Not everyone can, as Ryan Van Cleave discovered. Born Ryan Anderson, in 2006 he changed his name to a World of Warcraft term, and by New Year’s Eve 2007 the extent of his attachment to the game turned tragic. Van Cleave, a college professor, poet, and editor, was laid off from his teaching job because of his gaming compulsion; he was playing up to 80 hours a week, and had almost completely withdrawn from his wife and friends. On December 31, he told his wife he was making a quick cough-drop run but instead drove to the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C., and contemplated jumping. He slipped and nearly tumbled over the edge into the icy Potomac River. Catching himself just in time, Van Cleave dragged himself back from the edge. In 2010, he published Unplugged: My Journey into the Dark World of Video Game Addiction, where he describes his descent into video-game hell. It became the most important thing in his life, to the detriment of everything else, and eighteen-hour sessions were not unusual. His wife threatened to leave him, his kids hated him, and his parents wouldn’t visit. “I was so plugged in to virtual worlds,” Van Cleave wrote, “I’m not sure I recall what truly happened in real life. I missed out on a ton of it.”
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Lantz sounds almost mournful that the artistry and creativity he sees in game design can be the cause of a tragedy like that. “I think game design is a sort of home-brew psychology or home-brew neuroscience,” he said. “You’re crafting an experience, so of course designers think about psychology. Long before free-to-play games there was the goal of designing a compelling experience for players, but that meant designing a proper game and not just a slot machine. Designers are aware that if they scatter resources a player needs—like strength, powers, lives, and weapons—in one out of every four trash cans, for instance, it makes people feel compelled to keep exploring because of the power of intermittent rewards.
“There is so much voodoo involved,” he said. “We still don’t know exactly why Angry Birds is so popular. There’s just something ineffable about it.” His favorite game? I asked as I packed up to leave. Go, the ancient Chinese game played with black and white stones on a nineteen-by-nineteen grid.
Pharmatronic
For a video game, the compulsion point is like the apex of a narrow mountain. Slide down one side and you’re in The Valley of Too Easy. Slide down the other and you’re in The Abyss of Too Hard. Games that are too easy or too hard leave us bored or too frustrated to continue, respectively. Designers therefore adjust games to keep them at a player’s Goldilocks inflection point. Tetris was one of the first to do this. In this quasi-geometry game, blocks in different shapes—Ls, Ts, Is, two-by-two squares—fall from the top of the screen. The task is to rotate them in midair so they form a solid wall at the bottom, as rows at the base disappear with the addition of rows on top.
“It’s been called pharmatronic, an electronic with all the mind-altering properties of a drug,” said Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist at England’s University of Sheffield. One reason Tetris is so compelling, he explained, is that it exploits a psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect. Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik (1901–1988) was in a cafe in Berlin, Germany, one day when she observed that waiters have perfect memories for orders they have yet to take to customers. But once an order has been delivered they forget it instantly. “It’s memory for uncompleted tasks,” said Stafford, “and this is what Tetris does so wonderfully. It’s a world of perpetual uncompleted tasks. Every line you complete, more blocks fall from the sky. Every block you put in place creates another terrain within which to slot the next block.” Our memory for uncompleted tasks nags us to finish already and creates anxiety until we do. It’s Compulsion 101.
“The genius of Tetris,” Stafford continued, “is that it takes advantage of this memory hook for uncompleted tasks and involves us in a compulsive loop of completing and generating new tasks that keeps us endlessly playing, wanting to do the next thing.” Once we start something, taking several steps toward a goal, we feel compelled to finish. It is not only the Zeigarnik effect that makes uncompleted tasks occupy the mind, however. Because of the sunk-cost phenomenon, people hate abandoning something after they have invested time and effort in it. If you’re part way toward delivering a letter to someone, if that’s your quest, you feel compelled to keep going.
Many MMORPGs tap into the desire to recoup sunk costs by sucking us in, hard, from the start. “These games have what’s called a rapid absorption rate,” said psychologist Zaheer Hussain of England’s University of Derby. “When you start playing, the environment is quite pleasing: there are colors and sound effects and quests that are quite simple and relatively easy to accomplish, and that you get rewarded for. That causes players to spend more and more time in a game.” So does a feature that taps into something behaviorist B. F. Skinner discovered in the 1950s: when rewards become less frequent and harder to achieve, as happens in many online games, you not only keep playing but do so ever more compulsively, determined to get the damn reward that seemed so easy to score a level or two ago. World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs have a progress bar at the bottom of the screen indicating how many quests you’ve completed and how close you are to the next level or reward, “and that’s a motivator to continue playing,” Hussain said. To quit so close to the next achievement, especially if that means dropping back to the start of a level or quest, is to lose all that time and effort you just invested.
For what it’s worth, when the Guardian asked readers in 2014 to name the most “addictive”I game of all time, Tetris topped the list, named by 30 percent of respondents, followed by World of Warcraft (22 percent) and Candy Crush Saga (10 percent).
