Ever since video game designers were able to put red pixels on their imaginary characters that had recently deceased, there have been people crusading against their subversive ways. Addicted players will often react disinterested or even aggressive when confronted with their behavior. Constantly struggling in their virtual world to get better equipment, more money and a higher level and looking for a way to advance faster, online gamers are usually trapped in a vicious cycle.
Children are quite easily influenced by something that they're excited about and I've seen this happen a lot. The outrage at tai game avatar seems to be cyclic, fading very briefly before exploding into the public eye once more with renewed frenzy. They become socially isolated, no longer accessible to persons that used to be close to them and tend to loose interest in anything that happens outside of their game worlds."When players of massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) talk about ""death penalties"", they refer to the resources they lose when the character they are playing dies. Playing a wrestling video game with a group of eight year olds often leads to the eight year olds screaming raucously and trying to pin each other down on the ground. The controversy seems to have sparked up again in recent times, with numerous crimes being blamed on the corruptive influence of video games. A successful anti-addiction strategy thus has to come from within. Usually this can be anything from invested time, items they acquired in long play sessions or their virtual currency. Pre-teens will often punch and kick their way out of a cinema in terrible combat stances after having viewed a martial arts movie. There have also been various "controversies" surrounding recent video games and their content in the areas of both violence and sexuality.
One possible solution was unintentionally described over a hundred years ago: ""There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it "" Oscar Wilde might have got it dead on for online gamers. Recent games, like World of Warcraft (WoW) avoid that penalty in order to make the game ""more fun"". But it gets worse: Final Fantasy XI currently has 650,000 players and it's still growing fast.
The first game to receive widespread criticism and media attention was the martial art fighting game "Mortal Kombat". It is not until the user-made modification is downloaded and installed that the player is able to access the content. Unfortunately it's not as easy to remove real casualties that result from those games - from suicides of addicted players to parents who neglect their children to the point they starve while they are playing World of Warcraft. Number of results returned for ""final fantasy xi addiction""? 2,140,000. This game included large spurts of blood emitted from attacks and also "Fatalities" that could be performed on stunned opponents after their defeat.
Regardless of who's to blame, "GTA: SA" was re-rated in America and banned from sale in Australia.
Not all stories of excessive play end that bad, but the extent of the problem is being underestimated. That's 10 pages for every single gamer. These Fatalities were gruesome animation sequences showing the victorious player killing their defeated opponent in a vast variety of ways. Oddly enough the gratuitous and encouraged violence in the game went largely unnoticed in the wake of the "scandalous" sex scenes involving clothed, cartoonesque people. Those high profile cases are certainly the saddest examples of what can result from excessive play. While not all of them are directly related to cases of addiction, it certainly shows the importance of the issue. Gamers revelled in this new experience and the controversy surrounding the violence caused mass hype that informed the less informed gamers that the game was out there.
When examined objectively almost all games contain a certain amount of violent content. But in regards to the people who are affected by serious online gaming addiction, they represent only the tip of the iceberg. If for every player of a game, ten feel compelled to discuss a possible addiction, it's a phenomenon that has to be taken seriously. Consequently gamers played the new game just to find out what all the talk was about, thereby greatly increasing revenue. The kid-friendly bright and colourful "Mario" games by Nintendo feature a character stomping on animated creature's heads. What goes unnoticed are the thousands of stories of players who get involved in an online game to the point that they seriously neglect or even abandon school, work, friends and families.
There are also signs in the offline world that this problem is existing and growing.
One of the largest sparks of controversy has been the recent "Hot Coffee" modification for "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA:SA)". In fact the majority of games, even children's game free , involve the protagonist crusading against an enemy horde of some sort and generally "disposing" of them in some manner, whether it be striking them with a weapon or body part (feet, hands, possibly a tail depending on the nature of the character). There are no statistics on the depressions that result from extensive immersion in virtual worlds. In July 2006, the first detox center for gaming addicts in Europe opens in Amsterdam. This involved unlocking a sexually oriented mini-game that had been removed from the game before release, although evidently not from the source code. The only real stand out difference is that in a children's game the 'bad' characters will generally bounce backwards in a cute manner and explode with a humorous puff sound (or simply disappear) whereas in a game oriented towards older mature players, the characters are more likely to be (somewhat) realistic, spraying a gusher of red upon their demise. There are no statistics showing how many careers have been destroyed this way. More than 20 players have already been enlisted in the 8 weeks program. The creators of the game, Rockstar Entertainment, obviously realised that this particular part of the game free was not appropriate for the video gaming public and removed access to it.
Whenever some young person somewhere commits a violent crime these days it seems to get blamed on a video game, from "Duke Nukem" and "Quake" being accused for the Columbine High massacre, to a more recent incident involving a group of minors attributing their violent actions to the "Mortal Kombat" video games. There are no statistics showing how many divorces this has caused. They range from 13 to 30 years of age, showing that this is not something that only happens to teenagers. An enterprising fan of the game found out and modified the original code to give access to the content once again. Without any solid evidence either way it's hard to say whether or not video game violence actually has much of an influence on players.
As one of the oldest MMORPGs, Everquest is still very popular with around 450,000 subscribers. In Canada and the US there are already multiple clinics and even in China a facility has opened already. Lawsuits were brought against Rockstar for including such content in their game although the validity of the lawsuit has to be questioned. To really be sure you'd probably have to have a control group of isolated children that have never seen a violent movie or played a bloodthirsty video game. A google search for ""everquest addiction"" returns 234,000 results.
Families and friends of affected players are often at a loss as to how they can help them. If the game is simply purchased and played as intended by the developers. this admittedly tasteless and inappropriate mini game would never be encountered. History does however show that brutal crimes were committed long before video game online or even movies came into existence.
