rat addiction studies
I'm not addicted to rats, but I do play a lot of Pokemon Go as well as Wizards Unite.
Anyway, the advantage of alcohol is that it encourages sociability by letting you deal with the stress of talking to people. Right up until it doesn't.
I probably should start playing video games. Or maybe I should start drinking.
If you drink and play Civ V, you enjoy nuking Gandhi a bit too much.
How is it possible to enjoy nuking Gandhi too much?
Anyway, I basically replaced TV with video games and bitching on the internet. I'm not sure if this is healthy or not, but it's not like TV was a social and intellectual bonanza.
This is probably a dumb question, but this line confused me: "He decided he would download [Pokemon Go] so that he could immediately block all access to it using a 'screen accountability' program called Covenant Eyes". Huh? Why download the game for the express purpose of blocking his own access to it? Why not just not download it?
I gave up Pokemon Go for Lent last year. I'll probably do it again, but I'm already level 40.
Re: OP.last, I hesitate to look up how many hours I've played World of Warcraft. I think I easily could have wound up like the guys in the article if my college days or early career had been just a little bit worse or whatever. I still play it a lot, but I'm basically taking care of myself and my family and the biggest influence on my social life is clearly the child rather than the games, so I don't worry about it too much.
It makes me wonder about a lot of the people I encounter online. The WoW fandom is really divided these days. It's not just politics, the current expansion is very controversial. How many people I argue with are healthy sane adults who happen to have different opinions than me, and how many of them are in that 1-8 percent with medically recognizable addictions? On the Internet, no one knows you're a case study.
7: Why not both? A lot of the time when I'm playing WoW, I'm sitting in front of the TV. Someone else in the room is paying more attention to it than I am but I'm still looking up from my computer now and then and following the show well enough to get the essentials.
8: He download the game immediately to get it over with and set it up with Covenant Eyes proactively. That way, if he has a bad day (or a good day so he feels like he can indulge himself "just a little"), he can't be tempted to download it without setting up that app.
10.3: Because Netflix doesn't have Columbo anymore.
the current expansion is very controversial
Cyrus, can you explain what you mean here?
From the link in the OP, a skeptic of the idea of video game addiction:
People enjoy and sometimes form all-consuming passions for countless activities -- fishing, baking, running -- and yet we don't typically pathologize those.
The weird thing is -- for me at least -- I kind of think that my good habits/interests/obsessions spring from roughly the same personality traits as my bad ones -- so much so that it's not always entirely clear to me which are my good obsessions and which aren't.
Heebie is wise:
But what is my real life? I am capable, for instance, of getting a lot of satisfaction -- enjoyment, even -- from working long hours over extended periods. That trait hasn't always been beneficial for me, though I think a lot of folks would call that my real life.
Huh, after "Heebie is wise" and before my own subsequent comments, I meant to quote this, but it disappeared:
If you're self-medicating so hard that it causes problems in your real life, then you need to seek help for the underlying problems in your real life that you've been avoiding.
but it's not like TV was a social and intellectual bonanza.
TV has actually become really, really good. That's what I do now instead of reading.
Sometimes I hear episodes of Bob's Burger's and they sound funny.
12: Battle for Azeroth, the seventh expansion, was released a little over a year ago now. A lot of people on Reddit and the game's official forums seem to hate changes in gameplay, new features or the removal of some old features, the direction of the story... basically everything new in the game except for the maps and cosmetic features, and some of those too.
I have no idea how much of it is a vocal minority or genuine unpopularity. Personally I'd say it's a bit worse than the previous expansion, but far from the worst ever and still a perfectly fun hobby to sink time into. A lot of the complaints make no sense at all to me, or only make sense if they're coming from the most hardcore of the player base. I can understand intellectually why the changes in the global cooldown or gearing might suck for someone who wants to be a Cutting Edge raider, but that's objectively less than 5 percent of the player base, so I have no idea why so many people whine about it and get upvoted so much when they do.
You had me at "seem to hate changes".
Fortnite Chapter 2 is a mess. I'll probably stop playing pretty soon unless they fix it.
"Fortnite Chapter 2" should have been called "Rest of the Month".
