Bring on the Depression!

First off, I'm ridiculously sick and drugged. That's not an apology, but rather a cautionary warning that the following grammar or language conventions may deviate somewhat from established norms.

I just wanted to tip my hat to two articles from last month, one on 'seeking' from Slate, the other on depression from SciAm. I got both of these via Hilarie Cash.

In the depression article, they more or less say that depression could be an evolutionary benefit. When we slow down and ruminate during depressive states, we're able to pick apart events, situations, and so forth that might be causing us ongoing problems. That it's a completely natural reaction, one valuable enough to have stuck around for God knows how long.

The Slate article mostly features an interview with Jaak Panksepp, and his notion that dopamine wasn't stimulating pleasure centers, as is often assumed. It stimulates curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy - what he settled on calling "seeking."

This notion could loom large for game studies theorists, especially those exploring education, and the role of learning as a stimuli for encouraging play. No doubt, both of these articles have major implications for clinical researchers engaged in both theory building and quantitative analysis for pathological Internet use. In many places, Game Addiction points to dopamine as a pleasure stimulator, but in my view Dr. Panksepp's work would have made more sense in various parts of the book.

I also had fun connecting these two articles. If depressive rumination is about slowing things down so as to break apart problems, in some ways we're seeking. If a videogame is an entire system patterned to reward for seeking... It's interesting to ruminate on, at any rate.

Things have been fun for me on a personal level. I've started dogsitting here locally, this last weekend I babysat a couple real cute dachshund puppies. They had a lot of personality, and their interactions were super adorable. I've got a couple magazine pitches that I'm shopping, in relation to Game Addiction. I'll be sure to post if I get some hits on that. I've also been checking out D&D 4th edition. I like it. I'm playing a perpetually drunken cleric named Shanty McShamus, who sports a cap of disguise, wallwalkers, a bag of holding that is in fact a wine cellar, and a flask of fire breathing. Pub scenes are a blast (yes, literally), and occasionally he finds it useful to use his combat rounds casting turn undead (when there are clearly no undead within range).

I've also been hanging out with my ole pal Al, whose name we spell Elmeacq. We're a bit excited about something we're calling an interactive choose-your-own-adventure project. So far we're still in the 'taking stock of resources' phase, but so far we've done some good concepting and writing (during times normally allotted to Rifftrax, stand up and videogames). I don't want to give too many details, but it could be a novel take on storytelling and sketch comedy.

And that's about it. Mixing this Echinacea with this generic NyQuil stuff does a good job of knocking me right out.

Nothing Cures a Gaming Addiction Like...

A good old-fashioned beatdown.

Apparently drill instructors at a Chinese Internet Addiction camp beat to death a sixteen-year-old, Deng Senshan, for running too slow. For godssakes the boy was running! I've been working out daily for two months, but I still have to stop after about a mile and a half (Admittedly I'd gotten pretty bad). Would they not-so-surgically remove my spleen?

This is after news that treatment centers recently ended the use of electroshock therapy for the treatment of game addicts. This reminded me of a really cool photo I saw in a Nat Geo on China, featuring an actual treatment center for Internet Addicts. This isn't a hoax, it's the actual picture:



I say... escape on horseback.



Thanks to Melvin at DigiPen and Hilarie Cash for forwarding the news on China. Dr. Cash is an author and clinician who recently opened a 45-day, outdoors inpatient treatment program in the Redmond area. I was really interested in seeing the open house for it, to get a feel for what's what, but ironically I'll be camping.

Weekday Update

I think I've gotten too comfortable writing about feelings and events from the perspective of fictitious characters. At a certain point of blasting out kooky characters and odd science fiction, it feels more strange to take all of those details for yourself, distilling them into a representative and satisfying blog post. At least, that's how I feel right now. For the past month or so I've been writing a few thousand words of novel every day. And some of my characters are pretty fucked up. I won't lie to you, what they have to say is a lot more interesting than what I have to say. So usually I just help them to say what they have to say, and stay away from straying into saying things about play. Or my day.

So I've also been reacquainting my body to the mysterious forces known as gravity and motion. Funny how those make your brain work better. They've yet to sculpt my stomach into anything other than the usual curvaceous one-pack, but that's alright. I'm trying my best not to scrutinize too hastily.

What I'm really trying to say here is that by some wacky stream of events, my book received a beyond thoughtful review from Jim Rossignol at Rock, Paper, Shotgun (the second link is the review itself). I got introduced to John Walker at RPS a couple of years ago, when he and I talked about addiction for his PC Gamer feature (linked in the book review, but here also for gigs).

And now Raph Koster, who I quote and reference way more than once in Game Addiction, has posted a blog about the review before I'd even gotten around to posting it here. This is a sign. It reads: "Neils. Your blogging punctuality is questionable at best. At worst, it should be strung..." And the rest of the sign is illegible. At least that's my official line, and since I'm writing to tell you about the sign you're going to have to take my word for it.

Truth be told, I've spent the last few months taking a cautious sampling of all the things normal for a strapping lad in his mid-twenties. Dating a girl way out of my league, and failing terribly. Taking jobs way out of my league, and by odd coincidence doing quite well. Weeping.

And sailing



past this buoy



and this buoy



and this boat



and seattle



with my darling sister.



And that's the weekday update.

Untitled

When my grandma Cora died, I distinctly remember somebody telling me that she wasn't dead.

“She's living on in you,” they said. I have no memory who. “As long as you remember her and keep her in your heart, she's never really dead.”

