by Adam Alter
There’s a certain purity to MUDs, because unlike modern games they don’t rely on glitz and charm. Petrie was hooked entirely by the sense that he was playing alongside other people. They may not have been in the room with him, but they all shared a common purpose. The MUD had a chat function, so players could commend each other on a job well done, or commiserate when they were defeated by powerful enemies. Petrie told me that MUDs still exist, but they’ve been swamped by big budget games—the showy Hollywood productions to his beloved indie masterpieces. “After all this time, that MUD is still the best game I’ve ever played. I always wanted to make one just like it, but after overcoming my addiction I questioned the morality of creating that sort of game.”
Petrie’s MUD was compelling, but it has nothing on today’s most addictive games: massively multiplayer online games (or MMOs), like World of Warcraft or League of Legends. MUDs lived on the fringe, attracting a relatively small and sophisticated group of computer aficionados. In contrast, one hundred million people have opened WoW accounts. MMOs are more sophisticated than MUDs, but if you strip away their impressive graphics and sound effects, you’re left with the same basic structure: a series of quests and remote interactions among gamers who become friends, relying on one another for support both within and beyond the game.
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A couple of weeks after I spoke to Isaac Vaisberg, the former WoW addict I mentioned earlier, I visited reSTART’s facilities in Washington State. Vaisberg obviously derived a lot of pleasure from his online friendships, so it wasn’t clear to me why experts frowned on online interactions. Hilarie Cash, a clinical psychologist and cofounder of reSTART, explained that “there’s nothing wrong with making friends online, as long as you also make friends in the real world. If we’re good friends, and we’re sitting together, that interaction, that energetic exchange releases a whole bouquet of neurochemicals that keeps us each regulated emotionally and physiologically. And it’s our birthright as social animals to have lots of this sort of safe and caring interaction that keeps us regulated. We’re not meant to be isolated islands.” The addictive online friendships that attract young gamers are dangerous, not for what they provide, but for what they can’t provide: a chance to learn what it means to sit, face-to-face, as you maintain a conversation with another person. The staccato taps of a keyboard—and even remote webcam interactions—obey a very different rhythm, and convey information along a much narrower bandwidth. “Even the smell of another person, the consistent eye contact that comes from being in the same room, is important,” Cash said. She also reminded me that people who communicate by webcam never seem to look one another in the eyes, because the other person’s eyes aren’t perfectly aligned with the webcam that conveys your gaze. “It’s a lot like feeding sugar to a hungry person,” Cash told me. “It’s pleasurable in the short-term, but eventually, they’ll starve.”
Cash invited me to participate in a group discussion session with the center’s inpatients. As the session began, she repeated a mantra that I’d heard a couple of times already: “Remember: once your cucumber brain has become pickled, it can never go back to being a cucumber.” The phrase was designed to discourage inpatients from doing what Vaisberg had done when he left the center: believing that they could play just one more game without their addictions returning. Cash was trying to explain that the inpatients’ brains were forever pickled, in a sense, and that their addictions were always on the cusp of being rekindled. The mantra was a cute way of saying something very confronting: that it’s impossible to ever completely escape the aftereffects of addiction. Cash also used the mantra to explain what happens when your brain is deprived of offline social interactions. As she told me, “If you only ever spend time online, a part of you withers away.”
Cash suggested I speak to Andy Doan, a neuroscientist who had studied learning and memory at Johns Hopkins. She told me Doan was an expert on gaming addiction who could tell me more about the downsides of interacting with people online. I called Doan as soon as I returned to New York. He works as an eye surgeon now, but he has studied and written about addiction extensively. He told me that addictive games have three critical elements: “The first part is immersion—the sense that you’re embedded in the game. The second is achievement—the sense that you’re achieving something. And the third—and by far the most important—is the social element.” Gaming addiction has risen dramatically, Doan said, because high-speed Internet connections have made it easier to communicate with other players in real time. Gone are the days of clunky networks and Ryan Petrie’s beloved, but peripheral, MUDs, which addicted a much smaller set of people. Now Isaac Vaisberg and tens of millions of other gamers can build simulated friendships that almost look and feel like the real thing.
Doan explained why a brain raised on online friendships can never fully adjust to interactions in the real world. In the 1950s and 1970s, in a famous series of experiments, vision researchers Colin Blakemore and Grahame Cooper showed that what a young kitten sees shapes how his brain works for the rest of his life. In one experiment, they confined the kittens to a very dark room until they were five months old. Once a day, they removed half the kittens from the room and placed them in a cylinder covered with horizontal black and white stripes. They removed the other half and placed them in a similar cylinder, this one covered with vertical black and white stripes. So, half the kittens saw only vertical lines, and half saw only horizontal lines. They explained that, for each kitten, “There were no corners to its environment, and the upper and lower limits to its world were a long way away. It could not even see its own body, for it wore a wide black collar that restricted its visual field.” They added, providing little comfort to anyone even remotely concerned with animal welfare, that “The kittens did not seem upset by the monotony of their surroundings and they sat for long periods inspecting the walls of the tube.”
