My personal view on video game addiction

It’s sad that some people can’t maintain a balance between their hobby; computer games and their ordinary life with their partner, friends and jobs. But this isn’t something unique for video games as a hobby. I have friends who are compelled to finish a minimum of ten training sessions each week. They have to eat exactly 3250 kcal a day and the meals have to be served at specific times. This is not normal! But most people consider it more normal then to play video games 20 hours a week. Most people would consider a person who exercises ten times a week healthy.

Every year, people are killed or injured when they are doing what they love most, their hobbies. People crash with their motorbikes or get paralyzed when skiing down the Alps. Recently a young man died during soccer practise. But those deaths don’t make it to the front pages of newspapers. It’s healthy to play soccer and it’s healthy to go skiing in the Alps. It’s considered normal. But suddenly, a guy dies playing computer games and hell breaks loose. Every time something bad happens to a guy who plays videogames, if he dies, kills, takes hostage or thinks he’s a hobbit, the videogame is easy to blame. No one seems to notice that he’s probably a bananahead that would have freaked out even if he/she had never seen a videogame.

I’m not sure it is normal to get lost in your video games 20 hours each week, but it’s at least not worse than any other hobby.

What makes people start a blog where they can talk at length about their view of the world?

Well, a problem with living in the real life is that there are a limited number of people interested in your life and your interests. Nobody is interested in listening to your story. This is especially true if you have interests that are strange or unusual in some way. One way to solve this problem is of course to reach out to a bigger audience. Instead of increasing your number of friends it’s easier to solve the problem by switching on the computer and log on to the net.

When internet first arrived, forums and bulletin boards allowed people with common interests to get in contact with each other and discuss various things that more “normal” people didn’t want to listen to. It became possible to get help with problems, problems that none of your friends knew existed. You didn’t need friends that shared the same interests; it became possible to find them online, ready for a chat.

Next, the blogs came and even if you had the strangest hobby, someone would actually listen to your story and pay attention. Your audience could be reading from all over the country, maybe the entire world. Instead of forcing your best friend or girl/boyfriend to listen to stories about your hobbies, write it online! Read this example, this enthusiast collects airsickness bags. http://cc.oulu.fi/~emk/itstrue.html, I’m pretty sure only internet could provide him with a collector friend to discuss the important things in life with.

And this is what people want, we want to be seen and heard. We want to have someone saying that our life and hobbies is interesting. With internet, this is always possible to achieve.