“Examine and discuss the World Health Organization’s decision to declare gaming disorder to its International Classification of Diseases.”

In my limited gaming experience thus far by playing “Guild Wars 2,” I feel that “gaming disorder” is both valid and not; while I think the addictive aspects of gaming can be dysfunctional and debilitating, this is not the case for all, and this label sheds an overwhelmingly negative light on gaming as a whole.

From what I’ve learned, video games are designed to trigger addictive responses, because it is monetarily beneficial for the companies. The more people play more frequently, the more capital is produced, so creating rewards for those who come back, creating a need for certain things that one does not actually need, and other similar incentives, are built into the structure of the game. All of these factors do tend to lead towards addiction, especially when one considers the angle that gaming frequently preys on vulnerable populations, like those that rarely leave their house, and perhaps those that suffer with cognitive and mental dis/abilities that impede their ‘real life’ social activities. With all of these things considered, as well as the numerous cases of people’s lives being completely derailed by video game addiction, classifying it as a disease makes sense: it’s a form of addiction.

That being said, there are many other addictions that are not classified to the same degree, such as shopping addiction or food addiction, that can both yield equally as addictive and devastating results, but do not have the same recognition, allowing for those activities to be much more socially accepted overall. In many ways, modern life is constantly walking the line of addiction, whether that be through excessive capitalistic consumption or ‘food’ that is modified to such a degree that drawing “white powder” parallels would not be far-fetched.

All of these facets of life can be problematic, but there are stigmas attached to video games that other addictions steer clear of, which I find to be interesting, and not entirely fair. I believe that if we are to classify video games as an addiction, targeting only that medium would be incomplete, and we must therefore address other similar addictive behaviors that yield similar results.

“The debate about the short and long-term psychological effects of video game violence on players’ aggression levels is long-standing ongoing debate, and no closer to a resolution than when it began.”

Personally, I do not consider myself to be a violent person: occasionally, a heated political discussion turns a little aggressive, but for the most part, I value harmony and lack of conflict in my daily life. Before this course, I had literally never touched a video game of any kind, and that is in large part due to my conceptions (or misconceptions) about ubiquitous and unavoidable violence that I assumed was present in every single one.

Upon playing this game, my opinions are modified but not completely changed, because from my limited experience, I’ve realized that violence is, in fact, unavoidable, and is more detached than I’ve ever experienced. I find this dangerous. There is no way to go through the game and survive without fighting, with and without weapons. Because of the nature of gaming, any/all violence does not carry the same repercussions as real, physical violence, despite the fact that the fight scenes are made as realistic as possible, and the conflation of these two without the physiological repercussions have, in myself, trivialized violence as a whole.

Reflecting on my own experiences, I did not like some of the traits that surfaced within me while playing the game, such as harming an opponent and yelling “YESSSSS” to myself, or being in a minor fight and using stronger weapons and force than was necessary at all, even depleting my energy stores in the process. In real life, even being within close proximity to a physical fight causes me to recoil with tension, anxiety, and fear, but in the game, I have at points sought it out, which I find disturbing. Even playing one game over a short period of time has modified my perceptions of violence and conflict in ways that I don’t intellectually support whatsoever, and I think that is telling of how even a little exposure can add so much aggression.

That being said, the violence is not as flippant as I once thought. The story lines I’ve encountered have been complex and well-developed, and the violence is not as ever-present as I used to believe. Not every task is confrontational, and in life, it is sometimes an option to avoid and/or opt out of conflicts. I appreciated these caveats, but to be perfectly honest, they did not seem like enough to me. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, the violence present in this game has been a little on the more destructive, as opposed to constructive, end of the spectrum.

“One of the crucial insights from the research is that toxic behavior doesn’t necessarily come from terrible people; it comes from regular people having a bad day,” said Justin Reich, research scientist from Harvard’s Berkman Center. “That means that our strategies to address toxic behavior online can’t be targeted just at hardened trolls; they need to account for our collective human tendency to allow the worst of ourselves to emerge under the anonymity of the Internet.”

Simon Parkin, “A Video-Game Algorithm to Solve Online Abuse”, MIT Technology Review, September 14, 2015.

In my experiences playing thus far, I have not engaged in conversation with the game, but have consulted other internet resources, as well as discussing it with friends who have played the game before. I have not been approached within the game itself, and to be perfectly honest, have been too scared to start a conversation, because of thoughts such as “What would I say? Will they think I’m ‘dumb’? What if they tell others about me? What will they think of me?” and similar rabbit holes. In my mind, this has led to me negotiating my own internalized discourses around asking for help and when that is necessary, and my solution so far has been to simply Google it and see if I can solve the problem myself first, which I have been able to.

Interestingly, my anonymity has actually made me less inclined to speak up, for I feel that I might be misconstrued within this very specific context, as opposed to real-life interaction, where I feel I can always redeem myself. At least when I ask a question to someone in person, I can compensate for my lack of knowledge in one area by contributing to the conversation in others. I have had past experiences with anonymous forms of social media that have led to some interesting insights about people’s perceived anonymity and therefore lack of boundaries, but for me in this instance, it was the opposite.

For this reason, I was very grateful for those who created resources outside of the game to help answer basic questions about format, movement, quests, etc. As a game that is played on a computer on the internet, the lines about what is considered “cheating” become increasingly blurry for me, and I have a difficult time drawing hard lines on this issue. Personally, I do not consider it a transgression simply because of the format of the game itself, whereas I would feel differently if it was an in-person game that people temporarily exited to google a solution. Perhaps this is my own bias and lack of familiarity, but it does seem to me that within the context of an MMORPG, there is no cheating.

