Why Do We Play Computer Games Too Much?

"If work is a game you don't like playing then so may real life." That statement is a recipe for addiction. Is playing a computer game an inherently a Bad Thing? Or are there good things in it? I will be exploring this issue from time to time.

Suffice it to say that, yes, there are news reports of people dropping dead from playing computer games to the exclusion of everything else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081700625.html

http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/cvg/death.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/03/health/webmd/main1773956.shtml

But there are also people, like Steve Johnson,who has pointed out that there are good things that come of playing computer games. I will be exploring both sides of this issue.

And I'll begin by asking two questions. Are these people really that different from the rest of us? Are their activities really that despicable for not being related to "real life?"

I can tell you from personal experience that one reason computer games can become so addicting is that they streamline, abstract, and therefore concentrate, the rewards of doing anything in real life that can be simulated on a computer. I had two memorably addictive episodes playing Capitalism and Railroad Tycoon. These are both games about doing something that in the real life would be considered worthwhile activities: running businesses that delivers goods and services to people who would not otherwise have them.

Now ask yourself: why does someone go to the bother and challenge and risk of doing something with their life like running a business? The answer in most cases is "because they can." Succeeding in a challenge like that is one way a person of talent and drive can feel that they are somehow distinguished from the great mass of their fellows. They've done something a great number of other people cannot do. Interestingly, most people who have succeeded in business tend to say that the money is "just a way of keeping score" - as if what they've done with their "real" lives was itself a form of playing a more a elaborate game than most people play.

But what are the rewards of this "real life" game? They are concrete and tangible. A nice dwelling. An accumulation of possessions. Security from the demands of survival. These are concrete and cannot be gotten by playing a computer game. (Unless you are the owner of a Chinese gold farm). But there are other rewards that are abstract, and these can at least be simulated by a computer game. You can receive income statements and balance sheets showing your successes and the building up of your empire. You can receive deeds and camera views of property you've acquired. You can see the numbers in a bank account build up, and that can be every bit as rewarding as seeing a score go up. You can receive "atta-boys" from in-game characters, and see cut scenes showing that you "lived happily ever after." These are the abstract rewards of "real life" that the "fake life" of a computer game can simulate.

And one of the chief rewards of a "real life" game is the leisure to play other, less "real life," games. And ah, there's the rub! Now that the way is clear, does playing these less "real life" games turn out to be as interesting as the "real life" game that paid for them?

In a lot of instances, the answer turns out to be "no." Lee Iacocca, the auto magnate, was divorced by his wife when he retired because he could not remain retired. For him, the "real life" game was the thing, and no other could replace it. Wayne Huizenga made a big success of Waste Management Inc. and then did it again with Blockbuster. And he went on to own professional sports teams. He was unable to resist "the art (game?) of the deal." The piano man, Billy Joel, sang of the businessman getting slowly stoned while sharing a drink called loneliness, and of the realistic novelist who never had time for a wife. These are the players of "real life" games that are as equally addicting as the "fake life" games on the computer.

But here's the interesting advantage the "fake life" game addict has over the "real life" game addict: the "fake life" addict is not hampered by what military people call "the friction of battle." That phrase is from Clausewitz's famous "On War." Clausewitz said that in war, things are very simple, but because of the stresses involved in battle, even very simple things are extremely hard to accomplish. Things that are simple to do in the planning room are hard to do in a military war game. Things that are simple to do in a war game are hard to do during a live training exercise. Things that are simple to do in a training exercise are extremely hard to do in an actual battle where live ammunition is flying. Battles can be lost, not only for "the want of a nail"
but also for changed orders being misaddressed, road signs being overlooked and lack of sleep.

School teachers who have planned a class play, and people who have to put together a meeting for a large number of people know what "friction" is.

The key factor in "fake life" game addiction is that the "friction" of the "real life" version of the game is often absent. On a forum for Capitalism, I saw comments from "real life" businessmen who said that the game would be more realistic if had included such things as the expense of bribing municipal officials, paying off gangsters for labor peace, and other such unpleasantness. This absence of friction in a "fake life" game brings about a concentration and acceleration of the rewards of playing the game. The rewards of "fake life" are magnified because the poop of "real life" is reduced.

And let me make a key distinct here. As in all things, there is an elusive difference between something that's part of the challenge of an activity and something that part of the poop (or friction) of an activity. The whole point of mountain climbing is its difficulty ("because it is there.") But some of the difficulties of mountain climbing - like getting a visa to get to the venue - are not part of the challenge of it, but the poop of it. And one of the difficulties of game design is that one man's poop can be another man's challenge. Before the advent of computer gaming, hobbyist war game designers (and the miniatures war gamers before them) always had to walk a fine line between the "realism" of a game's rules versus their ease-of-play. Too much "realism" can make a game poopy to play. And so, behind every computer game you see, there's lies a group of very smart people who have gotten together to figured out how much friction needs to be taken out of the game to make its rewards for playing maximally addictive.

