The causation is irrelevant. If there's any correlation between ADHD, the exacerbation of ADHD symptoms, and gaming, then it needs to be reduced, tackled and effectively nullified. I think that I speak for a large majority in the gaming community as a whole when I say that the worst, most damaging and deeply divisive of members in any game have been examples of ADHD or at least behaviour that could easily be mistaken for ADHD.
If people are turning to gaming as a crutch to solve their mental issues, sure, this is better than them going out and shooting someone, but it's a poor long-term situation for our communities. There should be discouraging measures in place to control behaviour of an excessively immature fashion.
I'm not saying that restrictions or bans are the order of the day - quite the opposite. I'm talking about changing the way we design games, to appeal to the mature and to the careful, to the skilful and intelligent. I'm talking about not basing whatever boasts one can make in a game on the amount of play time you have, or your ability to read a wiki (I'm looking at you, the entire MMO franchise). In short, I think of this as a long-term design approach rather than the blitzkrieg concept we seem to see everywhere today.
You might ask - what is the blitzkrieg of game design? Basically, with the biggest releases today, it's all graphics, graphics, graphics, graphics, graphics, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing sound gameplay plot. In that order, and rhythm. If we look back to the Golden Age of the 90's and beyond, gaming expression has always had a similar pattern. But this set of priorities is aging badly, and I think we all could call for a new maturity, an artistic or culturally higher play that could create a stronger core audience of non-insane, non-ill community members. A new indy that isn't indy, that reaches that mainstream audience and, over time, slowly informs and transforms it. A kind of Beatles of the gaming world.
Fanciful comparisons aside, let me be frank. If we can't bat an eyelid at the fact that there's a link between ADHD and our favourite hobby, then we need a wakeup call. We are not only seeing a community suffering in the short term, but ourselves in the longer term, as a result of the attraction of members with mental problems and an addiction to the fragile egoism of levelling and slowly gathering statistical might.
We can easily pretend that the community is at arm's length, and does not influence us enough to warrant serious action or activism. "Oh, I've never been stressed about ADHD before." The trouble is:
yes you have. Let's use one classic experience. You know the person who complained about the guild having too many members, then suggesting, openly and in front of them and you, who should be cut out to make "room"? They might have had ADHD, and you wouldn't have known if they had.
Even if they did not, they fit the behaviour sets that characterise the problem. And these behaviours are taken up by the young - in guilds, and a number of other places - often, because they see the profit given to those who seek attention so excessively. Even if these melodramatic people have never
known someone with ADHD, they are proof that the disorder has an adverse effect on its surroundings, or that when one does something, many might follow.
These people effect you. Directly. It's time to discourage those that have no real disorder from taking up its habits, and to find a place or method to keep sufferers of ADHD within the community, but uninspired to exacerbate or exaggerate their already extreme personality traits.
We can do this by changing the environment around them - by changing MMOs and high-"skill" or "hardcore" gaming itself. This would require a direct and positive reversal on the current market-psychology frameworks of the modern MMO, based on the little rewards that keep the hamster in the spinner - instead attempting to appeal to a higher intellect or conscious mind, wherein large rewards are given for large successes, and proportionately down the chain. If the principles of game design and development were to change just so, to rebalance a set of more socially healthy responses and reactions into the heavy, and boasting and alienation a distant second, the effects on the community would be incredible (while, with a careful approach, I'd dare say that the effect on business would be neutral).
With a little waiting under this new paradigm, there would be little to no more reason to attract the "trolls" and tribulations of the naughties Internet era. These people would still turn up in game communities, yes, but they would not be encouraged, setting them and their obsessive gaming habits back from the seats of power and guild politics, and into a position that's healthier for everyone - equality.
John Funk said:
The study recommends that parents limit their kids' interaction with videogames and TV to under two hours a day, just in case - which honestly, seems more like plain common sense to me.
Which I agree is a good idea. But I'm not sure how entirely synthesised your views of this are with your enthusiasm for MMOs, Mr Funk. Many MMOs really demand more than two hours of play time in any given session (lest we face snow-as-snail-pace progress in levelling or the impatience of guild members, timed quests, and so on), making two hours a day much too low for a minimum.
There's the culture of such gaming to consider; guilds, forums and factions all play a part in encouraging people to stay in-game longer than may be healthy each day. If a child wants to be a competitive
WoW player - and I assume, perhaps mistakenly, that you would want them to have a chance at this as well - they have to get on at specific times, for long periods, and THEN set aside MORE time for levelling.
If we can all agree that two hours is too much for children (and sure, I think it's a debatable point, but you seem to think that's an okay guideline), does that mean that we should avoid designing games to encourage more hours of play per day, if they can get into the hands of these children? What would such a new approach mean for the industry? I think that there's a whole can of tasty beans here that is just dying to be opened. I look forward to the next articles on this topic.
