MMORPG’s as a substitute for social life

MMORPG’s as a substitute for social life

Remember as a kid, when you got that new phone and the first thing you did was download a cool game to play? It was your cherished game for days to come and you intended to finish all the levels, but you often find yourself with a dead battery and hours gone to waste. Hopefully, you've grown out of that. Right? Globally, kids find themselves carrying this so called passion into their early adolescent years, and tend to achieve a sense of accomplishment when realizing they have beaten a level. This is called a online gaming addiction. It’s known to be a impulsive control disorder, similar to pathological gambling. Its also known as video game overuse or compulsive/excessive use of computer games or video games.(Greenfield 2009) Ever hear of online games such as Minecraft, Final Fantasy, and World of Warcraft? These kind of games are popularly known to have multi-player online role-playing games, also known as MMORPG’s and multi-user domain games or MUDs. MMORPG’s allow networks of people, all interacting with one another to play a game to achieve goals, accomplish missions and reach high scores in the online fantasy world. For MUDs combine multiple elements including factors of role playing games, fighting and such. Such games allow for individuals to chat online as a substitution for realistic human interaction. Due to the constant time inside, these individuals lack proper social standards and find themselves struggling with social cues. Instead, they socialize and meet and exchange ideas through online chatting. Some video games require for the game to load for a somewhat long time, it requires for people to continuously stay online for a prolonged period of time, as a way of devotion and loyalty to other players who have not loaded on yet. Online gaming for the youth has been on a rise recently and it is clear that children, especially males, are more concerned with thriving in an online life instead of reality. Video games have a multitude of pros and cons associated with them however many of the cons take precedence over the pros. A lot of video games contain a large amount of violence in them and to expose that kind of explicit content to young children can do more damage to them psychologically. In addition often times the player is rewarded for using violence to reach a goal in the game which can teach children to emulate the same actions in real life and the constant repetition of these actions can lead to and much more dangerous problems in the future. Playing these games for hours on end can also isolate the child socially and prevent them from doing homework, eating proper meals and engaging in the more important aspects of life due to the fact that an addiction has been formed.

Sources:

"Virtual Addiction" David N. Greenfield, Ph.D., "Caught in the Net" Dr. Kimberly Young, Center for Internet Addiction Recovery, American Psychiatric Association, Online Gamers Anonymous ( http://www.olganon.org), Gentile, D.A. (2009). Pathological video game use among youth 8 to 18: a national study. Psychological Science, 20, 594-602.