Ah, Candy Crush. To understand its evil allure, I went back to Jamie Madigan, my dopamine freak-out victim. I had been intrigued by his analyses of compulsion loops and figured, who better to explain why millions of people become so engrossed in Candy Crush that they miss their subway stop, blow off homework and housework and work work, and give short shrift to their kids, spouses, and friends? For any naïfs out there, the game consists of colored shapes that fill the screen, and the goal is to move them around until three identical icons line up. (A predecessor, Bejeweled, was similar.) At that point the triplet drops out, the surrounding shapes rearrange themselves, and you are rewarded with flashes of colored lights, points, an explosion of sound, and the appearance on-screen of reinforcing words such as delicious.
At its most basic, Candy Crush taps into the brain’s drive to find patterns in seemingly random arrays of objects—the same talent that led the ancient Greeks and Romans to see swans and twins and bears in the random splatter of stars in the night sky. “Our brains evolved to notice something good where we didn’t expect it to be, like a source of food that wasn’t there before,” Madigan said. “So we’re predisposed to figure out why. We’re wired to make sense of patterns, especially unexpected patterns.” Candy Crush also appeals to a common drive to put things in their place, restore order, and generally tidy up, which is what you feel you’re doing when you face an initially chaotic-looking board that you know you can rearrange so like elements are with like. Result: a game that’s appealing and fun.
But lots of activities—watching movies, gardening, cooking, or your own preferred pastime—are fun without being “sticky.” What makes Candy Crush sticky, Madigan said, is that the rewards not only keep coming but come unexpectedly. Occasionally, when the tiles of the triplet you intentionally formed drop out, the new arrangement has loads of such triplets, all of which immediately fall out to produce a display replete with flashing lights, noises, points, and congratulatory messages all over the screen. That “makes the dopamine circuits freak out,” Madigan said. “It’s like our hunter-gatherer ancestors knew where food could reliably be found, but if they came across something totally unexpected and rewarding, like a stream with fish or a cluster of berry bushes they hadn’t known about, it was immensely adaptive to pay attention to that and remember it. When a reward is unexpected we’re wired to really pay a
ttention to it and to keep looking for another and another and another. Game design takes advantage of that.”
Candy Crush has other psychological levers up its digital sleeves. It has a “lives” system: if you fail to clear a board of, say, 100 purples in a given amount of time or number of moves, you lose a life. Losing five lives gets you kicked off the game, and you can play again only if you wait several hours, spend (real) money, or enlist friends to help you log in again. That exploits a psychological quirk called “hedonic adaptation,” in which people get used to pleasurable experiences over time until those experiences—driving a new car, living in a delightful new neighborhood, having a wonderful new job—become nowhere near as enjoyable.
A 2013 study showed how it worked. Psychologists Jordi Quoidbach of Harvard University and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia had volunteers sample a piece of chocolate. Roughly equal numbers of participants were given one of three instructions: some were told to abstain from chocolate until they went back to the lab a week later, some were given two pounds of chocolate bars and told to eat as much as they could without getting sick, and the rest were given no instructions other than to report back in a week. Upon their return, everyone was given another piece of chocolate and asked how much they enjoyed it. “Participants who had temporarily given up chocolate savored it significantly more and experienced more positive moods after eating it,” compared to those who were either implicitly allowed to eat as much as they wished or were explicitly told to go on a chocolate bender, the researchers reported in Social Psychological and Personality Science. By limiting how much you can play, Candy Crush keeps you anxious for more, your anxiety growing until you can assuage it with a killer triplet. “While most of us are used to the option of gorging on a game until we burn out on it and move on, Candy Crush cleverly forces us to avoid that behavior,” Madigan explained. Kicked off the game, players become twitchy and anxious as they jones for their next session and never succumb to hedonic adaptation.
Risky Personalities
It was time to level up for my next challenge: learning whether personality, age, gender, or other variables affect how vulnerable we are to becoming compulsive gamers.
Research on this has been plagued by many of the problems common to new fields of study. Even things as basic as what makes a behavior problematic, and what exactly the behavior is, are defined differently by different researchers in different studies. “It’s not consistent or specific,” Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware told me. The changing description of those most likely to become compulsive gamers illustrates the problem. In the early 2000s, when fewer people were online, research on excessive online gaming (as well as excessive Internet use generally) focused on identifying psychological predictors of the behavior. Unfortunately, as even a cursory glance at the research literature shows, studies “found significant associations with a great number of psychological characteristics,” Daniel Kardefelt-Winther of the London School of Economics and Political Science pointed out in a 2014 paper in Computers in Human Behavior. In fact, he continued, “almost all psychological characteristics . . . statistically contribute to the likelihood” of succumbing to excessive gaming. Or, to put it less diplomatically, the greatest risk factor was having a human brain.
At first, the stereotypical compulsive gamer “was a lonely, socially awkward guy who maybe had social anxiety,” Caplan said. “But these were about the only guys playing video games then.” Personality traits were therefore a marker for the true, deeper cause of excessive gaming, not themselves the cause. The personality trait of neuroticism is correlated with an inability to tolerate anxiety, for instance, and so shows up in surveys of the traits of excessive gamers. But it’s not neuroticism per se that compels people to play online games; it’s the anxiety they can’t defuse in other ways.
