Online Gambling: Regulations vs. Research

Speaking in broad generalizations, I’ve often noted the things Europeans seem to abhor versus the things Americans generally abhor. This is often expressed legislatively. Americans like gun ownership. Europeans don’t. Americans like the death penalty. Europeans don’t. Europeans are okay with women doffing their tops at the beach. Americans generally aren’t okay with that. Europeans think nothing of children sipping wine at dinner, or letting a teen quaff a pint. Americans are shocked with the notion, and prohibit legal drinking until age 21. Europeans are okay with online gambling. Americans are not.

It’s this last generalization that has cropped up recently again, as we Americans seek to align commerce with our brethren across the pond. Previous commercial alignment has resulted in soda being sold in one and two liter bottles over here, where we stubbornly cling to the English measurement system whilst the rest of the world goes Metric. Another example is Microsoft’s recent agreement to abide by European anti-monopolist regulations.

Most recently, the Europeans have expressed their ire at American regulations on online gambling. First, US regulators let it be known that gambling sites were discouraged on American soil. The Caribbean, however, has several island nations a short plane ride away, with governments more amenable to profitable online sites. Next, the US passed a law stating that online gambling simply cannot take place at all on American soil. Gambling sites responded by continuing to take credit card payments on the sly, and the fun continued. Finally, the US cracked down on the card companies, arrested some site operators who happened to be passing through American airports, and generally put the kibosh on online gambling.

The EU and Caribbean nations such as Antigua have brought a complaint against the US law to the World Trade Commission, and continue to argue against what they see as overly restrictive US regulations. Namely, this coalition contends Americans should have the luxury of gambling online if the site is not based in the US. The US law essentially violates the rights of offshore gambling sites, they say.

There’s little doubt that gambling can lead some down the path of ruin. Europeans who’ve read Dostoevsky’s The Gambler surely know this. Ironically, legal gambling has become more accessible to Americans down through the years. When I was growing up, folks had to travel to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to legally gamble. Now with the proliferation of state lotteries and casinos on reservations, riverboats, and elsewhere, legal gambling in the real world is far more widespread than it ever was in the past.

The interesting thing about gambling from an academic perspective is that money influences things in ways nothing else can. It’s one thing to pretend to invest in the stock market, or place a virtual bet. It’s quite another to use your own money from your own account.

Gambling also fuels ongoing research into addiction, such as Fong’s work at UCLA. It’s true that people can get “addicted” to almost anything. I’ve long argued there is a difference between chemical addictions and behavioral addictions. Unfortunately, most news journalists make little difference between the two, and we’ve read stories equating videogame players with heroin addicts, etc.

There is something about interacting with a video screen that truly focuses people. I recall reading about the introduction of television at the 1939 World’s Fair. One writer remarked that folks did not have enough time to sit around and watch the contraption. Once World War II was over, and RCA could get about the business of transforming radio networks to television networks, people found plenty of time to sit down and watch television.

Combining true interaction, beyond yelling at the set, was advanced by Willy Higginbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958 when he hooked up a couple of paddle wheels to play virtual tennis on an oscilloscope. About the same time, Ralph Baer was thinking about interactive games for television, and he began developing schematics and a prototype in 1966.

Since then, this interactive element with the screen has caught fire in ways nobody foresaw. Now, people around the world can play online with one another in everything from simulated card games to mock battles with virtual monsters. Video poker and gambling ported to online environments combine the attention-grabbing aspects of videogames with the allure of gambling.

Online gambling creates a strong pool of research material because it combines two highly interactive elements to which players can become “addicted” (a better term is “overuse,” especially for online time or videogame play). I think we’ll see some interesting papers coming out of UCLA and elsewhere in the near future. In the meantime, folks wanting to gamble online in the comfort of their homes will have to wait, if they live in America. Or, they can hop a flight over to Europe and gamble online whilst on the beach. There, they can go topless as well. Maybe have a drink, if they’re underage.

Games In Education: An Interview with Eva Zadeh

Earlier in the semester, I was contacted by grad student and freelance writer Eva Zadeh and interviewed by e-mail for a paper on which she is working. I thought Zadeh’s questions were good ones on the topic of educational videogames, and she agreed to let me put my answers in this blog. Here, then, is the interview. (I’ve since brushed up my responses, but the content is substantially the same.)

