Researh Paper Draft

It's official, the Korean government is taking online gaming addiction very seriously. As of October it will be restricting the play time of adolescents. Korea has suffered through some very tragic events in the past year, and years before making it hard for the government to ignore the seriousness of the problem. In May a couple let their prematurely born three month year old daughter die of malnourishment because, in a stroke of morbid irony, they were too busy participating in a twelve hour marathon gaming sessions to feed and care for her regularly. The irony? The game they were addicted too, Prius Online, was a fantasy game where you raised a virtual child. The parents lavished gifts on their virtual daughter so that she would earn super powers while she grew, while their real daughter suffered and died. This is not an isolated display of horror to happen in Korea this year because of online gaming addiction. In the same month a 22 year old male was sentenced to 20 years in prison because he beat his mother to death after she brought up the frequency in which he played online games, and a few months earlier a 32 year old male dropped dead after a nonstop five day gaming session. Online gaming addiction does not only effect Korea, and as more studies gather information it is without question a dangerous addiction that should be treated seriously. My question is, do developers of online games purposely keep the addictive properties that keep consumers shelling out money for the monthly fee? How much responsibility are they liable for creating online gaming addicts?

Why would online game developers be interested in making video games addictive? Maybe, it is because the online gaming market has become a very profitable business. Experts are projecting that online games are going to be the source of one-third of the game market revenue by 2011. As of this year it is already worth $4 billion, and people believe it is expected to triple in the next five years. This is according to Strategy Analytic. That is more than the other online entertainment markets, which encompasses music, games, and video. These figures only include the direct flow of money from consumers to developers, and does not include the revenue generated by third party businesses that have prospered due to online gaming, such as companies who sell in game currency for real world money.

How does an online game generate money? After the initial purchase of the game, the user then pays a monthly subscription to keep playing. From there it is up to the game company to keep the gamer interested. There are alternative online games that are free to play online, however they generate revenue by selling in game items for real world money. Online gaming is a very lucrative businesses, and when you look at the numbers it is easy to see why a company would be motivated to keep players paying the monthly fee. So, what are the dangers? If the player is happy, and the developers happy, what is the harm?

Internet addiction has been around for, well, as long as the Internet has been around. Online gaming addiction has been around for just as long, but it wasn't until the launch of an online video game developed by Sony's 989 Studios, named Everquest, released March of 1999, that people started to see the effects of online gaming addiction. The game launched with modest expectations, however by October of 2001 Sony announced that it had over 410,000 active subscribers. It was the first very popular MMORPG (Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) to hit the gaming masses, and from that popularity came many reports of gamers sacrificing their responsibilities to play the game. It was hard to ignore the many accounts. Gamers found themselves loosing their jobs, their relationships, their friends, and didn't care as long as it didn't interferer with their progress within the game. No one understood the addiction, or if they should call it an addiction, meanwhile a stigma in the geek community was formed, and with that stigma came a sense of pride. Everquest was given the nick name “Evercrack”, in the meantime some gamers began to face their addiction for the first time. Their experiences got the attention of psychologists who wanted to understand why video games are addicting in the first place, and the detrimental effects it has on the addict.

Gamers will sacrifice sleep, food, and real world human socialization (anything that can potentially occupy their free time) in order to spend more time in the game. A usual gaming session for an addict lasts from at least ten hours an can go on for more than twenty hours straight (Young 358). I have known people personally who would go for over twenty-four hours on a regular basis and be proud of their gaming stamina. They certainly had reason to be proud, because they were on top of the charts, mini-celebrities in the game. Eventually this behavior wears on the gamer's personal life, including job, school, family, and friends. This also begins to wear on the gamer's health. Gaming addicts can suffer from many health problems ranging from malnourishment, eye strain, back strain, carpel tunnel syndrome, and repetitive stress injury (Young 358). One of my resources, Kelly Young, goes on to quote a gaming addict concerning how his addiction effected his health “I sopped bathing. I didn't eat unless it was a quick snack I could eat in font of my computer. I lost weight. My skin was pasty and pale. I didn't shave or comb my hair. I did nothing. I looked so bad that my mother told me I looked more like a heroin addict” (Young 358). Despite the overwhelming consequences many gamers still refuse to acknowledge their addiction. What do they get from the game that keeps them playing despite facing real life consequences?

