Gaming addiction

Over at Terra Nova, Nick Yee looks at this silly manufactured disorder:

As I noted in Daedalus also two years back, taking away the game doesn't solve the problem because gaming problems are not fundamentally rooted in the technology. Calling it a "gaming addiction" distracts us from the real problems.

This is a subject I know well. My first year in New York, when not writing or taking the boy to pre-school, I spent every hour playing Everquest. Addicted? Nah. My life was just a mess. I was a 26-year old kid, with a one-year old kid. I think our household income was somewhere around $35k--95 percent of it generated by Kenyatta. I'd been fired from an altie-paper in Philly a year earlier, and virtually all of my magazine pitches were eliciting little or no response. A bad time for the empire, indeed.
What changed? I got a job delivering Italian food in Park Slope and a part-time, minority fellowship at the Village Voice. Oh yeah, and my parents, afraid for their grandson, helped out whenever they could. I remember my Dad coming up from B-More, and taking me to get some Ethiopian food. I got to dinner, and I couldn't even properly conversate--I think I was just stunned at the level of Fail in my life. Me and Kenyatta were struggling to pay some bill and had no idea how we'd do it. Every two minutes, the phrase "You're broke and you fail" would scroll in front of mind.

Anyway, afterward, I walked him to West 4th so he could catch subway to the Amtrak. We exchanged a pound and then walked off. I got maybe 40 feet and then he yells out "Ta-Nehisi."  I walked back and he was going through his pockets."I almost forgot, I wanted to give you some money, but I don't have any cash." He then wrote me a check right there, on the spot. I think it was, like, for $100, but back then, it felt like 10 Gs.

Meh, rambling and reminiscing as usual. The point is, I was in a bad place, and I was using Everquest as a way out. But it could have been any number of other things--food, women, television, weed, strip-clubs--whatever. The point is, it was me.

Everquest did suck, though...

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2008/12/gaming-addiction/6440/