Video Game Addiction and the Psychology of Gaming

Above: Fake Magic Johnson and Fake Alan Alda enjoy a competitive videogame on a television that is not turned on.

There's a lengthy but compelling piece in the Guardian online about video game addiction that's well worth a read. It chronicles the author Tom Bissell's journey from being a prolific writer to what amounts to a video game-addicted cokehead, and centers around his obsession with Grand Theft Auto IV. The thing that grabbed me about this piece is that there's a million cliches that could have gone into this story, from analogizing video game makers and drug pushers to assuring readers he's given up games to spend more time sitting outside or some such, but Bissell avoids pretty much all of them. Instead, he gives one of the most frank and thoughtful depictions of games and their appeal that I've ever read.

A large part of this is the fact that Bissell devotes several paragraphs to a stream of consciousness description of the experience of playing a GTA game (Vice City, in this instance), and writes it in a way that really captures the sense of freedom and possibility that the games provide. Later, when he's started abusing cocaine heavily, Grand Theft Auto IV becomes his go-to activity while high, and the game and drug form a sort of symbiosis. This leads up to the climactic meditation of the piece:

What have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that pointed not toward but at something. Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.

My experiences with life and with video games are hardly identical to Bissell's, to put it mildly, but I think he absolutely captures something vital about gaming with his point about games providing real experiences. This is a point that I do not believe non-gamers fully understand: so much of the quality of a game, especially a modern game, is tied into its ability to break down the sense of separation between the physical activity of playing a game (read: pressing buttons) and the actions onscreen. In short: the extent that a game can make you feel personally involved and empowered in what's happening onscreen, you'll probably like it.

In some ways, this is a grotesque oversimplification: there's many, many factors that have to come together to provide that experience. However, in great or even merely enjoyable games, the whole is more than the sum of the parts in a way that's difficult to capture with objective description. Here's the really interesting thing, though: despite all this complexity, games are getting much, much better at providing this quality of experience on a consistent basis. Think about this: a short game is roughly 5-7 hours of playtime in length, and a long game can easily be over 100 hours (I played Grand Theft Auto IV for at least 140 hours, and I imagine that Bissell played for triple that amount or more) or essentially endless if the focus is on competitive multiplayer. That means that a game has to keep your attention for much longer than a feature film does, and likely as much as an entire season of a TV program. What's more, almost all games are built around a fairly simple set of actions that repeat themselves over and over again with usually little more than minor variations over time. Even in expansive, free-form games like the Grand Theft Auto series, you'll get the main essentials of play in the first few hours.

By all rights, keeping someone interested in a video game ought to be an impossible task, but it turns out that it isn't. In fact, over the past several years, I've found that video games as a medium are not only more consistently compelling in my opinion than pretty much any other form of entertainment, but getting better all of the time, and I think Bissell has zeroed on the main reason why with his statement about experiences. A misconception that has plagued popular thinking about video games for some time now is the idea that the appeal of games is something like a more-participatory movie or television show, that the structured narrative is at the core and that the interactivity serves to make the narrative more compelling for the player. In fact, the reverse is true: games get most of their appeal from coming up with cool things for the player to do and letting the player control his or her experience of those things. Nobody plays video games for the story; if they did, nobody would ever play video games, because video game stories, with punishingly few exceptions, are terrible. GamesRadar wrote an article on the plot holes of Modern Warfare 2 that's three goddamn pages long (granted, mostly to maximize the number of pages clicked on, and thus ads viewed - welcome to the world of Internet games writing) and that's a game that's grossed more than one billion dollars since last November. MW2's narrative flaws didn't even stop it from amassing widespread critical acclaim, either. Hell, I'll even throw in my two cents: Modern Warfare 2's story was completely retarded, and I still played through the game twice, spent a solid two months with the multiplayer, and loved about every minute of it.

