Panoroma investigates games addiction, offers balanced, fair reporting

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Like many British gamers, I watched Panorama this evening.

(For non-Brits, Panorama is an investigative journalism programme on the BBC that revealed last week, for example, that FIFA is riddled with corruption).

Gamers across the Twitterverse girded their loins to be outraged, upset and annoyed that the mainstream media was once again maligning their favourite pastime in an ill-considered, ill-researched attack.

Only Panorama didn’t (although that didn’t stop a kneejerk reaction from gamers).

The biggest reason Panorama failed as television was because it was so balanced. It looked for evidence that we have a games addiction problem, and failed to find it.

Reporter Rafael Rowe talks to some disturbed teenagers and young adults who became addicted to games. He talks to some parents who struggled with their parenting skills. (One Korean woman said about her Warcraft-addicted son with whom she was attending an addiction clinic:

“I used to hit him a lot, now we spend time together”

That seems to be a parenting problem, not a games one. The son was “cured” by time spent in the sunshine and on the beach in company with other young people, alongside with structured activities and group interactions.)

He got balanced views from the industry and academics about whether there is an addiction problem. Sure, Panorama tried to sex it up by saying that 12 people were believed to have died, globally, as a result of games in the whole of history. To put that into context, 24 people have died of alcohol-related illnesses today, in the UK alone.

It tried to paint a picture of people manipulated by evil developers into spending too much time on games (and just wait until they discover social games, which can suck up people’s time AND their money).

But it failed. It failed because there is no evidence. It failed because it is not a problem. It failed because, as Rob Fahey has argued, we have won the media battle and editors and producers realise that gamers now outnumber non-gamers in the UK, making it harder to sensationalise at the ignorant.

I may have been more open-minded than many because I read Adrian Hon’s thoughtful piece on why social games are opening up the door to a whole new raft of potential psychological and social issues which are emerging as the games industry changes.

I started worrying about the same issue a few weeks ago, as I worked on my ARM Yourself framework. On Wednesday, my Retention post will be published, talking about how to use key elements of psychological persuasion to influence users to play your game – and to spend money on it.

There is nothing wrong with this per se. All marketing is about changing people’s minds about your product and making it more desirable. But I found myself thinking that there are some very powerful ways of reinforcing behaviours available to game designers. So perhaps we have to face up to the possibility that the great freedom we have to make great games comes with a responsibility.

The Panorama show ended with a po-faced Jeremy Vine saying something like “If your teenage son gets violent when you unplug his console, don’t panic – just visit our website for advice”. That is very far from being a biased critique of a hugely successful industry that creates enjoyment for millions.

But it is a reminder to us all that we do have a responsibility not to abuse our freedoms.

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  Disclosures, conflicts of interest and the role of the blogger
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