Q: Why is it important to put video games in classrooms?
A: The question is still out as to whether or not video games are important for classroom use. Certain media hold advantages over other media, depending on the situation. For instance, books are good for preserving dense information. Lectures are good for transmitting brief information quickly. Videogames are good for simulated experiences that can be pedagogical in some way.

The best place for videogames may well be in after school or extracurricular programs where time is not as limited and there is less concern about traditional testing. This is backed up in Squire’s dissertation, and elsewhere.

Q: For how long have you been working on educational video games? Is it something new?
A: I’ve centered my doctoral work around educational videogames. In that regard, I’ve been in the field personally only a few years. I think Marc Prensky helped popularize the idea of instructional videogames with his book in 2001. I think James Paul Gee helped popularize the idea in the educational research establishment with his book in 2003.

Some might say that instruction through videogames has been occurring since videogames first appeared. They were introduced (although via tube technology and not true vector graphics that some folks define as video) at the Brookhaven Nuclear Laboratory in the 1950s.

Personally, I think the notion of instruction through gaming received its biggest boost when Microsoft introduced Windows Solitaire. This game “trained” computer users on a mouse. Up to that time, PC users mostly navigated without a mouse. Windows required a mouse for some activities. Folks who had never used a mouse before became quite proficient after a few rounds with Windows Solitaire.

Q: I read in one of your papers that it was “widely believed that much more learning can take place within active environments.” How widely? Numbers? Since when?
A: This is a key question for which we are awaiting more empirical data. As frustrating as that might be, one of the even more fundamental questions yet to be resolved is, What should we measure? If we are going to measure test scores, I suspect that videogames won’t show any more improvement than any other program or product. My personal theory on improved test scores is, it doesn’t matter what product is used. What matters are the teachers, and what they do to get students to learn. The product matters little, in my opinion, other than to help promote an initial burst of enthusiasm.

Now, the idea that active environments promote learning more than static ones falls back on constructivism, and that opens up another can of worms altogether. Constructivists will always come down on the side of active environments, with or without empirical data to back them up. There may well be some research on what students learn through active environments as opposed to static ones. I recall a survey of students who went through an interactive museum exhibit versus those going through static exhibits. If memory serves, the interactive group enjoyed their experiences more, although they came away with knowledge of fewer facts.

I believe the quote in question was a synthesis of arguments by Squire and Jenkins, from the Insight journal, around 2003. Since then, much more attention has been paid to the field, with multiple journal articles and research in both education and the medical field. One of the better summaries of papers detailing benefits of educational videogames down through the years can be found in Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen’s article, “Third Generation Educational Uses of Computer Games,” in the latest issue of Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. See Table 1 for his list.

Q: Video games are said to be more engaging. Where does that theory come from? Situated learning? Or something else? Role of the teachers and books?
A: I would argue videogame interaction is self evidently more interactive than sitting through a lecture. I have proposed a means of estimating the higher thinking potential of any game, in a paper published in January this year in the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. This involves a melding of Bloom’s Taxonomy to videogame interaction. The article is entitled, “Assessing Higher Order Thinking in Video Games.”

As for the roles of teachers and books, some of the largest ongoing experiments have used both extensively with videogame environments. Indiana’s Quest Atlantis makes heavy use of hybrid learning, and the virtual world itself is quite text intense. In fact, I have discussed this with one of the lead developers, Dr. Scott Warren, now at UNT. My premise: Quest Atlantis is really a highly digitized, interactive text environment. If memory serves, Dr. Warren agreed, although he noted that much more than reading is involved with Quest Atlantis.

Nonetheless, text plays a key role in many of these games, which require reading and typing in order to engage in the environment. Books and teachers will never relinquish their key roles in the classroom. Videogames will increasingly offer supplemental educational vehicles, giving teachers additional resources to use in and out of the classroom.

Q: How do you measure the efficiency of video games in classrooms?
A: Again, efficiency of what? Efficiency of increasing knowledge? Higher test scores? Do videogames fall under the same media umbrella that other media do in Clark’s “delivery truck” argument, where he asserted media is immaterial in delivering the content? Or, do the interactions within games result in higher engagement and additional intrinsic motivation to discover new knowledge inside and outside the game, and school?

Q: Have scientists worked on the impact of learning through video games on the kids’ brains?
A: The major work in the hard sciences have centered around visual plasticity (Green & Bavelier) and glucose levels (Haier). Prensky is best known for postulating the digital natives / digital immigrants divide, but showed little in the way of experiments to back up the claim. Rosser showed that hand-eye coordination from videogame play has real world applications in modern surgery. Farrace-Di Zinno demonstrated that boys diagnosed with ADHD were more still and focused while engaged in videogames.