The contrast between games and other forms of entertainment has really hit home for me that past couple weeks as I've been playing Bioshock 2. A brief recap for the uninitiated: Bioshock is a first-person shooter game that came out in 2007 that became a massive critical and commercial hit. It is far and away one of the most original first-person shooters ever created; partly because of the setting (a failed underwater city resplendent in 1930s Art Deco architecture created as a libertarian utopia by a thinly veiled version of Ayn Rand), and partly because of the rich and well thought-out narrative, which actually came to a definitive resolution at the climax. This last point is important because virtually all major video games follow the modern Hollywood blockbuster model, of openly planning for a multi-sequeled franchise in pretty much all aspects of production, with none more glaringly obvious than the plot. Bioshock, however, felt self-contained from the get-go.

It also (deservedly) made a shitload of money, so when Bioshock 2 was announced, I was scornful. Here was an unnecessary cash-in sequel to a original and complete work, which to top it off wasn't even being made by the creators of the first. It's the sort of thing that drives fans crazy. The thing is, though, that Bioshock 2 didn't turn out to be the Blues Brothers 2000 of the video game world (fun challenge: come up with a snappier analogy and post in in the comments! I couldn't!), it's actually an immense amount of fun to play (less surprisingly, it's also selling by the bucketload).

Now, I don't want to give short shrift to the makers of Bioshock 2, who all things considered, did a fine job with the narrative and tonal aspects of the game, but most of what makes Bioshock 2 work in the way that it does are small improvements to the core gameplay and a few neat additions. In fact, the phrase "small improvements to the core gameplay and a few neat additions" is essentially a comprehensive summary of the philosophy behind video game sequeling. Simple as it is, this approach really works in games in a way that I don't think it can in other media. If somebody came up and told me that the upcoming sequel to a blockbuster movie was being hailed as "pretty much the same thing as the first one, only the hero shoots somebody with a speargun this time," I probably wouldn't make seeing it a priority. However, when I found the speargun in Bioshock 2 (it pins dead enemies to the wall, and you can pull out the spears to reuse them, which makes the corpse fall to the floor!) I was genuinely jazzed. I can't rule out the possibility that this speaks to a certain lack of sophistication on my part, but I think it has more to do with the point that the experience of playing games is qualitatively very different from our experience of other media. Playing Bioshock 2 made me realize that despite what I had thought, the not easily replicated aspects of the first game, its originality and narrative focus, were less important than I had previously thought, while more reproducible elements, the combat and exploration of the game world, were much more.

This has been a bit of a digression, but I think it relates profoundly to Bissell's piece on game addiction and the core role of experience in it. There's a reason that we can talk seriously about gaming being an "addiction," even if it doesn't fit the technical parameters of the term, in a way that's harder to apply to an equally avid consumer of movies, TV, or novels: video games give us feedback. They reward good play, punish bad play, and create a sense of improvement over time. Cracked's David Wong wrote a great piece a few weeks back on how video games use basic principles of behavioral psychology to hook people and keep them playing. Wong's focus is more on massively multiplayer RPGs like World of Warcraft, which I've never played and have no interest in, (although my girlfriend and I have sunk 80+ hours into playing Borderlands, which is essentially an scaled-back postapocalyptic shooter version of the same basic ideas) but I think that the basic framework he elaborates can be made to fit just about any type of video game to one degree or another. Simply put, the appeal of video games is ultimately a behavioral one, rather than an intellectual one.

I'm not sure what the full implications of this are, although I'm sure that the hoary old chestnuts of "are video games healthy?" and "are video games art?" will resurface fairly rapidly. I may have more to say on this topic in general, and those two questions in particular, at some future date. I am fairly sure, however, that it means that the current cultural ascendancy of video games will probably be a prolonged one, and may even just be getting started, given the explosion of platforms like Facebook and the iTunes App Store. Look for some 40 year old college student to publish an essay in Newsweek about the intermingling between her FarmVille and OxyContin habit by December or so.