Similarly, researchers found correlations between excessive online gaming and a host of personality traits: loneliness, depression, anxiety, shyness, aggression, difficulty with interpersonal relationships, sensation seeking, and deficits in social skills, for instance. It wasn’t so much that these traits put someone at risk for compulsive online behavior, however, but that they characterized the majority of people online at all, compulsively or not. “Now everyone is using the Internet, including on smartphones, so the description of the kind of people who do so compulsively has to change, too,” Caplan said.
As with other compulsions, playing video games compulsively is not in and of itself pathological, let alone an indication of a mental illness. The reasons people play online games (or use the Internet, tweet, text, or post to Facebook, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter) for hours each day “are the same reasons they do other things excessively: boredom, escapism, competition, and sociability—that’s where their friends are,” Caplan said. Crucially, online games, especially multiplayer ones, provide social interaction behind the protective persona of an avatar, appealing to people for whom interacting anonymously is easier than interacting with people they know. Psychologically vulnerable people may simply prefer online social interaction because the face-to-face kind is too stressful, or because they’re not very good at it; they’re more comfortable with a virtual life. Spending massive amounts of time playing video games is therefore, for many people, compensatory—a coping strategy, a way to handle stress or depression, to escape from loneliness or a boring job or any of the other lousy elements of the real world. In a 2013 study, Caplan and his colleagues surveyed 597 adolescents who were regular players of online games. The strongest predictors of whether their gaming was problematic and interfering with the rest of their life was that they were using it to regulate mood (relieving sadness, boredom, or loneliness, for instance) and were unable to do that otherwise. “If I’m lonely and go online, it’s compensatory,” Caplan said. “It’s not a primary pathology.” Games offer something we need or want. If the compensation works well and becomes your go-to solution for defusing anxiety, it can become compulsive.
Is everyone susceptible? Not equally. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, you recall, have mastered the slot-machine trick of variable/intermittent reinforcement through ploys like the unexpected high-value drops that hit our dopamine buttons. Being vulnerable to that ploy is a near human-universal, though as with everything there is a wide range of vulnerabilities.
Madigan had one final thought about the compulsion to play video games. In addition to their other allures, casual games like Candy Crush and Angry Birds can be played in the tiny slices of time that fall between, say, activities at work, between one chore and another, or while we’re en route from Point A to Point B. Time was, we’d use those moments to think, plan, scheme, ponder, or just daydream. In the always-on era, for many people the very idea is abhorrent; they’d rather suffer an electric shock than be alone with only their mind. (Literally, as I describe in the next chapter.) Online games, especially those played on mobile devices, piggyback on the compulsion to fill those minutes; unfilled, they make us anxious. “You start by playing a few rounds of Candy Crush at breakfast while you’re waiting for the coffee to brew,” Madigan said. “And pretty soon you’re playing every night before bed.” If you never download Angry Birds you can’t be sucked in, of course. Avoiding other forms of digital crack is harder, as we’ll now see.
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I. As usual, there was no effort to distinguish “addictive” from “compulsive,” but since readers were naming games they couldn’t stop playing the list is a good first approximation of games people play most compulsively, too.
CHAPTER SIX
Smartphones and the Web
IN 1995 DR. IVAN GOLDBERG, a psychiatrist in New York City, posted an online announcement of a new support group for “Internet Addiction Disorder,” or IAD. The incidence of this mental affliction had been “increasing exponentially,” he wrote, prompting the creation of a forum where sufferers could share their stories and therapists could outline effective t
reatments. Goldberg defined IAD as “a maladaptive pattern of Internet use, leading to clinically significant impairment or distress,” and—echoing the format of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual—decreed that people would have to show at least three of seven symptoms over a twelve-month period to qualify. Perhaps they experienced tolerance, needing to spend more and more time online “to achieve satisfaction.” Or perhaps they suffered withdrawal symptoms if they stopped going online, including feeling jumpy and anxious or obsessively thinking “about what is happening” online.I
Goldberg hit a nerve. Fellow psychiatrists diagnosed themselves as having “netaholism,” and hundreds of people posted their anguish to the Internet Addiction Support Group he set up as a listserv, describing how they spent twelve hours a day online, saw their “RL (real life)” obliterated by this “electronic takeover,” and considered “getting a second home phone installed in order to be able to talk to my family once in a while.”
There was only one problem. Goldberg had meant the original announcement of IAD as a joke, a send-up of psychiatry’s penchant for turning every excessive behavior into a pathology. People could qualify for a diagnosis if they merely spent “a great deal of time . . . in activities related to Internet use” such as buying books or doing online research, spent more time online than they intended, and spent less time socializing because they were, say, editing the Wikipedia entry on the Krebs cycle rather than attending beer pong night at the campus bar. And as you perhaps noticed, by tweaking Goldberg’s criteria for Internet Addiction Disorder to describe other behaviors, millions of us would be classified as compulsive joggers, compulsive book readers, compulsive news devourers, compulsive socializers, compulsive sports fans, or compulsive moviegoers. “I.A.D. is a very unfortunate term,” Goldberg told the New Yorker in 1997. “To medicalize every behavior by putting it into psychiatric nomenclature is ridiculous.”
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