UCLA Study to Tackle Online Gambling, Gaming

The Daily Bruin reports on an ambitious survey slated for the following school year that will examine UCLA students’ online gambling and video playing habits. Timothy Fong, codirector of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program is quoted:

“The genesis of this study came about after we started to see more students and younger patients with Internet gambling and video game addictions … It led us to wonder how big of a problem this was.”

Other questions in the survey will seek to identify popular games and pinpoint the differences in game players and online gamblers.

Most people who are gambling online or playing video games have no problems at all and lead normal and balanced lives, but for some, it can cause problems when done in excess.

“Many lose the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy and even begin to prefer fantasy,” said Dr. Richard Rosenthal, codirector of the program. “They just cannot stop playing.”

Daily Bruin author Seda Terzyan then proceeds to interview students who have habitually gambled online. Although Congress passed an anti-online gambling bill last year that prohibits banks and credit card companies from processing payments to online gambling companies, loopholes abound and UCLA students report ongoing activity.

With no current regulation on these sites or by the school, there is no way of knowing the fairness of the games, no way to protect compulsive gamblers and no way to determine who is playing, Fong said.

Then the article turns controversial, and Terzyan reports on potential bias in the study.

Though compulsive gaming was recently rejected as a mental illness or addiction by the American Medical Association, the diagnosis for it is essentially identical to the criteria used to diagnose pathological gambling, Rosenthal said.

There is a progressive failure to control the impulse to gamble, followed by disturbances in personal and family life – it works the same way for gaming, he added, stating that an addiction is essentially the loss of control.

In many ways, he added, compulsive video gaming can be viewed as the purest form of addiction, since it does not require a substance as seen in chemical dependency, nor does it require the rewards of monetary loss and gain present in gambling addiction.

Terzyan offers additional anecdotal evidence of video game addiction, interviewing World of Warcraft players who have spent several hours at a time on the game.

On a personal note, I know I am engaged in an uphill battle against the concept of labeling video games as addictive. Nonetheless, here is my stance: the term “addiction” should be reserved for chemical dependencies. Behavioral attributes that affect ones’ life should be termed “overuse.” When the Council on Science and Public Health (CSPH) presented its report to the AMA on research in violence and video games, the term video game “overuse” was used. At the very least, some sort of differentiation needs to be made clear, such as indicating chemical addictions versus behavioral addictions.

OK, enough soapboxing. I’ll look forward to reading the results from Rosenthal and Fong’s study.

References

Terzyan, S. (2007, July 9). Addictions for the Internet generation. Daily Bruin. [Online]. Available: http://www.dailybruin.com/news/2007/jul/09/addictions_internet
_generation/

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1. Online Gambling: Regulations vs. Research « Educational Games Research — November 10, 2007 @ 8:49 am

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