So, something is going on in the brain. Measuring the impact is somewhat difficult. Haier’s work with PET scans dates back to 1992, so at some point somebody will probably build on that work and give us a more detailed look at what is going on inside the brain during game play.

Here are the citations to the works above:
Farrace-Di Zinno, A.M., Douglas, G., Houghton, S. Lawrence, V., West, J. & Whiting, K. (2001, November). Body movements of boys with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) during computer video game play. British Journal of Educational Technology 32(5). 607-618.

Green, C.S., Bavelier. D. (2007). Action-video-game experience alters the spatial resolution of vision. Psychological Science 18(1), 88-94.

Haier, R. J. (2003). Positron emission tomography studies of intelligence: From psychometrics to neurobiology. In Nyborg, H. [Ed.]. The scientific study of general intelligence — Tribute to Arthur R. Jensen. 41-52. New York: Pergamon.

Prensky, M. (2001a, September/October). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6.

Prensky, M. (2001b, November/December). Digital natives, digital immigrants, part 2: Do they really think differently? On the Horizon, 9(6), 1-6.

Rosser, J.C., Lynch, P.J, Cuddihy, L., Gentile, D.A., Klonsky, J., Merrell, R. (2007, February). The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st Century. Archives of Surgery, 142(2). 181-186.

Q: What perspectives do you see for the future? Do you see any evolution in the field?
A: A defining groundwork, where everybody agrees to the same set of definitions, will help. I think we’ll see much more empirical data come out of the medical literature, with applications for education. Finally, we need a really killer app for education that meets the needs I spelled out at AECT 2005: a product with an appropriate cognitive load for students, aligned to standards, with problem solving germane to the subject; probably built on a rich 3D environment, and easily customizable by the teacher. I think we see a lot of this already in teachers tweaking the Neverwinter Nights engine for their own classroom use, but it takes an inordinate amount of time programming that game. If something out there could be offered that was easier for teachers to use in the classroom, I think considerable interest among educators and researchers would follow.

-*-

Zadeh’s questions were good ones, and I enjoyed having to think about the topics she brought up, and justify some of my positions in the field. All told, it was a very thoughtful exercise, and I appreciated the opportunity to respond.

Addictive Group Play Might Make Johnny an Angry Boy

I found a nice site devoted to research on videogames from the psychology side. A lot of academic research on videogames seems to be deriving from psychology profs lately. Wai Yen Tang is a student who decided to start the VG Researcher – Psychology blog in “an attempt to bridge the gap between gamers and VG researchers in psychology. Another pertinent reason is that I’m simply tired of reading short and somewhat inaccurate news report on VG research (angers me a lot) and makes me want to read the article directly and write on it.”

I couldn’t agree more! As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the media can put an entirely different spin on stories than what researchers published. VG Researcher is filled with several interesting entries, each devoted to a different paper. Several caught my eye, including this one:

Eastin, M. S. (2007). The influence of competitive and cooperative group game play on state hostility. Human Communication Research, 33 (4), 450-466.

Tang notes that Dr. Eastin took a novel approach to aggression research in videogames, finding higher levels of hostility measured among players who teamed together. I look forward to reading this one, as soon as I make it over to the university library. Alas, it’s not available freely online.

Also, this paper examined hostility in the context of “addiction”:

Grüsser, S.M., Thalemann, R., & Griffiths, M.D. (2007) Excessive computer game playing: Evidence for addiction and aggression? Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 1o, 2, 290-292.

Griffiths, Tang notes, is renowned for addiction research in the field of psychology. The study was an online survey of over 7,000 players, and noted that those meeting the researchers’ definition of addiction (11.9%) reported higher levels of aggression, “But regression analysis demonstrated that gaming addiction accounts for 1.8% for being responsible for aggression.” Tang concludes the connection between addiction and aggression seems tenuous.

Give Tang’s site a visit. I’ve added VG Researcher to the Blogroll.

Webkinz & Club Penguin: Evil? Or Good Financial Teachers?

Recently the debate over the benefit or detriment of MMOGs aimed specifically at children has heated up again. Specifically, these debates center around Club Penguin and Webkinz. The current debate was kickstarted in a New York Times article last week entitled, “Pay Up, Kid, or Your Igloo Melts,” by Mireya Navarro.

