Online Game Addiction

[unforth]

Yoinked from akashiver and swan_tower: 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. Also: The Cost of my Gaming Addiction.


Reading the second article really effects me, enough that I'm putting off the rest of my morning to briefly write this post. I don't talk about it much, but I was a SERIOUS addict of an online game for my entire freshman year of high school, and I only quit because the game changed the format in which it was presented, and as a result most of my online friends quit playing.

Ever since then, I've pointedly avoided these types of games, because I've discovered thoroughly just how in to them I get (except for a single summer where I fell head first in to FFXI, but emerged before any serious harm was done, mostly because of the many ways in which the game sucked). I guess I never really thought about how much more destructive this experience could have been. As it was, I went to school about as often as I would have anyway, I did my homework, I kept my grades up, and by the end of the school year I'd even managed to make some real friends: but every minute I wasn't doing these other things, I was at home, playing Fed. And it did screw me up, because the piece of life that got sacrificed so I could do this was SLEEP. I went through my entire freshman year on roughly five hours of sleep a night. Most school nights I'd stay up til between 1 and 2 am; on the weekends I would start playing at noon (when I woke up) and often play until 3 or 5 am.

Fed had two components that made it super addictive for me. One was that the entire point of the game was to make money - it was a space commerce game, and so you'd run around and trade things and when you were higher level you'd build factories and eventually even own your own planet (it took me 9 months to get to the level where I owned my own planet...it was called Library...that was level 9). The other, though, was far more insidious to a 14 year old girl who hadn't had a "real" friend in 4 years and who had never had a member of the opposite sex look at her. My character in the game was a shockingly gorgeous red head, age 16. However, thanks to my mostly impeccable grammar and my quick typing, I know for a fact that most of the other players thought I was OLDER than that. I only ever told two people that I was actually 14, and they were both, er, surprised to say the least. In this game, I could be attractive, and I could flirt, and I could learn to be comfortable with others, and I made a lot of friends - even now, 13 years later, I can still remember many of their user names. And to make an admission that I've only ever told a few people, but that feels appropriate as part of this story? It's also where I did my early sexual exploration. At that point in time, I had such a poor body image and such poor luck with friends that I honestly believed that no one would ever want to have sex with me. Fed gave me a place where I could learn about the birds and the bees (without having the embarrassing experience of asking a parent. ;) )

But thinking about those articles, I can see how even that primitive, text based game was designed to breed addiction. Indeed, it was much more obvious about it. There was a level (Merchant, I believe it was level 5) where you had to build factories. The rub, though, was that the factories only ran while the player was online. This game was hosted by AOL (I was an AOL subscriber all through the 90s) and AOL had a thing that would auto log you off unless you clicked the stupid box. Basically speaking, it was close to impossible to ACTUALLY play enough hours to have your factories produce enough for you to earn enough money to reach level 6, because it reset if you didn't reach the goal in one month (or something like that - I might have the details slightly wrong, it's been a LONG time). So, in order to conquer this, everyone used a very simply macro. However, if the AOL log off box came up, the macro would be keyed to it instead of the game window, and though the macro kept you from logging off, you'd then get auto logged out of Fed. The result was that the macro could typically gain you one to two hours of "play" when you weren't actually there, but then you HAD to come back, and the more hours you could ACTUALLY be present, the better things would go. Of course, there was nothing you actually had to DO during this time, just be around, which was why I ended up having so god damn many friends in the game. I still remember how happy I was when there was a couple week period where the AOL thingies went away...

Once, out of curiosity, I decided to do a test. My mother had told me about the Myers-Brigg test, and I wanted to know what my type was, so I went and did a little online version. I tested as an INTJ, which wasn't terribly surprising at the time. Then, I tried taking the test as if I was my character in Fed. She was an ENFJ (if I recall correctly - again, it's been a long time). I thought it was so interesting, because so much of what was different in there was what I wished I could be. Fed allowed me to have the ultimate Mary Sue.

I was in deep. I would think about what I had to do that night all day in school. I remember sitting in class, "doodling" the word commands to do things on the margins of my school papers. I remember how excited I was when I found out that one of my acquaintances at school actually played the game also. I remember getting hungry at midnight and grabbing the food and bringing it straight back to my computer. I remember hours spent talking about absolutely nothing. I remember the night I ended up as the entertainment at a bachelors party being held by a friend of mine (many people, myself included, got married in the game) and how even now I recall that evening with pride. I can't help it.

I pulled myself out of this. I spent the summer in place that had only occasional internet, and that helped. The game moved off of AOL and onto the internet, and started to cost money, and most of my friends quit. That helped. When I got back to school in the fall, my friendship with clareon, ultimabaka and Minh had solidified, and Adam had joined us, and for the first time pretty much in my life I had real friends who actually shared my interests and who I wanted to spend time with, and that really helped. But I missed Fed constantly all through HS, and the bad habits it bred never ceased to cause me problems. Long after I had quit, I maintained the ridiculous sleep schedule that meant that every single Thursday for four years when I arrived at Dr. Dubiner's for my therapy appointment, my answer to "how are you?" was "I'm tired," followed by collapsing in the patient chair. I found other things to fill this addiction, mostly involving the internet.

I had learned the valuable lesson, though - I have the type of personality that, when I added depression and loneliness to the mix, would be prepared to completely give in to the game. I won't ever let this happen again, and I've learned much more productive ways of dealing with depression. The first one is: get enough sleep every night!!

But Fed still exists, and every once in a rare while, I still miss it.

Comments

[ultimabaka.livejournal.com]

Wow babe...I remember when you used to talk about how much you enjoyed this game, but even I didn't know it was this bad...

It's basically for this reason I've avoided wow like the plague that it is. Though, for the record, CoD > WoW :P