A friend of mine from college works for a video game firm (not one so popular that I've heard of it or anything it produces).
We were talking about game addiction and he says the problem is so stark that he has moral qualms about his job. I said that my understanding is that 90% of booze is sold to 10% of the population, most of whom are alcoholics. Without saying the numbers, he said that video gaming is even more unbalanced than that and that without the very small percentage of addicts, it wouldn't be a profitable industry.
Then we talked about other things and I don't know his sources and if you prove me wrong that's fine. But he's a usually reliable source, so.
Is he working for the free phone games? Those are probably different than things like WoW.
part of the problem with analysing something like 21 is "video gaming" is a really broad term now. The companies making several hundred million dollar budget "AAA" games for release on consoles and PC's are arguably in a different business than companies churning out phone games with engagement tactics, as are their customers. There is some evidence that the latter group of customers have distributions much like legal gambling, where a very large percentage of the money comes from a small percentage of users, many of whom have addictive tendencies.
add to 23 subscription service online games (e.g. WoW) as a different model again.
I wonder if Farmville isn't keeping a few people from losing their house in a casino. Somebody should look into that.
Obviously, my main compulsive behavior is hitting "refresh" here.
A big part of 21 is that so many games have a funding model where they're free to play but it's also possible to spend thousands of dollars if you're a completest and want every fancy costume every character could have. So all the revenue is coming from whales.
(WoW is wildly different in funding model since it has a subscription. But that model's been obsolete for games other than WoW since around 2008. Source: RWM was working for a video game company in 2007-2009 that was supposed to be subscription based but never released the game because the model was changing.)
I can only assume he is. Someone who buys a copy of Halo 5 and plays it once is exactly as profitable to Microsoft as someone who buys a copy of Halo 5 and plays it for 10,000 hours.
26: somebody should monetize that.
"We were talking about game addiction and he says the problem is so stark that he has moral qualms about his job. I said that my understanding is that 90% of booze is sold to 10% of the population, most of whom are alcoholics. Without saying the numbers, he said that video gaming is even more unbalanced than that and that without the very small percentage of addicts, it wouldn't be a profitable industry".
I suspect that something pretty similar is true of books. Most people buy zero books a year. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 90% of books were sold to 10% of the population, most of whom would describe ourselves as bookoholics.
Standpipe did. That's how he retired with all the money.
31: I always wondered how he paid for that blog.
21, 30: You're talking about the Pareto principle.
Only 20% of the people referencing that are using it correctly at least 80% of the time.
The spending distribution for books is complicated by the existence of public libraries. If there were publicly funded bars, but they only served you three drinks a night, how would that affect overall alcohol consumption and spending?
We can use the Dewar's Decimal System.
People enjoy and sometimes form all-consuming passions for countless activities -- fishing, baking, running -- and yet we don't typically pathologize those.
God that guy is a moron or at least the article is trying to make him sound like one. The lead up to that is gamers detailing things like their overwhelming depression and plan for suicide. You know, like people do with baking and fishing. "THE FISH WON'T STOP BITING, MY FOREARMS ARE ON FIRE. WHY CAN'T I STOP? I SHOULD KILL MYSELF"
28 Coincidentally, I got drunk last night and started playing Halo 5 for the first time.
I curse my brother for getting me into Clash Royale, one of those addicting phone games.
Do you get to kill children at the end?
40: Maybe things are different in Utah, but when I go fishing -- and still more when I went fishing compulsively -- it's only the mosquitos that can't stop biting.
The companies making several hundred million dollar budget "AAA" games for release on consoles and PC's are arguably in a different business than companies churning out phone games with engagement tactics, as are their customers.
Yes and no. It varies from company to company (I'm looking at you, EA, Ubisoft and 2K) and from game to game, but increasingly the traditional AAA games are leaning on exactly the same "engagement tactics" - ie addiction exploitation - to monetise the games long after the initial purchase. They may have more substance to the gameplay than your typical phone game, but the psychological tricks are identical.
10 & 17. I play WoW fairly regularly. I avoid addiction by not raiding. (I used to raid in Everquest and it came close to addiction before I quit.) I rather like the Battle for Azeroth expansion. Maybe it's inveterate raiders who don't like it? I've heard people say that the raids are too easy, except for one or two.
