Dust off the cobwebs – Internet Fatigue

*cracks knuckles out in front of himself* wow, been a while since I stepped inside this blog – curse you facebook, twitter etc, and now Google+ for distracting me for so  many years

So, social media – where is it going? Are you all bored with it? Feel you’ve been made so addicted that you can’t live without but secretly want to be able to? Is it the bain of your existing haunting your thoughts – even using “going to the toilet” as an excuse to quickly log on and sneak a peak at whether your friend has moved from current location? Or perhaps it’s a new lease of life, creating new avenues of information, friendship and a place where you finally feel like you belong?

How ever your feeling, the term “Internet Fatigue” is growing and growing and I’m curious to know, after all this time has past – for new comers and internet old timers how as social media affected you?

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Video game addiction experiment: final thoughts

Ok, I know it’s been a while–sorry about that. Ok…my final thoughts and analyses about the experiment, and the aftermath.

Firstly, I think the experiment was a complete success. I managed to stay away from games, gaming, and almost anything video game related for a week. What I found interesting, however, is just how much video games have become a part of mainstream life. I walked through a local mall and found it almost impossible to avoid game-related media. More than just a few shops had huge video game posters in their display windows, and one of the days that I arrived at the mall, there was a massive Nintendo expo in the center court. I can compare this to almost 10 years ago, when all things video game were pretty much found in specialist shops in this part of the world. In fact, when I bought my first Sega Genesis (or Megadrive if you came from the UK), it was difficult to find shops that sold games for it. Now even standard groceries retailers have games on their shelves.

Back to my quest to find out whether I have an addiction: the answer is no. I didn’t go out of my way to play games, I didn’t sneak away in the middle of the night to play games, and I found that I wasn’t obsessing over video games so much the time I was away. I even learned a few things about myself. Despite these facts, however, I must say that I AM, and always will be a gamer. It’s part of who I am and I consume games in the same way, and for the very same reasons, that I consume books, movies, and tv shows. On the other hand, before the experiment, I was doing very little else in terms of entertainment other than video games, but I’ve rediscovered enjoyments in other pursuits.

I’m not going to miss the gameless week, but I do have a better perspective about it now. And I’m glad that my trusty DS is back in its pouch wherever I go.

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Video game addiction experiment: day 4

Night Noises by Fayyaad Hendricks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

I apologize for the overimagification, but that’s the result of two days of challenge. It’s actually left me a little on the drained side, but…it was actually fun. It’s weird how much I can accomplish when I’m not actually playing video games! Don’t get me wrong…I miss playing them, but I’ve discovered activities and parts of me that I’d forgotten about. And I think that’s the most important lesson I’m taking away from all this–life DOES exist outside of games. The Darling Wife is impressed enough at this little book I’ve written that she’s actually at the moment in the process of trying to find it a publisher. I’m going to clean up the artwork and layout a bit, and then we’ll see if there’s a chance I can get this, and perhaps a few other stories into bookshops. Is that too ambitious for something I wrote and drew over the course of two nights? Probably…but it’s fun and exciting, even if nothing comes of it. Anyhow, enjoy the story and illustrations, as raw and un-refined as they are. If you can’t read it, my apologies; I’ve shrunk it down quite a bit so that I don’t overload anyone’s browser. If there’s a call for it, I’ll post the finished, reworked, cleaned up product at Flickr or Picasa. Just to get an indication, does anyone think they’d actually pay money for a story like this?

Back to the story of addiction. I don’t know if it’s just a case of information synchronicity, or…er…that psychological phenomenon where you only start taking notice of things because they’re relevant to you (argh, can’t remember what it’s called!!), but I’ve suddenly noticed an awful lot of articles popping up in my RSS reader about video game addiction. This statistic comes to us via Switched.com, and states that almost 1 in 10 US children are addicted to video games; 8.5% to be a little more precise. It’s an alarming number if you’re going to label it “addiction” vs “compulsion”. The sample size is significant: 1,178 adolescent children, with 8.5% of them exhibiting addictive behavior:

(Researcher, Douglas) Gentile looked for symptoms like becoming irritable when gameplay was cut short, avoiding homework to play, stealing money to buy gaming paraphernalia, and escaping reality and avoiding problems through games.

That sounds about right for “addiction”, and with kids of my own, I’m beginning to feel as though this hasn’t received enough attention till now. The article goes on to state that Dr Gentile has touted the benfits of video games before, so he’s not exactly a completely biased voice in this matter.

Gentile doesn’t necessarily think games are bad. He would just like to see game manufacturers use the significant influence games have over children for good instead of evil — for creating powerful educational devices.