Navarro notes that several opportunities in the games require additional purchases, much to many parents’ chagrin. One thing that has alarmists concerned is the fantastic growth the two largest sites, CP and Webkinz, have seen recently. CP has almost 5 million unique monthly visitors, while Webkinz has around 6 million.

While there is some free content, attractive add-ons require additional payments. Anyone can register in CP for free, but to keep virtual items in the game, a monthly pay account is needed. People purchasing plush toy Webkinz in the real world get free access to the virtual Webkinz world for a year. Buying more plush toys leads to more benefits online.

Navarro notes that the idea of selling to tots in the digital realm is raising concerns:

Consumer Reports WebWatch started a study this summer to evaluate the commercial content of online games for 3- to 7-year-olds.

“Every interface is becoming an opportunity to sell children something, either brand awareness or real things,” said Liz Perle, the editor in chief of Common Sense Media. “That’s the end game.”

Other profit concerns exist, Navarro says, including the fact Disney bought out CP for $350 million, with an option to double that amount if growth targets are met. We’re used to hearing folks fuss about profits generated by “Big Oil” and “Big Pharma.” Now, perhaps we’ll hear talk about “Big Gaming.”

On the other end of the spectrum, some parents actually like these virtual worlds for tweens and kiddos. Brian B., a fellow technology director from Texas, and blogger, notes that his daughters have been captivated by Webkinz. After some scaffolding, his 4 year old twins took to the game like the proverbial duck to water:

At first, they were satisfied with watching mommy and daddy play the games, buy things, and arrange furniture, etc., but eventually they wanted to take control of their own private virtual living space themselves. My wife came up with the idea of putting a heart sticker on the left button of a little USB travel mouse I carry in my bag so they could remember which button to push (laptop tracks pads are difficult for 4-year-old fingers apparently), then a little instruction on drag-and-drop and they were off. They only thing that my wife or I do now is to log them in (while they can type their own names, the extra long/unique user names for the site give them a little trouble).

Brian is a little worried about the financial aspect, namely that it may use up a lot of his money like so many other things for your children have a tendency to do. But, he also likes what he sees in Webkinz:

Many of the games are educational – one of my personal favorites is one where you take random letters and try to put them together to spell words. Depending on how you put them together you get more points – don’t get enough points and you don’t advance another level. Another game teaches spatial placement by setting up pathways to get the “pets” on one side of the screen to their “homes” on the other. You have to click on each piece of the pathway to make them flip until the pathway is complete – and the possibilities are endless (no two game boards are the same) … BTW – My wife and I find several of the games as good methods of winding down at the end of the day…now who’s WebKinz are they again?

So, the jury is out as to whether these for-profit virtual worlds aimed at kids are evil capitalist “first hits” to the addictive world of Internet playgrounds … or fun sites where kids can learn a thing or two about money management and home décor. It will be interesting to see what Consumer Reports’ WebWatch report says, and hopefully we’ll see some academic research as well.

References:
Navarro, M. (2007, October 28). Pay up, kid, or your igloo melts. Newyorktimes.com. [Online]. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/fashion/28virtual.html

Parents Rejoice: Video Games Don’t Hurt GPAs Much

Todd Stinebrickner over at Western Ontario, and Ralph Stinebrickner over at Berea College (a son & father team), wrote a paper based on the effects studying (or lack thereof) had on grade point averages. The study was based on time-use diaries that volunteer college students kept for the researchers. Data was collected in 2000 and 2001. A total of 210 subjects participated.

The media has trumpeted the most salacious findings in the study: video game use (mainly consoles, it appears from media coverage) that interfered with study time led to slightly lower grades. USA Today/Yahoo News reported the story here; Wired reported the story here. But, parents of college students need not fret. The effect was not too bad. GPAs of freshmen who were gamers showed a decrease by .241 points.

Alas, the full paper is a $5 download, unless you are a working journalist or in a developing country, in which case it’s free. All others can read the abstract here.

References:
Arendt, S. (2007, September 19). Study: Roomies with videogames lower college students’ GPAs. [Online.] Available: http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/09/study-roomies-w.html

Naseef, K. (2007, September 19). Video games can shoot holes in GPA. USA Today. [Online.] Available: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070919/
tc_usatoday/videogamescanshootholesingpa

Stinebrickner, T. R., & Stinebricker, R. (2007, August). The causal effect of studying on academic performance. [NBER working paper no. 13341.] Cambridge, Massachusetts: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Researching the Webkinz Phenomenon

As far as peer-reviewed academic research on the Webkinz phenomenon, I haven’t seen anything yet. However, several parents, magazine authors, and concerned bloggers have done personal research on this issue and have reported about it online.