I'm what the hardcore call "casual": I only recently finished the achievement that lets you fly (on a flying mount, not like Superman) in that expansion. Some people got that achievement within a week or less of the bottleneck part of the expansion being launched. I don't read message boards about WoW, so I'm probably missing the whining and complaints.
I think people with certain personality types (M-B INTJ, if I can mention M-B without raising ire) can easily fall into game addiction. I'm a software engineer, and the same traits that make you good at (e.g.) debugging (concentration, eye for detail, mental stamina) can also make you want to play the game addictively.
I do know at one remove a fortnite player whose YouTube channel makes $80k a month in advertising revenue.
I would very much appreciate a link to this YouTube channel if one is available.
I would very much appreciate a link to this YouTube channel if one is available.
Here. He's a friend of my older son (who is spending his gap year editing these and other videos and getting a cut of the ad revenue).
45.last: No ire, but I don't think there's much evidence that personality type has much to do with addiction. Is hyperfocus addictive per se? Is it a form of addiction? I would guess these are separate tracks, but I could be wrong. (Maybe this is just a colloquial language issue, like when people say "I have OCD" to mean that they attend to detail when tidying.)
You down with OCD?
Yeah, clean so free.
48. I think getting immersed deeply in something you are doing (debugging, killing monsters, ...) and finding it hard to stop and thinking about it when you aren't doing it is the behavior. I won't say it's a "type," but it's a common thing in the software industry and in gaming. Hyperfocus, if it produces gratifying results, can be addictive. I think it's a more reasonable term than "OCD," but OCD is okay colloquially. (I don't meditate, but it sounds a lot like a kind of hyperfocus, and it can be "addictive" in the same way.)
I really can work for hours when I get in that state. And billing for them makes it all better.
I have to think that pretty much every entertainment/hobby that isn't 'comic book movie'/'network tv show'/'airport or romance novel' has the same pareto distribution of customers. I am curious what percent of people don't engage in any of the more skewed hobbies.
They probably vary in how much time they take, but outside of some rich people who can buy expensive sneakers, expensive cars, expensive scotch, etc. most people have time and $ in their budgets for only one main hobby.
I definitely get the hyperfocus thing. I have trouble focusing most of the time, so when I come across something with enough detail to focus I can really get stuck. I have mostly quit videogames because I can easily just drop into it for 12-18 hours before I realize I haven't eaten or slept. I enjoy the time, but time goes too quickly and I'd rather have 12 hours of recreation feel like 12 hours, not 20 minutes. It probably helps that the 'engagement' tactics don't actually make me feel more engaged and prefer, or at least get more immersed in, more traditional video games. Last two games I did were city skylines and No Man's Sky
Trump getting booed at the World Series is giving me life.
I've watched a whole bunch of different angles.
One city, two city.
Red city, blue city.
Fans of the Nationals lack moral standing to criticize Trump, because the Nationals' stupid logo appears to be an homage to George W. Bush. You can call it a "curly W" all day long; all I see is GTMO.
I think they should get credit for being better than the Redskins.
Josh Marshall has a bunch of different videos of it on his twitter feed.
The thing is, in his mind he went there expecting a hero's welcome for having taken down al-Baghdadi and instead he was forced to face the one thing his narcissistic ass has spent a lifetime avoiding, spent a lifetime organizing his life around avoiding, that people despise him and think he's an utter piece of shit. George W. Bush would never have been booed en masse like that even at the height of his criminal Iraq war. And as much as I detest American militarism I love how the crowd cheered the troops, booed Trump, than went back to cheering the troops. Inject that stuff straight into my veins.
She hasn't said when she resigns yet.
Meh. Blue city.
People say that but most Nats fans are from Virginia, World Series tickets are for rich people, and baseball is a notoriously conservative sport.
"George W. Bush would never have been booed en masse like that even at the height of his criminal Iraq war."
He got booed in the streets on the way from his inauguration if I remember Fahrenheit 9/11 accurately.
The World Series of baseball is like the World Series of Netball, except it's baseball.
"George W. Bush would never have been booed en masse like that even at the height of his criminal Iraq war."
