Are games addictive or not?

The Walker reading quotes Keith Bakker in saying that he believes "gaming is currently the greatest threat to our society.” I think this is a bit of a generalisation. Not all gamers are as "addicted" to gaming as the ones that go through his clinic. Gaming is particularly looked down upon by society because it does not make profit which is why there is social stigma around spending a lot of time on video games.

I found the description of the clinic for addicted gamers particularly interesting because it really does describe gamers as being addicted and reliant on the technology. It makes them sound like computer games are a drug to them and if they don't get access to it they will get withdrawal symptoms. The clinic seems to focus on the traits that indicate addiction such as an inability to stop or cut down hours playing despite how the games affect their lives. This makes it sound like video games suck you in and are inherently addictive when actually, having fun releases a hormone in one's body called dopamine and it is this hormone that players can delight in and get addicted to. By this logic then, anything that is fun can be addictive. The difference is that if someone is addicted to exercise, work or is an adrenaline junkie, there isn't as much social stigma surrounding it. - Just continued with the article and found that Bakker does take dopamine into account. He justifies his reasoning that gaming is an addiction by saying that gaming is a chemical addiction thanks to the release of dopamine in the gamer's body. What is interesting is that once the player's brain becomes accustomed to the release of dopamine he or she needs to work harder to get the same amount and this is where addiction comes into the picture because when gaming stops, the brain isn't used to the lower dopamine levels. This makes a lot of sense and I can see why they argue it is addictive. I know in the past I have felt addicted to facebook or neopets and other silly sites and I'm not sure I can quite explain why. Did using those sites really release dopamine? Or was I just constantly waiting for someone to reply to a post or comment on a photo? Or did seeing my neopets play and be fed make me so happy that dopamine was released?

The article then goes on to list a few tragedies where young boys killed themselves after prolonged sessions of playing MMOs. I do not know if this is can be used as an argument that games are addictive however. From personal experience, I know how MMOs can seem like a nice escape from reality when everything is going horribly wrong in one's life. These MMOs can both be the source of the problems in one's life and the symptom. The article does not take into context what was happening in these boys lives before the time they committed suicide. It is likely that the games were a symptom of a life already hard to bare rather than the cause alone.
The article asks if these boys' fates were sealed by an addiction to video games but I think it is more likely that these were examples of problematic use, where the boys tried to escape their problems with online games rather than seeking help. Of course this is just speculation but the article basically claims that video games are responsible for these boys' deaths and does not go into the context of what was going on in their lives. This is similar to the panic surrounding video games and violence because as soon as a video game is found to be related in anyway to a person's death then they are to blame.

Because it is the dopamine that addicts the gamer and not the game itself, I do not think it is correct to say that video games are inherently addictive but that one can get addicted to any fun activity that causes the release of dopamine but that the difference between loving soccer to the point that you play it as much as possible and loving video games to the point that you play it in all your spare time is that soccer is socially accepted whereas video games are surrounded by moral panic and social stigma.