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A hallmark of addiction is that addicts will betray their strongly-held ethical and moral convictions in order to get their drug of choice. Case in point: a 54-year-old Maine woman embezzled $166,000 and of that, used $4000 to play the social media games “Mafia Wars” and “YoVille.” Is this a case of games imitating life?
Just in time for Christmas, here are the top 10 “most addicting” console games per a survey conducted by Gamesutra.
People feel a natural resistance to labeling technology as addictive in the same sense that cocaine is addictive or methamphetamine is addictive. Yet considering the behavior of addicts, it’s hard to see much daylight between chemically-fueled addiction and technology or Internet addiction.
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Substance abuse and addiction can affect anyone, of any race, and any social status. So too, can technology addiction. South Park (video link) lampooned the legions of young World of Warcraft players playing 60 or more hours a week in their parents basement while the Wall Street Journal wrote about top-level executives getting hooked on a simple Breakout variant called “BrickBreaker” that came preinstalled on Blackberry phones. Just like any addicts, these corporate high-fliers neglected work and family to chase the rush of a new high score.
Smartphones are becoming competent gaming platforms all by themselves now. Time will tell if the brighter, louder, flashier games will distract more of us from the goals we set for ourselves.
A mystery for parents: how can a child who can play video games for hours without so much as a bathroom break be unable to focus on homework for 15 minutes? The easy answer is that video games are “cool” and entertaining and homework is anything but. However research shows us something deeper.
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It turns out that if you brain scan youth while playing video games, their frontal lobes, the part of the brain that control learning, emotions, memory and self-control, are not active, while the regions of the brain managing vision and movement light up. Run the same scans on kids doing simple math exercises, and now large regions of the frontal lobe activate.
In other words, when we see someone in front of an Xbox, we say they’re concentrating. And when we see someone studying, we say they’re concentrating. Yet we’re using the same word to describe very different internal processes. Worse still, since video game attention doesn’t activate the frontal lobe, I have a strong suspicion (and some personal experience to back this up) that Xbox-attention may even conflict with or erode study-attention.
Something to think about if you are a student or a parent.
What if you want to go work out, but you’re too hooked on Angry Birds? What then? Check out this YouTube video for a potential solution:
Just because we can call, email, and text absolutely everywhere, it doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. Texting while driving is always dangerous and increasingly illegal. Texting at the dinner table is likely to arouse ire in your dining companions. But what about texting in the classroom? No good, says philosophy professor Laurence Thomas of Syracuse University. In fact, if you text in his class, he’ll walk out immediately, and he has done so in the past. Not surprisingly, his students are not happy about his scorched-earth no-texting policy.
One of the big differences between the web and print media is that when we read print, it is assumed that we’ll start at the beginning and read until the end. The web, and especially search engines, changed all that. Now scanning is the norm and reading is the exception.
The literary-minded certainly see skipping great swaths of text as a problem, however scanning has its advantages. According to Gary Small, M.D. and Gigi Vorgan, authors of the book iBrain, with practice, people become good at ignoring noise and locking in on exactly what they’re seeking.
Now web authors are even capitalizing on this trait. It is now an accepted tradition on Reddit.com that if you write a long swath of text, you put a one-line summary on the end with the marker “tl;dr”, this itself is an abbreviation for “too long; didn’t read”. Oddly enough, tl;dr reinvents the wheel as academics have been using 50-100 word abstracts to summarize their work for decades if not centuries.
tl;dr: People don’t read long articles but they’re often good at picking out wanted details from a longer piece.
If there was any doubt whether technology profoundly changes how we think, I present you this 1-year-old infant. She knows her way around an iPad, but is completely frustrated with a print magazine. Her mind has jumped right past conventional printing to digital technology in exactly the same way you and I grew up with books rather than clay tablets.