When Blakemore and Cooper allowed the kittens to roam a normal room, they were very confused. All of them, regardless of whether they’d been exposed to horizontal or vertical lines, struggled to judge how far away they were from physical objects. They bumped into table legs, failed to jump back when the experimenter acted like he was about to tap their faces, and couldn’t follow moving objects unless they made a noise. (If you’ve seen how avidly cats follow laser pointers, you know how strange it is when a cat ignores a rolling ball.) When Blakemore and Cooper examined the kittens’ brains for activity, they found that the kittens reared in vertical environments showed no activity at all in response to horizontal lines, while those reared in horizontal environments did not respond to vertical lines. Their brains were effectively blind to whatever they hadn’t been exposed to naturally during the first few months of their lives. This, Andy Doan told me, was irreversible. The visual cortex inside these poor kittens’ heads had been pickled forever, and even exposing them to normal environments for the rest of their lives did nothing to reverse many of the effects of their stunted early lives.
Doan drew an analogy to Hilarie Cash’s reSTART inpatients. The technical term for what Blakemore and Cooper induced in their kittens is visual amblyopia (Greek for “blunt vision”). Doan told me that children reared on the Internet suffer a kind of emotional amblyopia. Children develop different mental skills at different ages, during so-called critical periods. They pick up new languages with ease until ages four or five, after which they only pick up new languages with considerable effort. A similar idea holds for developing social skills—and for learning how to navigate the complex world of teenage sexuality. If kids miss out on the chance to interact face-to-face, there’s a fair chance they’ll never acquire those skills.
Cash has seen dozens of adolescents, mainly boys but also girls, who have no problem interacting with peers online, but can’t carry a conversation with someone sitting across from them. The problem worsens when you encourage adolescent males and females to interact. “How do you learn to talk and flirt and date and end up in be
d if you’ve only mixed with other people online?” Cash asked. “Our guys get sidetracked, and they develop intimacy disorders. They don’t have the skills to bring sexuality and intimacy together. Many of them turn to pornography instead of forming real relationships, and they never seem to understand true intimacy.” Cash referred to “our guys” because the center no longer admits women. “For four years we admitted women, but we had to revise our policy after a number of patients ignored the ‘no physical intimacy’ rule. We had many more male applicants in those days, so we decided to stop taking women. Now, with the rise of non-violent casual and social gaming, there are almost as many female applicants. We may have to reconsider our policy.”
Even addicts who, like Isaac Vaisberg, somehow win the charisma lottery are susceptible to a range of psychological and social disorders. One study found that gamers aged between ten and fifteen years who played more than three hours per day were less satisfied with their lives, less likely to feel empathy toward other people, and less likely to know how to deal with their emotions appropriately. Three hours may sound like a lot, but recent surveys have shown that kids spend an average of five to seven hours in front of screens each day. When today’s Millennials become adults, there’s a fair chance their social cucumber brains will be pickled.
PART 3
The Future of Behavioral Addiction (and Some Solutions)
10.
Nipping Addictions at Birth
Today, the average schoolchild aged between eight and eighteen years spends a third of her life sleeping, a third at school, and a third engrossed in new media, from smartphones and tablets to TVs and laptops. She spends more time communicating through screens than she does with other people directly, face-to-face. Since the turn of the new millennium, the rate of non-screen playtime fell 20 percent, while the rate of screen playtime increased by a similar amount. These stats aren’t inherently bad—the world changes constantly—but in 2012 six researchers showed that they happen to be taking a human toll.
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In the summer of 2012, fifty-one children visited a summer camp just outside Los Angeles. The children were typical Southern Californian public school kids: an equal mix of boys and girls aged eleven or twelve years from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. All of them had access to a computer at home, and roughly half owned a phone. They spent an hour texting friends each day, about two and a half hours watching TV, and just over an hour playing computer games.
For this one week, the children would leave their phones and TVs and gaming consoles at home. Instead, they hiked and learned to use compasses and to shoot bows and arrows. They learned how to cook over a campfire and how to tell an edible plant from a poisonous plant. They weren’t explicitly taught to look each other in the eyes, face-to-face, but in the absence of new media, that’s exactly what happened. Instead of reading “LOL” and staring at smiley-face emojis, they actually laughed and smiled. Or didn’t laugh and smile if they were sad or angry.