The way Webkinz works is, youngsters buy a plush animal toy that has a code. Going online to the Webkinz site, youngsters enter the code and a virtual version of the toy comes to “life” on the site. Cleverdude relays the following factoids:

* When you activate the pet online, you get $2000 virtual dollars (KinzCash) to buy your pet food, toys, and other items. These items can be rather pricey. A fancy bed can run you about $1750 in KinzCash! Also, you can’t buy KinzCash with real cash (or it conveniently leaves that out of the FAQs if you can).

* You can earn more cash by playing games online, getting a job, or taking surveys. However, per Webkinz FAQ, these games are not gambling because “Webkinz members can not lose KinzCash playing any of our games. There are no wagers involved at all.”

* The pets need food or go hungry, and if they go hungry for too long, they get sick and need medicine, which all costs KinzCash. However, the pets never die, they just stay sick.

So, are the toys, and especially the site, good for educating your children? Cleverdude says yes, provided parents stay involved in the online process with their children. Many financial lessons, and teachable moments with time management and appropriate netiquette become feasible on the site.

Luigi Lugmayr over at I4UNews notes that Amazon carries Webkinz, and it can be a place to get the fast selling items when they sell out at the brick and mortars near you. The second and third top selling toy rankings at Amazon were taken by Webkinz when Luigi looked into the matter back in April.

Carleen Hawn, a freelancer writing over at Business 2.0, wondered what makes Webkinz and Club Penguin so popular with kids? Both Canadian startups have been enormously successful in North America, and CP was bought out by Disney this week. Some of Carleen’s key findings:

Bennett Morris, 7, and his brother Lawson, 5, used to live for Club Penguin but are now enthusiastic Webkinz players. The boys, who live outside Boston, like the variety of the Webkinz animals and the “houses” they live in. “I like the private rooms. I like to get furniture and decorate King Kong’s house,” Bennett says. King Kong is his Webkinz gorilla. He also has Coco (a monkey) and Gumdrop (a chihuahua). “I like Webkinz better because there are more games,” Lawson pipes in. “My favorite is Wheel of Wow, but you can only play it one time a day.”

This is an important feature: Webkinz puts strict limits on how much time kids can spend on any activity–a “leave ‘em wanting more” strategy that is one of the secrets of the site’s success. Webkinz’s traffic ballooned from 1.1 million unique visitors in November to 1.9 million in December. Moreover, kids spent an average of two hours and eight minutes per visit on Webkinz between April 2006 and January 2007. (YouTube, by contrast, averaged 32 minutes per visit during the same period, while Club Penguin averaged 54.)

Finally, Denise Pappalardo over at Network World wrote an article entitled, Fuzzy logic: How Webkinz is getting young kids hooked on the Web. Overuse is rampant, Pappalardo reports, amongst both youngsters and parents:

One grandmother says when she and her grandson stumbled on Webkinz last summer “it changed her life.”

Now she’s totally addicted. “I have 10 Webkinz and five different accounts,” says Sharyn Morin, a vet technician. She says she visits all five of her accounts daily and her grandson’s three after he goes to bed to be sure he “did his daily activities,” with all of his Webkinz.

Daily activities include exercising their animals, feeding them and keeping them happy by spending time with them. Kids see happy, health and hunger meters for their plush that lets them know if they’re taking good care of their pals.

All told, the research has so far been experiential and non-scientific. Perhaps something more experimental will come down the pike, maybe after a professor’s child somewhere gets the Webkinz bug, and the scholar/parent decides to research the issue.

Gambling Banned in SL

I’ve long been interested in Second Life as an educational or serious games venue, and my discussion with Karl Kapp about the merits of SL versus World of Warcraft as appropriate venues for educational contexts still gets hits. But, there is a type of gaming in SL that, regardless of popularity, is now banned by corporate parent Linden Lab: gambling. Apparently folks could gamble using the in-game currency, which could then be converted to real dough. Or, probably more likely, folks could convert real money to Linden bucks then lose it all in virtual casinos.

Linden Lab is bringing SL into compliance with new US federal law that prohibits online gambling. Andrew, over at Gaming Today, suggests that SL folks will likely find loopholes such as virtual sports betting and office pools.

On the one hand, it’s a shame since SL gambling could have been used as a Petri dish for interested researchers. On the other hand, similar gaming (perhaps using fake virtual money) could probably be replicated without too much additional effort. Time will tell.

