Defining addiction

The big story this week is the one about the doctor claiming 40 percent of all World of Warcraft players are addicted to the game. But when you read the story with an open mind, you will notice two things: 1) The number of 40 percent is pure guesswork, with no scientific work or study supporting it. 2) The person claiming this happens to run an addiction treatment center, and is obviously fishing for customers.

Addiction makes for good headlines, because it sounds so serious, and is so badly defined. Lets take the loosest possible definition: An average person trying this is defined as addicted when he wants to come back for more. Under that definition you could probably claim over 90 percent addiction rate of World of Warcraft. At a medium definition level ("Person is defined as addicted if he spends most of his free time pursueing this activity") you might well get to something around 40 percent of addiction level. Unfortunately neither of these definitions has any scientific basis. Long before video games existed hobbyists obsessed about their stamp collection or model railroad, without newspaper articles claiming "model railroad addiction runs rampant!!!".

The scientific definition of addiction is: "Addiction is a chronic disorder proposed to be precipitated by a combination of genetic, biological/pharmacological and social factors. Addiction is characterized by the repeated use of substances or behaviors despite clear evidence of morbidity secondary to such use." The key factor here is continuous use or behavior despite clear evidence of negative effect.

Looking at World of Warcraft or video games in general, we can probably exclude genetic or biological/pharmacological factors. If anything there is a social addiction. And we have to be careful as what to define as negative effect. Look at this much more balanced story about a World of Warcraft player. The "negative effect" of World of Warcraft in this story is that the player has blocked two to three evenings a week for WoW, and will not play poker or go to a baseball game on these nights. Those are clearly all equivalent entertainment activities. Choosing WoW over poker, baseball, TV, or a book, is just a personal choice. It's just like choosing Coca Cola over Pepsi.

A person *can* be addicted to World of Warcraft, or other video games, or other hobbies. But for this to be true the person has to exhibit symptons of serious negative social effects: prolonged neglect of family and friends, grades going down at school, calling in "sick" at work to play, or performing your job badly because you raid every night are certainly signs of addiction. Even more serious cases of people being left by their wife, flunking exams, or being fired from work certainly exist. And there are one or two cases of people playing until they dropped dead, or their baby starved, or something similar catastrophic. But if you apply this scientific definition of addiction, the percentage of World of Warcraft players that are addicted is significantly lower than 40 percent.

Personally I have no problems with wife or boss to report. Which isn't surprising, as for example I refuse to raid on weekend nights after 11 pm, because I need to get up for work the next day at 6:30 am. Just like the large majority of World of Warcraft I first do the important things in life, job, family, etc., and then when I have done everything and get my normal share of leisure time, I choose to spend that leisure time on video games. Currently preferably WoW, but I played 2 hours of Titan Quest last night, so WoW isn't even exclusive. I also still read books, watch TV, play D&D, and do a range of other leisure activities. People like me are "addicted" only if you stretch the definition beyond the scientifically valid.