On Monday morning, when the kids arrived at the camp, they took a short test called the DANVA2, which stands for the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Behavior. It’s a fun test—one of those tests that goes viral on Facebook—because all you have to do is interpret the emotional states of a bunch of strangers. For half the test you look at their faces in photos, and for the other half you listen to them read a sentence aloud. Then you decide whether they’re happy or sad or angry or fearful. That may sound trivial, but it isn’t. Some of the faces and voices are easy to read—these are labeled “high-intensity”—but many of them are subtle. Like deciding whether the Mona Lisa is smiling inside, or whether she’s just bored or unhappy. I tried the test and got some of the answers wrong. One guy sounded mildly depressed, but the test told me he was actually mildly afraid. The summer camp kids had the same experience. They made an average of fourteen errors across the forty-eight-item test.
Four days of camping and hiking later, the kids were ready to file onto buses to return home. Before they did, the researchers administered the DANVA2 again. They reasoned that a week of face-to-face interaction without distraction from gadgets might make the kids more sensitive to emotional cues. There’s good reason to believe practice makes perfect when it comes to reading emotional cues. Children who are raised in isolation—like the famed Wild Boy of Aveyron who was raised by wolves in a forest in France till he was nine years old—never learn to read emotional cues. And people who are forced into isolation struggle to interact with others when they emerge, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Children who spend time together also learn to read emotional cues through repeated feedback: you may think your playmate is holding out a toy because he wants to share it with you, but if you look at his face you’ll see he’s about to use the toy as a weapon.
Reading emotions is a finely tuned skill that atrophies with disuse and improves with practice, and that’s what the researchers found at the summer camp. The kids did much better the second time they took the DANVA2. They were never told the answers to the test after taking it the first time, but their error rate dropped by 33 percent. The researchers also asked a control group of kids from the same school to take the test twice. These kids didn’t attend the camp, so they took the test on a Monday morning and a Friday afternoon just as the camp kids did. Their error rate dropped a bit, too—by 20 percent—presumably because there’s some benefit to taking the same test twice, but this rate of improvement was much less impressive than the rate shown by the wilderness campers.
Now, there’s a lot that separates a week in the city from a week at camp. Apart from access to gadgets and time spent face-to-face with friends, there are plenty of other differences that may have explained the kids’ different rates of improvement on the DANVA2. Is it that spending time in nature improves mental functioning? Or that spending time with your peers makes you smarter? Or that staying away from gadgets makes all the difference? It’s impossible to be sure, but that doesn’t change the prescription: kids do better at a task that drives the quality of their social interactions when they spend more time with other kids in a natural environment than they do when spending a third of their lives glued to glowing screens.
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Children are especially vulnerable to addiction, because they lack the self-control that prevents many adults from developing addictive habits. Regulated societies respond by refusing to sell alcohol and cigarettes to children—but very few societies regulate behavioral addictions. Kids can still play with interactive tech for hours at a time, and they can still play video games as long as their parents will allow. (Korea and China have flirted with so-called Cinderella laws, which prohibit children from playing games between midnight and six in the morning.)
Why shouldn’t kids be allowed to play with interactive tech for hours at a time? And why, as I mentioned in the book’s prologue, do so many tech experts prohibit their children from using the very devices they design and promote in public? The truth is that we won’t know how children will respond to tech overuse for some years still. The first generation of native iPhone users is only eight or nine years old, and the first generation of native iPad users is six or seven. They haven’t reached their teens, so there’s no way to know just how different they are from their peers who are just a couple of years older. But we do know what to look for. Tech subsumes some very basic mental activities that were once universal. Kids of the 1990s and earlier stored dozens of phone numbers in their heads; they interacted with each other rather than with devices; and they made their own fun instead of extracting manufactured fun from ninety-nine cent apps.
A couple of years ago, I became interested in what we call hardship inoculation. This is the idea that struggling with a mental puzzle—trying to remember a phone number or deciding what to do on a long Sunday afternoon—inoculates you against future mental hardships just as vaccinations inoculate you against illness. Reading a book, for example, is harder than watching the TV.
(David Denby, a film critic at the New Yorker, recently wrote that kids are abandoning books as they age. “Books smell like old people,” he overheard one teenager say.) There is good early evidence to support the idea that small doses of mental hardship are good for us. Young adults do much better on tricky mental puzzles when they’ve solved difficult (rather than easy) ones earlier. Adolescent athletes also thrive on challenges: we’ve found, for example, that college basketball teams do better when their preseason schedules are more demanding. These mild initial struggles are critical. Depriving our kids of them by handing them a device that makes everything easier is dangerous—we just don’t know how dangerous.
Relying too heavily on tech also leads to a phenomenon known as digital amnesia. In two surveys, thousands of U.S. and European adults struggled to remember a raft of important phone numbers. They struggled to recall their kids’ cell phone numbers and the central phone number at their workplace. In other questions, 91 percent of respondents described their phones as “extensions of their brains.” The majority said they would search online for answers to questions before trying to generate the answer from memory, and 70 percent said they would feel sadness or panic if they lost their smartphone devices even briefly. Most said there was information on their smartphones that wasn’t stored in their heads or anywhere else.