for the normal gamers. Won't anybody think of the able people???