Video Game Addiction With Each

Video Game Addiction

With each advance of technology as the creation of the telephone, radio, and television, psychologists have conducted research to determine the positive and negative impact on adolescents. Recently, the game playing on the TV and Internet have become one of the major entertainment vehicles for youths. Online gaming, similar to activities in previous generations, has raised concerns regarding the effects on behavior. These games appeal to adolescents for many reasons.

A large number of the studies have dealt with video game playing teens (boys) and violence. Another growing area of concern is addiction. It is not so much the video/Internet game, itself, but the time spent playing the game that raises an issue. My study would be about the video game/Internet game addiction and time spent playing the game. That is, how much time per day/week would be considered addictive? (This is similar to alcohol abuse and the number of drinks per day that are consumed). The title would be: ADOLESCENT VIDEO/INTERNET GAME PLAYING: AMOUNT of TIME PER DAY CONSIDERED ADDICTIVE

I believe this is an area that should be studied, since I did not see any studies that actually addressed this issue. In addition, there are not many studies that I saw that researched video/Internet game playing addiction in general (and some of the ones I saw and include below are not peer reviewed). The concern is that adolescents are spending a great deal of time playing these games, which is taking them away from other social activities. In middle school and high school, there were many students I knew who spent considerable time playing these games. In fact, that is all they did every day when they went home from school. Plus, they spent more time on the weekend online or with the video games.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Hauge and Gentile (2003) from the Minnesota School on Professional Psychology studied 607 8th and 9th graders for hand-held devices, video game consoles, and the computer to analyze addiction levels and degree of aggressive behavior. A scale of addiction was identified and separated into two groups (Non-Addicted and Addicted). The results showed that the addicted group revealed more reports of involvement in physical fights in the last year, more arguments with friends and teachers, higher hostile attribution scores, and lower grades. The authors report that video game "addiction" is a problem among adolescents, particularly among males, and that addiction is associated with adjustment problems, such as school performance and aggressive attitudes and behaviors.

Moore (2005) expresses his concern about his own children and addictive behavior. He states: "Lest you think I'm jesting about the addictiveness of these games: The family down the street had a ten-year-old who was so deeply entranced by the Harry Potter game that he would sit unblinking in front of the TV set for three to four hours at a time, until he wet his pants rather than interrupt the game for a bathroom break." He continues that unless he gives his children even a moment of unscheduled and unmonitored time, they are immediately downstairs again in front the video games. He states that his sons will not play real basketball, but they will play Allen Iverson in the NBA game for hours on end, similar to other sports.

Harris Interactive in collaboration with Psychology Professor Douglas Gentile, Ph.D., director of the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University and director of research for the National Institute on Media and the Family interviewed 1,178 U.S. children and teenagers (ages 8 to 18) concerning their online game use between January 17 to 23, 2007. This study is the first to document a national prevalence rate of pathological video game use among youth.The amount of video game playing time varies by age of the player as well as gender. Harris found the average 8- to 12-year-old plays 13 hours of video games per week, while the average 13- to 18-year-old plays 14 hours per week. However, boys played almost two times the amount of hours as girls.

Gentile stated, "It is important that people realize that playing a lot is not the same thing as pathological play. For something to be an addiction, it has to mean more than you do it a lot. It has to mean that you do it in such a way that it damages your life. This is why we-based our definition on how pathological gambling is diagnosed in the DSM-IV. Almost one out of every ten youth gamers show enough symptoms of damage to their school, family, and psychological functioning to merit serious concern."

Dr. Suzanne Martin, youth and education researcher at Harris Interactive, says, "The prevalence of video gaming in youth culture in combination with this level of pathological video gaming is great cause for concern and highlights the need for further research in this arena." Gamers who were interviewed and deemed pathological were getting lower school grades than other students, more apt to have video game systems in their bedrooms (65%), spending significantly more time playing games each week (averaging 24.5 hours per week), and more likely to have been diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder.

Psychologists at the University of Rochester, New York, in collaboration with Immersyve, Inc., a virtual environment think tank, asked 1,000 gainers what motivates them to keep playing. The research as published in Motivation and Emotion suggests that people enjoy video games because they find them intrinsically satisfying (Science Teacher 2007). The Rochester reseachers analyzed at the basic motives and satisfactions that can spark players' interests and maintain play. Four groups of people played different games, including one group tackling massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, which are considered the fastest growing segment of the computer gaming industry. MMOs support hundreds of thousands simultaneous play worldwide. For group playing MMOs, demonstrated the need for relatedness "as an important satisfaction that promotes a sense of presence, game enjoyment, and an intention for future play."