Digital Heroin

As a gamer myself, who had spent the first twenty years of my life in China, the word that immediately jump into my mind when talk about games is ‘Digital Heroin’. Such negative, even demonized, viewpoint towards games was very popular in China during the last two decades of 20^th century. Kids of that time, whose parents allow them to play video games, are envied by friends.

I was running a video game retail shop, named ‘Game-Mate’, with three of my friends in 2000 in China. Although we were not even aiming to make profit out of it, rather more like to provide a place where we can make new game-mates, and to expand our little ‘game society’. But we were soon considered as a malignant tumor to the local community by the adult residents around. Many parents, whose children visit our shop quite often, even threaten to sue us if we do not close our shop, because they thought we were abetting their children to rip-off money with each other, or from them, in order to buy video games from us. Ironically, the premises we were doing our business is owned by local police station, therefore we were somehow ‘protected’ by local authorities.

Addiction has been one of the most mentioned issues related to video games, but on the question of ‘how frequent and how much is involved with a game considered as addiction’, digital natives, who grow up with modern technology, hold quite different opinions with their elders. Gaming becomes a very important part of their social life, in a scale that their elders could not be able to reach in the past, such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, etc. Video games have also become their tools to outlet increasing social pressures from school, work and family in modern busy life.

I think there is a huge potential for video games to be developed into a new education system, which is probably more efficient and attractive than traditional methodology, a new direction in education revolution. Parents in China against their children playing games, largely due to the lack of understanding about contemporary digital video games. Most of them still hold the stigma that games are “play” and thus the opposite of “work.” However, I am not saying playing video games immoderately is encouraged, but at least, we should not treat video games as dreadful monsters.

Hope this topic won’t be too heavy for you guys, lol~