In every piece of information, and research I read regarding online gaming addictions, there was one parallel drawn to connect the papers. This was the social need of the gamer, and their ability to overwhelmingly fulfill that need inside of the game. Online games have a very complex social environment that is only limited by the diversity of its players. In the game World of Warcraft produced by Blizzard Entertainment, which has well over eleven million players, and accounts for roughly 62% of the current online gaming market, a player can participate in a number of organized social events from small temporary groups, to the larger, more permanent guilds.

Social support is essential to a person's mental health. It is known to improve physical health, and reduce negative psychological symptoms of depression and anxiety. It has been found that the social support derived from online games like WoW can also be associated with lower levels of stress and depression. Also, the more involved a player was in WoW, the more social support they received in game. It is found that gamers form life long friendships, and partners. It also has been concluded that gamers preffer to socialize online instead of real life, because inside the game they can safely express aspects of themselves that they don not feel comfortable doing so in real life due to their gender, sexuality, age, or looks. Though while a good thing for the mental well being of the gamer, the intimate supports groups, and social circles gaming addicts online have damaging consequences to real life relationships.

Blizzard knows how powerful the strong social bonds gamers form within their creation, and pressures active gamers to bring back friends who have quit the game by rewarding current players with items called scrolls of “resurrection”. These items you can give to a friend who has played in the past, and when activated will give them a free two week play time. If the friend completes the trial period and pays to activate their account, the person who gave them the “scroll of resurrection” earns a free one month period of WoW.

Blizzard isn't the only game developer who understands the importance of social support, and the pivotal roll it plays in keeping their consumers active, and paying the monthly subscription fees. The company Square-Enix of Japan offers an item called a “buddy pass”, and a “gold world pass” for their game Final Fantasy XI in a recruiting program. A current gamer can apply for the item, and send it to a friend, who can in return redeem it for a one month free trail period of the game. The “gold world pass” goes further, if the invited friend stays in game, they receive special items on their forty day anniversary, seventy day anniversary, one hundred day anniversary, and year anniversary.

Another interesting aspect of psychology that game developers admittedly use in order to keep their gamers hooked is derived from a famous man named BF Skinner, and is most famous for his experiments concerning rats in a box, and conditioning their behavior through reward and punishment. When a rat pushed a lever inside the box, it was rewarded with food pellets. The rat soon learned to push based on the positive reinforcement the food reward created. Later Skinner found that if he staggered out the rewards, instead of giving the rat a pellet every time it pushed the lever he would reward the rat every tenth time, the rat would push the level more often, establishing motivation.

The same concept is applied during game play. When a group of gamers defeat a hard opponent there is a chance that they will be rewarded with a rare item. To keep this system in check, and to prevent gamers from collecting all the rare items and growing bored with the game, the developers introduce harder monsters with more powerful, rarer items as reward for it's defeat. Some times the monsters are hard to find, and will only appear in game randomly after a number of days. A lot of the time the monster will not drop the rare item every time. The game developers monitor the game, and the players, and work hard to introduce new things to keep the gamers interested, so that they can keep collecting the monthly fee. It is also implied, while gaming, that you must have all the best items, and be more powerful than the other guy.

While there are some positive aspects of online gaming, and when done in moderation, it can be a rewarding experience for some one who enjoys video games, there is enough overwhelming evidence out there that shows how harmful online games can become. Instead of developers responding responsibly to the addiction, they leave it for other institutions (like the Korean government), and the gamers themselves to monitor for addiction, and prevent it. I feel strongly that with the more people taking action, and the more research that piles up to support the addictiveness of online games, developers will be forced to change the play style of the games to provide a more neutral environment, or place research into other preventative measures against online gaming addiction.