This thinly veiled parallel between video games and drugs resurfaced in the media when the World Health Organization added “gaming disorder” to its list of mental health conditions in 2018. Let me adduce my own symptoms, withdrawals, dryouts, crack-ups, benders…” ![]() “I mean, this might all turn out to be a bit of a problem. “What we are dealing with is a global addiction,” he wrote. A young(ish) Mr Martin Amis, who, in 1982, published an unlikely guide to arcade games entitled Invasion Of The Space Invaders, painted video games as equally fascinating and distasteful, rhapsodising over games such as Defender while continually comparing their pleasures to pornography, “no worse than any other form of selfish and pointless gratification”. They were places where youths gathered to enjoy a new entertainment, which, to their parents’ generation, seemed mysterious and dangerous.Įven those who enjoyed early video games often seemed to do so with a certain sense of shame. Plenty of adults lost hours and pocketfuls of change to Pong or Space Invaders in pubs, pizza joints and late-night cafés.Īrcades were portrayed as dens of iniquity by newspapers, by pastors and memorably by a US surgeon general, who declared that young Americans were addicted “body and soul” to the dubious pleasures of games. The game design of this era proved ludicrously and almost universally compelling, and not just for bored children. The idea of video games as a pointless timesink goes back to the arcades, where the classic cabinets of their time – Centipede, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids – were explicitly designed to tempt players to feed them just one more coin. Time-consuming video games are not a modern phenomenon and nor is the panic around them. This was highlighted in January when Polish developer Techland, creator of the new open-world zombie game Dying Light 2, revealed that it would take a staggering 500 hours to complete. What they all seem to share is an insatiable appetite for your free time. The experiences available to gamers today are more varied than ever and range from the mind-expanding wonder offered by the likes of Breath Of The Wild or the recently released and critically acclaimed Elden Ring to the dopamine-triggering, monkey-brain gratification of Candy Crush. I’m not sure those gaming experiences were quite so enriching. Or the three weeks that I lost to The Sims at university, when I nearly failed my first-year exams. Then there was the weekend I was deliriously ill and spent about 15 hours and at least £30 on a supposedly free-to-play dungeon crawler game on my phone. I’ve explored far-flung corners of the world and the inner worlds of interesting characters and other worlds beyond imagining, foreign planets with toxic seas and bizarre roaming fauna with limbs in strange places. I’ve had all kinds of experiences like this in video games such as The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild. ![]() It was a dragon scale and, when I picked it up, I felt a genuine sense of wonder. It struck and something fell from the skies along with me. Seconds before my stamina ran out, I got close enough to loose off another arrow. ![]() Eventually, I ended up near the top of some mountain and, for the hell of it, I flung myself from its peak, gliding towards the elusive dragon on its meandering path through the clouds. I followed it as far as I could, trying to get up close, but it was indifferent to me and my futile attempts to goad it with arrows. I was riding my horse aimlessly through a forest when I came upon a bridge, from which I could see a waterfall and an extraordinary green and yellow creature, snaking its way through the sky before it, crackling with electricity. Let me tell you about the time I found a dragon in Hyrule.
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