I was twelve. I'll never know if that was just one of those comments meant to stop a crying child. I don't even remember if it made me feel better. What I do remember is hearing from another family member, “She was a cowgirl.” Since then I've learned that we're all inalienably entitled to picture death in whatever form or fashion we so choose. “She's a cowgirl” always summed it up for me. It was bad, a feeling of loss, but there was always something about that statement that overcame the bad. Right then it was exactly what I needed to hear.

When a friend Jeff died seven years later, I didn't go to the poetry slam dedicated to his earthy and bourgeois impact, didn't join the group driving to the services and couldn't bring myself to meet his mother. Besides my own private and solitary tribute, what I did do was pull up his website from time to time. In looking at that page, in just taking in the experience he had himself laid out, designed, in a way painted, it almost felt like a part of him was alive. It felt like maybe his faded spectral form was sitting just behind me, arms crossed in a silent approval. Looking at the site brought on a clouded feeling, but other feelings came too. These were the feelings that I needed.

The site lasted a few years before vanishing. Maybe deleted, maybe buried in the explosion of voices. Whatever it might have been, the website never outright said that he was a cowboy, or an elitist, or a guy that I wish I'd know better. But it did talk. In his own way, he was telling me what I needed to hear.


“Are these our dead friends, or the gramophone?”
-George Seferis

Oh, Theodore

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."

A McLuhan Moment

Read My Book!!

The book, my friends, is ready for public consumption! Well, at least, in one sense of the word. Finding the thing has its own lovable quirks. The first problem you’ll have is with typing my name into any kind of search feature. It has a high probability of taking you to, among other things, the charming e-harmony guy Neil Clark Warren. Maybe my next book should be about identifying the love of your life – in two games of Tetris Attack or less. Using the full title, Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects seems to work the best. The other problem is that nobody seems to have prepared for the possibility people might buy my book. It appears to be sold out on Amazon here in its first week of release (it must be the 38 cent discount.) My sincere apologies on that score.

Here’s the part where I should up and sing the book’s praises, and in a week or three I may indeed post press release info to help out any interested journos (though those are going first to journos I’m already in contact with.)

That said, why should you trust me to sing my book’s praises? Of course I love it – it’s my damned book!

So instead, I wanted to point out some of the areas where I screwed up. With a project like this, hindsight always burns the retinas in one or two places.

The editing and proofing, in my view, was not one of these areas. I exclaimed this before, to the point where people around me got annoyed, but my editors at McFarland humbled me with their abilities. There are probably one or two little editorial blips with the book as it stands – but that happens.

I commit this first foul several times; it really cracked me up when I first realized the following example in proofing. In the intro I let the reader know I’ll be talking about “the woman I married,” in videogames. I never do. And my World of Warcraft pirate wedding is probably one of my better stories.



Promises, promises. This is the problem, in my estimation: there are too many places in the book where I promise to talk about something – and then get distracted by shiny objects.

To more of a substantial issue: Chapter 3, ‘Why they Play.’ In retrospect, too much of Ch. 3’s smoothing got cut, while too much back-end research was left unadorned. As a result, some of my more important points on psychological immersion go un-made, leaving one or two parts feeling disjointed. Brilliant colleagues pointed out this problem in very early drafts, making me feel all the sillier for not minding it consistently. On the flip side, I felt that in the Soul Kerfuffle narrative, Andy and Dave bailed me out, explaining a lot of these problems in ways that were far more clear and straightforward. And also, Chapter 3 did not include this hamster. Unforgivable.



What might surprise some, given how outspoken I’ve been in blog posts and interviews, is that you won’t find Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) in Game Addiction. While the early drafts started and ended with refutations of IAD, as this book grew to include subtle topics like brain plasticity, functioning, cultural reasons for play, psychological reasons for play and physical immersion, an eight-item checklist for addiction really didn’t seem to be worth mentioning. This is a problem that a lot of people have with DSM-style criteria – the issues that they explain are too complicated to be captured in an antiseptic little jar. In retrospect, that wouldn’t have been hard to say.

What makes this omission worse, the APA makes a final decision on whether to include gaming problems in the DSM within the next two years. If researchers come up with legitimate, clinically-verified criteria for pathology before then, and that's included in the new DSM, then there might actually be enough funding for researchers to make textured and productive headway. Catch-22, right? Oh, right, and a fully new DSM only comes out once every couple of decades.

Finally, the last issue is one that I started noticing when doing early planning for my media and ethics course at DigiPen. In the book I point out two major technological advancements (as opposed to the socially-embedded media, or how those technologies are adopted and adapted by people [to use Neil Postman’s distinction]) that games have – above and beyond other mass-market entertainment: the designed experience and the social connectivity. In my lectures, I decided to rank user-generated content on equal footing. Were I starting the book anew, I'd have included it from the beginning. The argument could be made that user-generated content is a product of the two other technologies, and that this is truly only an issue of how they’re used. Nonetheless, pointing it out would have made understanding virtual worlds easier for the unindoctrinated. And that's what this book was about - bringing together fields of inquiry that don't talk - then explaining things so that everyone can understand.

So, depending on how busy I get in the coming months, I might set aside time to supplement the book with updates on IAD, e-wedding and e-divorce, player motivations and the technologies of gaming – among many, many other things that I’m interested in talking about. I’m also keen to talk about the major next step for this line of inquiry.

Enough said – read my book!!