[Link: Switched.com - Almost 1 in 10 Children Addiction to Video Games]

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Video game addiction experiment: day 3

I suppose it’s obvious, but it’s starting to get easier to avoid thinking about video games now, but there are still moments when I want to play. I had some spare time today that would have been dead useful for clearing a few levels of Gears of War, but I spent the time instead watching Doctor Who (my other addiction…I get a joyful upwelling in my spirit when I hear the theme tune starting up!)

So yesterday’s challenge was a two-parter, so you don’t get to see the full results until I finish today’s half of it. The challenge was thus: “Your children don’t have any of your writing that is purely theirs, so you are to write a short book in the form of Dr Seuss.” I’ve written the text of the story, and it’s not long at all. I’m going to be illustrating it tonight.

Off the topic of the challenges and onto the “gaming addiction” part of it, some experts are of the opinion that video game addiction shouldn’t be treated as an addiction, but rather as a symptom of something deeper, such as depression or an inferiority complex. I suppose in some cases, this may be so, but I think the problem a little too widespread to be attributed that way. What thinks you?

[Link: MSNBC - Is video game addiction a mental disorder?]

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Video game addiction report: day 1

So day one of the “Do I have an addiction issue?” experiment went by. And I’m sorry to say that it was a reasonably painful day. I’m going to go out there and say that if I’m not a addict, I’m borderline at the least. Let me put it this way: I took an afternoon nap to pass the time and had dreams (yes! Plural!) that I was playing a video game (Sonic the Hedgehog, I think!)

Console I missed the most? My trusty little go-anywhere DS. During the day my fingers kept itching to pick up a controller and get on with Gears of War 2 or Oblivion, or to try and obtain the last few gold medals on Rhythm Heaven DS (Seriously, one of the best games I’d ever played in my life….but I’m not allowed to think about it right now except in parentheses or as part of the experiment!) More than that, however, I found myself actively thinking about the games I was involved with, and how to get around the challenges I was facing at the moment (damn you, Oblivion!) and once on that sort of trail of thought, it’s difficult to find something else to think about…mostly because I haven’t actually had to think about much else before.

What this seems to tell me, I think, is that if not addicted, I’m at least heavily dependent on games to entertain me and keep my mind occupied. The sad thing is that I’ve not read a decent book in MONTHS, and I used to be a really avid reader (the other UtterInsanity authors can testify to the size of my personal library). I also seem to dimly recall that I might have once had an artistic streak about as wide as the Pacific Ocean. I may have even created a few paintings, written a few poems, drawn a few sketches, composed bits of music, and I have it on good authority that the half-finished book sitting in a dusty directory on my computer is actually mine.

I haven’t picked up the guitar to play in…ages. I haven’t plinked on a piano in at least twice as long. I haven’t written a poem in at least a year. My books, which I had such grandiose dreams of finishing and publishing, lie forgotten. And let’s not get started on the drawings. So these activities that used to be a big part of who I am have been lost in in all the gaming that I do. So I think I plan on revisiting those activities that I once used to find so much enjoyment in, above and beyond the games I’ve been playing since I was six.

You might find, as I did, this story about a woman dealing with addiction in her kids very interesting and amusing. It sounds very…familiar. I wasn’t playing under the covers at night when no one is around, but I’m going to admit that there were times I’d be playing something until lights-out. Which I’m very sure didn’t make the Darling Wife too happy…hence the challenges I have coming up. More on that as the week goes by.

I seem to have touched an interesting nerve with my first post about gaming addiction: had a lot of people weigh in their opinions on the matter, and whether or not gaming as a social device counts or not. Meeting online once or twice a week for a few hours to play a few games together? Not an issue. It’s when you’re playing more than 20 to 40 hours a week that you can start saying that there’s a problem. Guess why I didn’t pick up World of Warcraft?

So the first challenge happens today. Will let you know more about what happens, and how it all went down in tomorrow’s update.

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Personal experiment: video game addiction?

I read this article about video game addiction at GameSpot with great interest, seeing as how the article discussed two interests of mine: psychology, which I studied at university, and video games, my favorite down-time pursuit, and an industry that I’d love to work in. The article is long (runs into four pages) and unless you’re as rabidly interested in both spheres under discussion as I am, I doubt you’ll read the entire thing. (Incidentally, if you DO happen, by some strange quirk of the universe, to read the entire article, I’d be interested to hear your comments!)

tl;dr: how to define and quantify the concept of “video game addiction” as a psychologically valid term that can be listed in the next edition of the DSM. In other words, what criteria can we use to say “yep, this guy has a problem”.

The article goes into describing the obvious cases such as the chap who died after several days of non-stop Starcraft. The focus is on the word “addiction”, and if a person has an addiction problem, then playing games will affect other parts of their lives that aren’t generally spent playing games, such as social, marital, work, etc.