Overall, the mid-game interactions in this game have honestly been quite a huge barrier for me, but they have led me to address some of my own internalized thought forms that I thought were long gone, which has proved quite useful and interesting.

“The study of digital storytelling is both forward-looking, with regard to its being an iteration of the digital humanities, and increasingly visible, as recent developments in new-media studies and narratology have removed some of the stigma that was once attached to gaming within the academy, but digital games are still considered by many in the humanities as frivolous (and monstrously violent to boot)”.

Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp

As someone who has never played a video game prior to Guild Wars 2, I was surprised by the level of drama that was involved in the narration of the game, as well as the intricacies that kept thickening the plot as I kept playing. I did not anticipate that there would be such an elaborate backstory, not only for the whole of the game, but for each individual task. Admittedly, I sometimes found it difficult to feel engaged in a world that felt so removed from my own, but that could also be my own lack of familiarity with this type of content. However, when the game involved me in said content, I felt much more motivated to perform the tasks and participate in the causes, seeing as I was now a part of it.

The first task I found to be interesting in several ways: as a member of the Asura race, our ‘people’ are valued for our ingenuity and intelligence, not outright battle skills, which I was informed of in the first few moments of playing the game. As such, when there was an invasion, I was half expecting to have to suit up for battle and physically fight constantly, for in my mind, that’s what video games were like. I was surprised, however, that the main task was to re-wire these robots called “golems” that had been tinkered with by the opposition.

This holistic view of such a fictional battle impressed and engaged me, because it debunked my previous assumptions about the so-called “mindless killing” in video games. Additionally, and perhaps this is because I projected too much of myself onto my avatar, but I was thinking to myself “ugh I don’t want to fight,” and while I had a few small battles, I mostly was fixing things and conducting research, which appealed to my own interests in daily life much more than fighting anyways. Not only did this aspect of the narration engage me personally, but it also has an underlying message of valuing multiple forms of strength and intelligence, which I can very much get behind.

“Like traditional landscapes, video game landscapes incorporate the moral ideologies of their producers and therefore limit or direct the kinds of lessons about the real world that players might learn. Video game landscapes my therefore reinforce the dominant ideologies that govern the production of real world landscapes as much as they challenge them”

When playing the game, in my world, there are two main landscapes: lush jungle/tropical rainforest, and harsh rock faces/caves.

 

My first thought was, for a “genius” society that was allegedly the most technologically advanced, the setting was extremely underdeveloped, with there being primitive stone structures nestled in between energy-channeling devices and personalized robots. I do have a jungle cat companion and adequate gear to help protect me from the harsh environment and dangerous creatures, but it is interesting to me how they chose to portray the backdrop as simultaneously conducive to advanced forms of life, but also barely touched.

The premise of my first couple of challenges was to fix the “golem” robots that some evil force had tinkered with, convince younger characters not to join the evil forces, and conduct several experiments for my “genius” race. I believe I am supposed to be one of the “good guys” protecting the land for invasion, and it’s unclear whether my kind is native to the area or not.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the game takes place during a time of war, the environment seems to be thriving, and nature seems to be doing its own thing, even in crisis. There are no signs of destruction, as even large explosions, sparks, battles, etc. do not seem to modify the environment whatsoever. To me, this seems ridiculous: the environment matters insofar as it is interacting with you, but you interacting with it produces no effect??? This is a similar discourse, when applied to real life, that led to our current and ongoing environmental crisis.

The dichotomy shown in this game of human-like creatures living in relatively symbiotic harmony with the environment, while simultaneously acting extremely destructive and violent towards and within it, demonstrates a kind of utopia. To humans, our ideal would be to do whatever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want, and have the environment cater to our needs, while also not having to put in the work to create infrastructures in order to make our survival possible. In my opinion, it’s a “best of both worlds” scenario that obviously isn’t realistic, but is quite fun.

“Video games have increasingly being deliberated as a propaganda tool to influence people with regards to some targeted matters. Design of game’s character plays an important role for such objectives”.

While I was creating my avatar, I found this quote to be quite à propos: not only was I aware that this avatar was going to supposedly represent me in this virtual space, but that most of my actions, my fate, and my gaming experience was to be predicated on my fictional identity. Knowing this, I found the choices to be interesting, especially the aspects regarding body type and facial features. Everyone playing this game has the same set of choices, or ones that are presumably very similar, and I found that the only choices available were of a very Euro-centric, conventional ‘attractiveness’ variety. There was no body that wasn’t an hourglass for my female character, for instance, and her huge eyes and other facial features were distinctively Caucasian. To be fair, there were options for darker skin tones and adjusting nose bridge width etc., they just weren’t the default and were not as common. The ‘propaganda’ aspect discussed in the quote above pertains to this scenario in a fairly nuanced way: by creating an almost endless amount of choices, the game is set up to make the player feel like it’s an exhaustive list of physical features, and that subconsciously these are the only ‘correct’ physical features to have. Interestingly, I found myself choosing features I either had in myself or wanted to have, like for example I’ve always wanted red hair and bangs, so my avatar has those. I can imagine that this is a fairly common phenomenon, and that by creating a virtual world based on a grasping attempt to conform to societal beauty standards, albeit through non-human gaming characters, one runs the risk of reproducing existing discourses around beauty.