Photo by motoyen - http://flic.kr/p/27RBCn

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?

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – 73% of gamers who said they’d played said they felt ‘addicted’ to it
2. Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls V – 70%
3. Halo 3 – 68%
4. Final Fantasy VII – 63%
5. Grand Theft Auto IV – 58%
6. Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls IV – 56%
7. The Sims – 55%
8. Red Dead Redemption – 46%
9. FIFA 2012 – 42%
10. Tetris – 39%

photo by Carl MiKoy - http://flic.kr/p/7XvfWg

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.

photo by nigeljohnwade - http://flic.kr/p/3LftnN

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.

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.