Addicted to society: Excessive Gaming and Social Norms

Minecraft is a phenomenon that is turning kids’, parents’, and researchers’ heads. When it came out, I paid $15 for the Alpha version of Minecraft in 2010, and was quite entertained for the novelty that it was at the time. Five years later and no longer being a gamer myself, I notice a few hardcore gamers in Lewis and Clark who consistently play Minecraft. I wanted to find out why the game was so addictive.

Minecraft is a first person, open world video game where everything is made out of blocks. The game can be focused on building structures out of blocks or on surviving among dangerous creatures and mining for precious minerals. I myself spent hours playing, and so do many other young kids. To get a sense of it, you’d only have to open your web browser to YouTube; chances are it will be featured in the front page.

“Minecraft, the online world that most parents simply don’t understand, is now officially the most watched game of all time on YouTube.” (Wakefield, 2015) This is a huge deal. Not only are kids playing the game, but they’re spending hours watching other players play. The game and the videos on it are popular with kids as well as with teenagers–such as the “Clarkians” I have seen play–as well as older people. In a blog run by a mother of a Minecraft-addicted kid, she recommends playing Minecraft as an adult to understand why her kids may cry or scream in front of the screen. (Oakley;1) Why would anyone do this? A possible response may be linked to the causes of addiction.

Studies on addiction to video games show that players are maintaining “an active social life through their” video games. (Natasha Lewis, 2015) In the same study, the real social support satisfaction players received was negatively correlated “with addiction.” (Ibid.) These users, as the Minutemen in our current book, are looking for a place to belong to. These video games give  players a “reassurance of worth, opportunity for nurturance, sensation seeking and harmonious passion.” (Burnay et al., 2015) Why would we think that this is so weird when it is giving a sense of purpose to hundreds of thousands of people around the world?

I fell in a trap while researching for this topic, as I assumed that internet addiction was inherently something bad. And as a sociology student I should have realized that the idea of an addiction is, as everything that I think of, a social construct.

The realization of the malleability of concepts brings us to analyze the idea of “madness,” of acting in a way completely out of line of what society expects from us. Michel Foucault says that the idea of madness itself is “a product of cultural norms and power politics.” (as cited in Manjikian, 2012, p.7.) There is an expectation on each one of us to be able to regulate ourselves to be citizens useful to the state and accepted by society. This does not automatically mean that hardcore gamers will fit in after you, as a reader, magically free yourself from the cultural norms that dictate normal Minecraft usage. It does, however, give an explanation as to why we think people who play great amounts of Minecraft are seen as they are. Foucault takes the conversation further by looking at how tool usage in general is dictated by society.

Technology does not inherently cause problems. Society “establish[es] norms regarding how the technology is to be understood and utilized.” (Ibid.) Video games have a particular place in our society. Although there are subcultures where these norms can vary greatly, there is a reality to the lack of connection with, for example, physical humans. This matters only to the extent that we want to hold on to the ideals that we have of interactions.

In the social world I live in, video games are not to replace what we call everyday social interactions with physical friends and family. And yet it makes sense for our social world to see that the need of belonging and feeling competent is being met through video games.

Works Cited:

Burnay, Jonathan et al. Which Psychological Factors Influence Internet Addiction? Evidence Through an Integrative Model. Vol. 43. Computers in Human Behavior, 2015. Web.

GodXRay. Addiction Minecraft. Print.

Harrington, Natasha Lewis. “Social Support in Players of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.” Dissertation Abstracts International, A The Humanities and Social Sciences 76.02 (2015): n. pag. Web.

Manjikian, Mary. Threat Talk. Ashgate Publishing Group, 2012. Print.

Oakley, Bec. “Help, My Kids Are Obsessed with Minecraft!.” MineMum.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2015.

Shapira, Harel. Waiting for Jose. Princeton University Press, 2013. Web.

Wakefield, Jane. “Minecraft Videos.” bbc.com. N.p., 14 May 2015. Web. 24 Nov. 2015.

Footnotes:

(1) “ A large part of helping their obsession stay healthy is just being involved so you know what's going on. There might be times when it looks like the kids aren’t enjoying the game at all, for example - maybe they cry when they play or scream at the screen, or it’s causing a lot of friction between siblings or friends. At those times you need to do a bit of investigating to figure out what’s going on before deciding whether to put the brakes on their time spent playing.” (Oakley)