So that said, it is still true that reducing the "real life" poop in a "fake life" game makes the rewards of playing the game that much more addictive.

And one key piece of poop and friction is time. In "real life," the games are stretched out by the time it takes for the game to advance. It takes a lifetime to find out if you "won" the game. It takes chunks of a lifetime for the "atta-boys," cash, and other rewards to accumulate and manifest themselves. And the poop of "real life" is that sometimes time does not actually reveal if you got the rewards you expected to get. Sometimes you can wait a life time for one key person to say "atta-boy," and that person never will because they'd rather die than do so. Sometimes all you get is the complete silence of envy. And sometimes, just at the end, one unpredictable thing you can't control comes up and resets your "score" to zero. And sometimes you just drop dead in the middle of the game. Bummer.

The "fake-life" games, by contrast, sometimes have clocks that can be advanced. Capitalism has a setting that can make time pass at various rates of speed so that you don't have to spend every day of your life minding the store in order to see how your marketing strategy worked out. Jagged Alliance 2 has the same ability. Nightfall comes quickly in seconds of real time. A game turn in Civilization is equal to one year of real time. Centuries roll by rather quickly.

And this allows you to out-do Wayne Huizenga by leaps and bounds, even if only abstractly. You can be a business tycoon one day, a sports team owner another day, the master of a battlefield the next day, and the ruler of a galaxy-wide empire yet another day. And you can lose spectacularly at any one of these careers and still continue on with playing at the others.

I've talked about how the removal of friction can concentrate the rewards of "fake life." Removal of the friction of time accelerates the rewards. They come faster and are all the more satisfying because you are still in the mind frame that made you seek out those rewards in the first place. (Many's the person who became disenchanted with a "real life" game before the rewards ever showed up.)

So this is the essence of game addiction: the concentration and acceleration of rewards, the reduction or mastery of the frictions that impede obtaining those rewards.

It is only the degree of mastery in each realm that determines whether the addict will be a "real life" game addict or a "fake life" game addict. A "real life" game addict is someone who has found a game in "real life" that economically supports him or her, and who has obtained mastery over the frictions of that game.

Stephen King has said that his writing is an obsession (game?) that just happens to have a real life economic reward attached to it. He said that if his obsession had been something less rewarding, he'd not been as successful. Other people would not be successful doing what King does, because they would find too much friction in the odds of being published versus the time spend sitting down with a paper and a pencil. (Garrison Keillor has said that most would-be authors like the idea of having written a book more than they like the idea of actually writing one.) The successful authors are those who are addicted to a process rather than an end result. The end result tends to be an anti-climax for them. It’s how they kept going in the face of rejection and disinterest.


The slide towards "fake life" seems to be related to either a lack of interesting "real life" games or an inability to handle the frictions of a particular "real life" game. If "real life" games are not available, or the person has trouble dealing with "real life" frictions, then they may become addicted to "fake life" games simply because of the extreme contrast between the rewards and frictions of "real life" versus "fake life."

China, for example, has a population of very bright and eager people for whom very little "real life" opportunity is available. If the opportunities are discovered in "fake life," they will have more of their people gravitate towards it. In countries where opportunities abound, the portrait of the average "fake life" addict is that of someone who was already marginal to start with. They are people who have an inability to master the frictions of "real life."

Perhaps the real cure for game addiction is for the addicts to find games, however possible, that can support them in "real life," which have only frictions that they can master.

This is in fact the very definition of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has called the "flow experience" of optimum performance: doing something that is like a game, which has only frictions that can be mastered. If it is not like a game, it will not be engaging enough. What makes a performance a game is that the frictions are not too easily mastered (which would make the performance boring) and the frictions are not impossible to master (which would be frustrating). Some thermostat-like set-point between the over-mastery and under-mastery of friction is what makes a performance a game. Contrarily, the worst case situation would be a performance in which there are both frictions that are over-mastered and under-mastered. Boredom alternating with frustration. The very definition of the horrible job, the lousy career.

It may be that the therapist's job to help the addict find the right game and the right set-point between over-mastery and under-mastery of its frictions. Being that the set-point is thermostatic, it would always be a moving target in the life of the game-addict. Indeed, this may be the real problem that some people have. They don't realize its time to change the game because the set-point needs to move. In the game of life, this may be what the mid-life crisis is about.

As we close on this discussion, maybe we can cast our net wider and consider the good of the human race as a whole and not just the game addict. Maybe the betterment of human life consists in finding "real life" games whose friction-mastery set-points are constantly being updated. Maybe the history of the human race was never really been about money and resources. Maybe it’s really been about the equitable allocation of both games and master-able friction. We may legitimately agree to disagree about whether the state should do this for the individual, or the individual should do it for him or herself, or both. But what dreams may come of looking at life like this?