So after discussing this issue with The Darling Wife, I asked her if she thinks I have an addiction issue. To put things in perspective, there’s very little time that I’m not either actively playing games (I have a 360, a Wii, and a DS, and a computer provides endless opportunities for gaming), thinking about games, talking about games, or on the odd occasion, dreaming about games. The first 8 or 10 blogs in my feed reader are all gaming blogs, but my counter-argument is that those are the sum total gaming blogs I read out of about 50 or so feeds. Personally, I don’t think I have a gaming addiction problem.

So I proposed an experiment: I’d give up gaming for a week, from Sunday to Sunday, and document how removing a core part of what I do affects me, if at all. I’m not allowed to read gaming blogs, talk about games, play games, and I have to actively try to avoid thinking about games if I can. Now I know that will annoy some of the other authors of this blog, since Friday night is the time that everyone gets together to play multiplayer online Gears of War 2. So surely that’s already HELPING my social life, since it’s impossible to interact with my friends IRL, right?

To make things interesting, The Darling Wife has come up, Top Gear style, with a few challenges to keep my documenting of my week interesting. I’m not sure if I should be dreading or looking forward to it. Watch this space!

[Link: GameSpot - Game Addiction: The Real Story]

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Probably the cutest fight scene you’ll see all day

Yea, I have no words either. I think I’ll teach this to my kid

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Today’s insane new method of suicide: getting lost in a forest

The Japanese have come up with another novel way of committing suicide: getting lost in a forest and dying of exposure, starvation, or whatever other perils await you. The forest of choice is Aokigahara Forest, also called the Sea of Trees. Of course it’s crazy, but it’s so typically Japanese; I can’t see any other nationality coming up with something like this. Japan has a ridiculously high suicide rate (I’ve covered other crazy methods of suicide here before), and the rate’s gone up since the economy’s gone down, not that one caused the other, as any statistician will tell you!

Signs have been posted outside the forest to help deter the suicidal, and security cameras have been erected as well.

The goal, said Imasa Watanabe of the Yamanashi Prefectural Government is to track the people who walk into the forest. Watanabe fears more suicidal visitors will arrive in the coming weeks.

“Especially in March, the end of the fiscal year, more suicidal people will come here because of the bad economy,” he said. “It’s my dream to stop suicides in this forest, but to be honest, it would be difficult to prevent all the cases here.”

As a method of suicide, what do you think about it? At the very least, you’re not being inconsiderate by leaving a body for other people to sort out, and being considerate is all about what being Japanese is, yesno?

[Link: CNN.com - Desperate Japanese head to 'suicide forest']

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The IKEA effect: labour = love

Harvard Business Review has an interesting article about how people tend to value creations that they’ve labored over more than those that they haven’t.

When people construct products themselves, from bookshelves to Build-a-Bears, they come to overvalue their (often poorly made) creations. We call this phenomenon the IKEA effect, in honor of the wildly successful Swedish manufacturer whose products typically arrive with some assembly required.

In one of our studies we asked people to fold origami and then to bid on their own creations along with other people’s. They were consistently willing to pay more for their own origami. In fact, they were so enamored of their amateurish creations that they valued them as highly as origami made by experts.

The article goes on to state that the effect extends to office politics, and managers might see ideas and processes that originate with them as more valuable than those that come from outside.

It contributes to the sunk cost effect, whereby managers continue to devote resources to (sometimes failing) projects in which they have invested their labor, and to the not-invented-here syndrome, whereby they discount good ideas developed elsewhere in favor of their (sometimes inferior) internally developed ideas.

Personally, I’d call this the “Mo” effect, but that’s neither here nor there.

Either way, it’s an interesting argument, and links to the psychological effect of people being blind to their own imperfections while criticizing those same imperfections in others. People seem wired to put worth in something where they understand the labor “cost” involved, whether that cost be monetary, work hours, or otherwise. I think that’s why people put a high price on art (or any creative work, really); it’s something that the man-on-the-street feels incapable of without considerable time and effort on their behalves (whether actually true or not).

How do you feel about DIY projects that you’ve put your heart and soul into? How about projects that you’ve seen as being similar to your own? My personal feeling is to put great worth in artistic works not because I’m incapable, but because I DO understand the labor cost, having produced artwork myself. On the other hand, I see that no one around me has any love for my jokes, but that’s because they think that they just pop into my head, and that I don’t sweat for hours trying to perfect the funny. They’re right, of course, but I’m lot letting anyone think I know that.

[Link: Harvard Business Review - The IKEA effect]

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Clever advertising

This is an advert for the Panasonic Intelligent Face Detector software in their cameras, just in case you can’t make out what’s going on.

[Link: Ads Of the World - Panasonic: Intelligent Face Detector]

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