Universal computerization is a real scourge of the 21st century. These machines have become so densely and ubiquitous in our lives that the plots of science fiction films about the conquest of the world by machines no longer seem so fictional. Today, every third inhabitant of the planet suffers from computer dependence. How to overcome a bad habit - this article will tell you.

Signs of computer addiction

Virtual reality is gaining more and more fans. There are especially many teenagers among them. What is especially dangerous, because the psychoemotional development of the child is in full swing. So, how to understand that your child suffers from computer addiction:

• decline in physical activity;
• constant bad mood;
• severe anxiety and nervousness;
• lack of interest in reality;
• the desire to complete any business as soon as possible and return to the gadget;
• aggression;
• irritability when trying to distract the child from the game;
• cannot complete the game on time, spends days and nights at the computer;
• spending money on upgrading equipment;
• skipping meals, eating fast food without interrupting the game;
• neglect of hygiene;
• while playing, the child becomes happy;
• abuses coffee and other stimulants.

For your information, addiction manifests itself much faster than alcoholism or drug addiction. 4-6 months of frequent "freezing" in the virtual world is enough for the cravings to be formed.

The main reasons to spend time at the computer:

• communication on social networks;
• games.

Addiction to computer games

The most dangerous is addiction to games. "Sitting" on sites for communication does not have the same attractiveness and destructiveness as going into a parallel reality.

Why gambling addiction is dangerous:

• destruction of social ties of a person, his degradation in terms of communication;
• deviation of behavior, aggressive attitude towards the outside world;
• decreased brain activity, the transition to communication in short phrases from the game;
• health problems.

Damage to health caused by spending a long time at the computer:

• sleep disturbance, chronic fatigue;
• lack of physical activity affects the whole body and, first of all, a lack of oxygen;
• the development of psychological problems - hallucinations, the initial stages of schizophrenia;
• gastrointestinal diseases - gastritis, ulcers, constipation;
• haemorrhoids;
• drying of the mucous membrane of the eye;
• pain in the wrist;
• scoliosis and other troubles with the spine;

Computer addiction in adolescents

And what generally prompts a child to concentrate his life around this smart machine? "They are all now obsessed with their phones, set-top boxes," you say, and you will be right. Because even a mild form of addiction suffers from every teenager today. This is due to the fact that communication is gradually replacing live conversation. The virtual dialogue is convenient because:

• no need to leave the house anywhere;
• you can combine communication with your personal affairs;
• there is time to carefully consider the answer and make a better impression than in reality;
• fashionable to communicate through social. networks.

And here are the factors that initially push the teenager into the tenacious paws of the computer:

• an attempt to relieve nervous tension;
• withdrawal from reality, in which there are only constant conflicts with everyone around;
• the desire to assert itself - it is much easier to achieve something in the game;
• dissatisfaction with your appearance, yourself in general;
• the need for communication and for high-quality construction of a dialogue in life;
• desire to avoid increasing responsibility;
• disturbed value system;
• distance from the family, strengthening the authority of peers;
• the desire to escape from the care of parents;
• an attempt to demonstrate independence and independence;
• trying to find friends when relationships with peers do not work out in life.

Computer addiction treatment

Therapy of this addiction is based on demonstrating to the child the beauty of ordinary life, the very one from which he strives to escape.

Much in this matter depends on the parents, but you cannot do without the help of specialists. The psychotherapist will analyze the personality, identify what needs the child was forced to go to the virtual world and suggest the best methods of struggle.

Parents are required to:

• devote enough time to the teenager;
• set a block on unwanted resources - category 18+, scenes of violence, etc.
• demonstrate absolute parental love, unwillingness to control and crush the teenager, namely the experience;
• to organize a high-quality child, to instill in him optimism and a desire to live in reality as much as possible;
• be sure to send your child to a circle or section, this will help to find like-minded people, which will put the computer in the background.

Take the teenager to nature, play ball, go to a concert with him. Learn to listen to your child and find compromises.

Prevention of computer addiction

As a prevention of gambling addiction, it is recommended to devote more time to the child. Of course, in the modern world it is quite difficult for working parents to do this. However, everyone can find at least 10 minutes a day and have a heart-to-heart talk with a child.

It is recommended, if possible, to limit the stay of the child with gadgets in his hands. But not by force! Find him an interesting hobby in real life, pick a hobby that will be really interesting to him. Interested in shooting games? Please, for shooting lessons and shooting range. Do you like fighting games? And let him learn to do these tricks himself, in any interesting section of hand-to-hand combat. Do you like planes or cars? There are also a bunch of options for models from various materials that you can assemble, glue and paint. Any person can find something to their liking, it is only important to awaken in him the desire to do it.

Love your child and be attentive to his life. Today, there are many different dangers on the Internet - violent videos, perverts disguised as peers, drug and suicide propaganda. The best way to prevent this from happening is to be your child's friend and have a strong relationship of trust. Be aware of all the events of his life.

It is also important to be a good example for the child. If a child is allowed to spend no more than 2 hours a day with a gadget, then adults do the same. Think if the child has not turned to the computer according to your example.

The computer is one of the most significant inventions of mankind.

First, it is a powerful computing tool capable of processing thousands of operations per second.

Secondly, having access to the Internet, the computer becomes a wonderful means of communication.

Third, having the same Internet, we get almost limitless opportunities for learning, reading the latest news, information, improving our qualifications and all that stuff.