He got booed in the streets on the way from his inauguration if I remember Fahrenheit 9/11 accurately.
That's sounds less impressive than a whole stadium.
70: Well that was people who came in particular to boo him. This was a stadium of baseball fans.
Who are mostly people who seek to be bored in public.
I wonder if ticket prices went down when people realized that Trump would be there, or went up when people realize they'd get a chance to boo him.
(Like Spike, I am impressed that a bunch of fatcat baseball fans nonetheless hate Trump. I believe I heard that the cheapest, standing-room tickets were going for $400 each.)
I won't link it, but Breitbart is funny on the president's visit. You get six paragraphs of bad newswriting (including a mention of al-Baghdadi in the second graf), before this final paragraph:
Most fans in the stadium booed the president after he was announced, some in the crowd turned their backs and some others chanted "Lock him up" before he left.
74: Boring answer: I doubt he moved ticket prices too much either way. It's a local World Series for the first time in something like 90 years or so. It's a very blue area, but a blue area where people are blasé about appearances by national politicians in general. I can't imagine anyone either going or not going just because of Trump. The fact that they were able to heckle him would have been a relatively minor bonus. If hypothetically the crowd had been pro-Trump, the anti-Trump contingent would be used to seeing something similar roughly once a week on the way to work.
I've seen a lot of speculation about how the Venn diagram of baseball fans who go to games overlaps with the general area's population. On the one hand, going to a game means more disposable income and free time than the median, which generally means more conservative. On the other hand, Trump is less popular around here than the median Republican. The DC suburbs is full of those people who are about to lose their jobs because they didn't want to relocate to Nebraska.
That was Missouri. Nebraska is much nicer.
Lincoln is getting a Lululemon store, so soon the state won't suffer from off-brand butt-covering.
I am also not inspired by the crowd of very rich suburban people demonstrating they don't like Trump.
||
"Working together with the local security agencies, the military has been deployed to restore normalcy in the area," Defense Indoctrination and Public Relations Director Major-General Mohamed Tessema said|>
Today I put my shoes and socks on before eating my breakfast porridge, breaking the ancient Scottish rule of Brose Before Hose.
Well off suburban fucks are a crucial part of the Trump vote.
Am I allowed to enjoy it without finding it inspiring?
82: Exactly -- it's like LBJ saying "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America." If Trump is unpopular enough to get booed in a stadium full of people who can afford World Series tickets, that means something, because economically those people are his base.
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"The story about me running for office is just speculation. I am running to lose weight."|>
Aren't the NoVa suburbs, unlike most suburbs, blue?
86: Bluer than most suburbs. Not as blue as DC itself. Again, this isn't terribly surprising or meaningful. But it's fun.
68 Yeah, also at the 92 World Series. I stand corrected. But still booing.
https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1188824556812881927
W at a 2008 Nationals game. I haven't even started drinking.
Also as Felix G pointed out on twitter, nothing could raise America's standing more in the eyes of the world than Americans publicly booing 45.
I thought people knew that most people in America hate the president, like in so many other countries.
Aren't the NoVa suburbs, unlike most suburbs, blue?
Blue for Virginia, but way redder than Maryland's DC suburbs.
That's because the major federal industry in the VA suburbs is built around the Pentagon. In MD, its built around agencies like NIH and NIST.
Re: baseball, it's very conflicting to be an Astros fan right now. On the one hand, they have the best team they've ever had and are one win from winning the World Series. On the other hand, the team management revealed themselves to be a bunch of total assholes over the past week or so, and now a bunch of random twitter MAGA heads are announcing that they've become Astros fans thanks to the Trump boo-fest.
I just think its a disgrace that somehow the World Series this year is two National League teams playing against each other.
I mean, first the perfidious NL steals the Brewers, and now this.
Dunno, I'd say once a team has a full-time DH they are an American League team. Exception for Philadelphia during the Pete Incaviglia era.
95-7 belong in the other thread.
93 is right. Nearby DC in MD are Montgomery and Prince Georges Counties, both about as blue as you can be. DC goes without saying. NoVA is increasingly blue though there are still some fairly red bits. If you live in a red part of MD or VA it's a long trip to get to Nationals Park.