Looking back to when I was only 10-years old, there are only a couple of things that I can tell you with absolute certainty: 1.) I loved eating McDonald's, 2.) I enjoyed strawberry soda an unhealthy amount, and 3.) every time I played a video game that I really liked and started getting the sensation that I needed to go to the bathroom, I waited until the last minute that my bladder was about to blast to put pause and run to the bathroom.
Based on this, I make a definite conclusion about the common factor between these three things –namely, that children themselves are prone to consuming dangerous amounts of things that they do not need. More specifically, that kids are exposed to things that are addictive from an early age. So what is the solution to ensure that we do not become addicted to anything? A life of austerity and asceticism? –One in which we simply abstain from things that are pleasurable in order to ensure generating the least amount of addictive potential?
The answer is no. Life itself carries with it an assortment of temptations that comes in all sorts of flavors; the idea is that if you don't derive pleasure from activity A, you will derive it from activity B – that is, there will always be something from which we derive pleasure. As gaming researchers Patrick Markey and Christopher Ferguson point out in one of their recent book, video gaming raises dopamine levels in the
brain to about the same degree that eating a slice of pepperoni pizza or
dish of ice cream does (without the calories).
That is not to say, however, that consuming excessive amounts of pepperoni pizza or ice cream won't land you in the hospital. What it all essentially boils down to, then, is moderation: children must be taught from an early age that video games have the potential to be addictive, and can thereby be a destructive force in their lives.
But what perhaps distinguishes the addiction of gaming from the addiction to other more conventional forms of deriving pleasure is the fact that gaming forces you to detach yourself from your current surroundings and become immersed in and invested into a virtual world. This rings especially true for games whose purpose it is to explore vast open worlds filled with dungeons, mazes and puzzles –such types of games oftentimes lead the player to spend substantial amounts of time interacting with characters, objects and enemies found throughout the map; aimlessness, in a sense, is a characteristic pertinent to these type of video games.
It is when this aimless interaction with a virtual world supersedes interaction with the physical world (i.e. when the amount of time one spends gaming begins interfering with one's personal relationships, one's general appearance, one's sense of hygiene, one's finances) that one must take a step back and recognize the destructive impact that this activity is having on them. This virtual addiction not only produces an unhealthy disengagement with reality to the point that one is no longer able to function within it, but it can even cause one to have manic and suicidal thoughts: "Brett's father had retrofit a metal lock on his Celeron computer to prevent his son from gaming. [...] Half an hour after Brett was mulling suicide, however, a friend called him on the phone and invited him to come over and game."
The case of Brett, as reported by Vice (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdpwga/video-game-addiction-is-destroying-american-lives-456) is one that is very representative of the criticism I broach: the obsessive usage of video games as a means to escape reality can result in the loss of meaning outside of the virtual world in which one escapes to. For me, then, games that incite gun violence, for instance, are not dangerous by virtue of their content, but rather have the potential to be dangerous if those who play it feel a vacuum of meaning in their existence outside of it. –These are the people that, at the end of the day, are more likely to question the value of life itself, and therefore, more likely to be a threat to the dignity of human life.
Therefore, in an age in which virtual reality deprives us from the more fundamental drive to interact with each other, people need to think twice before retreating into a virtual world that could potentially rob their external reality of meaning.
