Jan 19 2009
Video games and social anxiety part 1
This is a simple question, Do video games and computer games lead to anti-social or socially detached behavior? IE. a gamer being scared to interact with real flesh and blood people, a gamer who has delved so deep into a CG world of ultra-violence, death and, dismemberment, that he/she begins to loose touch with reality all together.
Well ladies and gentlemen, i am a gamer, i love video games and i dare say that it has made me a bit of an outsider. That even to go so far as saying, it has caused a form of social anxiety disorder. I’ll spare you the gory details but lets just say the bathroom and I are close friends. But thats not the point I’m trying to make. My point or rather to re-write my title two paragraphs in, is to say “Are video games a coping mechanism for the socially repressed?”
Personally, I would answer a resounding yes. For those of you who are in the know of video games and the recent popularity of peer to peer, massive-multiplayer and, online head to head challenge games. You’ll find a mass of diffrent groups, from all walks of life, from Attorneys to Mechanics, Police, Military, Government, Receptionists etc. All of them from various cultures and backrounds, countries and states. You could play one game with a lawyer from new york then the next game your playing with a cop from france.
All of these people usually have one thing in common from my experience, and that is they don’t know how to interact with a vast group or even a small group of people, none more apparent than the game which is already more popular than jesus and about as fulfilling as a second full-time job, World of Warcraft.
As a player of this gem of technology, blending a general hacky-slashy style game with the format of grinding quests and go here, go there chains. Blizzard seems to be too busy giving everyone in their office piggyback rides and frequent trips to the icecream parlor to realize that the game they created is endlessly boring. Please save your bile spitting insults for later, and lets have a little chat about this. Create an account, and a charecter, choose a server, grind your way to fame and riches, well riches, only to find out that they just released new crap for you to grind out that makes your current crap worthless. Not to mention that occasionally accually with seemingly timed precision, just as your about to level or finish a quest along comes one of the enemy faction and he/she/it/they cut you down. So now your stuck as a ghost running all the way back to your lifeless “teabagged” corpse only get camped for rep and honor points until you can either beg for help from someone stronger or you give up entirely and log off at which point theyll leave you alone lest your paths cross again.
Please stop me if this is sounding all to familiar. Continue with days, weeks or months of grinding and getting “ganked” until you finally make it up to the max level and you’ve accumulated a fortunes worth of gold and items that you don’t have enough room in your bank to store it all. Just about the time you’ve completed all that, another patch comes out and all of your skills and abilitys that you’ve spent months perfecting, all of your items and rare gear you’ve spent weeks gathering, fighting the greedy and desperate to obtain. the countless hours you spent infront of your computer slaving away at. All of it, is now worthless, de-valued to the point of tears. everyone and their mother immediatly puts it up for auction for prices far beyond that of what any normal player could afford, and your left to sell your now worthless gear to the lowest bidder just so you can walk away with a fraction of what its accually worth.
Here is how it works, supply and demand post update. The formula for figuring out how much an item is worth after the update rendered it useless is this, take all the time spent trying to obtain it, divide that by current price of the item in the auction house. then multiply times zero to get an answer of nothing. By now your wondering, what the hell am i talking about. Well think about it a second, how many people are playing this game for an equation like that to accually be true? Answer, over 11 million people world wide. That means over 11 million people are all doing the exact same thing your doing, there trying to acomplish the exact same thing you are.
Now for that 11 million people out of 6 billion and change across theworld, doesnt seem like much does it? But ask yourself, how many people do you know who since the sale of the original world of warcraft, how many people have stopped hanging out, how many people have stopped going out to the bars, and shows, and resturants, and coffee shops. Better yet, how many people do you know that you see at your local starbucks on their laptop playing world of warcraft?
The game is addictive, its a crutch for a continusly growing trend of social apathy. Sure they think their socializing with real people in their guild of clan or party. But think, this is the internet, its text on a screen with a oddly colored cartoon representing the idealized version of yourself, big muscly and intimidating, or petite, well endowed with a perfect complexion and hair that never fails. Now ask yourself, how many of those people are even being honest about their gender, let alone their age. You’ve just become aware, congratulations. Alot of the people you will meet are using games like world of warcraft as a crutch because they have forgotten how to interact with society, with real people, and when they try they usually sound off center, pompous and arrogant, or just plain stupid.
Am i saying that video games are bad, no. They build hand eye coordination like no ones buisness. They can teach you to be more observant and pay closer attention to your surroundings. They can be a good form of stress relief, a way to pass time, but just like a drug or gambling addiction, too much can be dangerous, even fatal. so remember, get up, go outside, meet people, for the love of god date a tangible, flesh and blood human being. pixel love is great and often provides for an endless source of hysterical laughter, but nothing beats being able to go to bed at night with that special someone and have her steal the covers from you before you wake up shivering.
Stay tuned, part 2 will cover the Virtual Worlds