Gaming Addictions in Indianapolis

Indianapolis Star reporter Christopher Lloyd is not addicted to video games. Honest. He wrote so in an article published in the Sunday edition of the newspaper about addictions to MMORPGs.

I’ve stated repeatedly in my various posts on the topic that “addiction” is the wrong word for video game overuse, or at least it should be labeled as a behavioral addiction to distinguish it from a chemical addiction.

Anyway, Lloyd focuses on World of Warcraft, and his article is filled with anecdotes from self-professed over-users. The article is chock full of interesting quotes. Here’s a sample:

The scarcity of hard data also provides ammunition to skeptics who question the readiness to label extensive gaming as addiction, whereas other time-consuming leisure activities are not.

Nongamers may be appalled by the idea of someone playing video games four or five hours a day, but consider that the average American spends nearly 32 hours a week watching television, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Clint Parker, a 25-year-old electrician’s assistant from Broad Ripple, played World of Warcraft for six to eight hours a day and doesn’t think he ever had a serious problem with it.

“It’s certainly nothing like a drug addiction,” he said. “If you don’t play . . . you’re not going to get the shakes or the sweats or start vomiting.”

In the same July 29 edition of the newspaper, Lloyd offers another article entitled, “Tales from the Gaming World,” where he confesses his own upbringing in the world of video games and his daily doses of WoW. “I am a gamer … Yes, I am a WoW player.” But he’s not addicted. Really.

Quantifying Addiction in World of Warcraft

Someone recently remarked to me regarding the paucity of quant studies on video games. I think this hole is slowly filling as researchers figure out what, exactly, to measure in regards to gaming. Efforts that have taken place so far have focused on simple things to measure like caloric consumption and glucose levels in the brain while playing. More troubling has been the focus on gaming as an “addiction,” with little regard for properly differentiating between video game overuse with chemical dependencies.

I found a paper by Nicholas Hunter over at MIT recently which focuses on the issue of “addiction” in World of Warcraft. Hunter served as lead programmer for Revolution, a social studies serious game set in Colonial America about which much has been written. In Spring, 2005, Hunter wrote a class paper on addiction in World of Warcraft. He sums up the paper from his portfolio page thusly:

Games, and in particular MMORPGs, have a history of being called “addictive.” So I thought I’d take a quantitative approach to the problem by developing a model for player consumption habits, conducting a survey of WoW players and then performing a regression analysis of the data collected. As part of my model, I propose a new way to evaluate opportunity cost (a core principle of economics) and determine that WoW players are addicted, but without enough data to determine what kind of addiction.

Although the paper has not been published (as far as I can tell), it has been made available through MIT’s Open Courseware project. It’s well worth the read, and can be downloaded here. Hunter seeks to apply “rational addiction” to Warcraft, theoretically assuming consumption leading to additional consumption equates addiction. The key question is whether the addiction in question is negative or beneficial. Obviously, a negative addiction is one leading to harm, such as smoking or alcoholism. A beneficial addiction would lead to positive aspects, such as a habitual exercise regime or developing an appreciation of fine music.

Hunter collected his dataset through random interviews with 30 WoW players, who were asked a series of questions regarding their gaming use. Follow up surveys were conducted a month later. The last question asked was, “Do you believe that you are addicted to WoW? If so, do you think playing WoW has a negative impact on your life?”

Although Hunter was able to show a statistical indication of addiction to WoW based on his dataset, he was unable to determine if it would fall under the negative or beneficial labels. He has released his dataset online, and has some additional information regarding the paper here.

In each posting on video game addiction, I’ve mentioned my preference to consider video game overuse a separately defined entity from chemical addictions. I was therefore happy to find this tidbit on Hunter’s portfolio page:

Note: In retrospect, I made a tactical error when writing this paper by overusing the term “addiction.” In economics, addiction means that prior consumption increases the amount you consume now (counter to diminishing marginal utility). As I explain in the paper, there are two kinds of addiction: Beneficial and Negative … You can read the paper for a more formal explanation of how these two types differ, but the reason for this edit is that the word “addiction” carries with it all kinds of meaning in the usual English language that does not always apply when discussing the term in economics.

References

Hunter, N. (2005). Rational addiction and MMOs: A case study of World of Warcraft. [Online.] Available: http://web.mit.edu/nhunter/www/wowresearch/wowaddiction.pdf

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/