It is also a multifunctional entertainment tool: you can easily watch movies or listen to music, play or. It's safe to say that computers make our life much easier. But along with these cool pluses, there is one huge, fat minus.

More and more people, both adults and children, suffer from computer addiction.

What is it and what is it with? Let's try to understand the reasons for its appearance. A person who constantly sits at a computer is most likely:

• Deprived of a favorite activity, hobby;
• or scared by her. And, as a consequence of the fright, he prefers to live in virtual reality;
• Has family problems. Does not find a common language with household members, feels like an outcast;
• He has no friends and thinks that no one understands him.

If you find in yourself two or more signs of computer addiction, then it's time for you to take action, otherwise the machine will soon consume all your time and nullify real life. If more, then immediately begin to get rid of this scourge. Tips on how to get rid of computer addiction can be found below.

Computer addiction symptoms

1. You cannot tear yourself away from the computer, spend all your free time at it. You are pulled away from him almost by force, shouts and threats, and when you still have to break away, your mood deteriorates, you become angry, irritable or even aggressive.
2. You prefer communicating with a computer to communicating with people.
3. You are unable to concentrate on the task at hand, constantly distracted from your activities to check your mail, read the news or play "one fight" in your favorite game.
4. You neglect household chores and try to postpone them as long as possible, personal hygiene and sleep in favor of the computer, and in your refrigerator "the mouse hangs".
5. The main topics for conversation with people are the topic of the computer and computer games.
6. You suffer from a lack of something in real life and therefore try to get it all in virtual: communication, attention to yourself, success and recognition, which you do not have. You are trying to make money in online games.

Analyze your answers and draw conclusions. And now a little about how to get rid of computer addiction.

Of course, a computer is very good, but as the truth says: "A little bit of good luck." Set goals for yourself, achieve them, be purposeful and communicative, and you will understand that the virtual world is not worth the time you spend on it. Live profitably.

Image: barsen (flickr.com)

Chapter from the book “I Can't Stop. Where do obsessions come from and how to get rid of them ”Sharon Begley on how addiction works on various computer games - from Candy Crush Saga to World Of Warcraft.

Compulsive video games are different from all other compulsions. Most people don't become pathological gatherers, OCD sufferers, compulsive eaters, bodybuilders, or shopaholics. By virtue of their psychotype, they do not risk falling into a black hole of such behavioral patterns, since they have a sufficiently high resistance to painful anxiety.

But video games and other electronic temptations exploit the universal sides of human psychology... As I have already noted, compulsive behavior does not mean that a person is crazy. On the contrary, an adaptive response to anxiety that would otherwise be unbearable is perfectly normal.

In nothing this is manifested so clearly as in gambling addiction. Video games are extremely compelling because their creators have learned to take advantage of the universal aspects of how our brains function. So almost anyone can feel attracted to play and unable to resist... John Doerr, a celebrated Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has invested in game development company Zynga, said in a 2011 interview with Vanity Fair: known. "

I hoped the reasons for this could be explained by game designers and scientists who are dedicated to a new field of research - game psychology. But first, you had to make sure that play satisfies the prerequisite - the ability to reduce anxiety - in order to be the subject of compulsion, and not, say, addiction.

In a 2012 New York Times Magazine article, consultant critic Sam Anderson talked about his compulsive need to play Drop7, a 2009 Zynga Sudoku game in which balls fall from top to bottom in a 7x7 grid.

“I played, instead of washing dishes, bathing children, communicating with relatives, reading the newspaper, and most importantly, writing,” Anderson admitted. “The game has become for me a pain reliever, an emergency escape capsule, a breathing apparatus, Xanax.”

The game has become a digital tranquilizer. He realized that with her help he was “self-medicating”, grabbing Drop7 “in any extreme situation,” for example, “after talking in a raised voice with his mother; as soon as I found out that my dog ​​is probably going to die of cancer. "

One online commentator confirmed that video games, at least for him, are inseparable from compulsion. “They reduce my anxiety, and I acknowledge that I play Bejeweled for this purpose,” he wrote. “I didn't pay attention to how much time I devote to this game, until one day I realized that I was playing it on a stationary bike during physical therapy” - before falling off him.

Screenshot from the game Bejeweled.

Neil Gaiman described this condition in the 1990 poem Virus:

You play - tears in your eyes
My wrist aches
Hunger torments ... and then everything leaves. Or - everything except the game.
In my head now - only a game And nothing else *.

Tens of millions of people could subscribe to these words.

In May 2013, Dong Nguyen, a hitherto unknown game creator from Hanoi, Vietnam, released Flappy Bird, which he told reporters the following year, "It was probably the simplest idea I could think of."

The game turned out to be the embodiment of "stupid toys" despised by serious gamers, in which the lack of a plot, visual appeal and full-fledged development is compensated for only by the complete thoughtlessness of the process. In Flappy Bird, the player pokes his finger at the screen, trying to force a barely animated bird (it does not even wave its rudimentary wings - in fact, they are barely visible) fly into the gap between the vertical green pipes.

However, despite the stupidity - or, on the contrary, thanks to it - the game became a sensation. In early 2014, she topped the lists of the most popular downloads on both Apple and Android, to the complete bewilderment of the creator.

“I don't understand why Flappy Bird is so popular,” Nguyen told the Washington Post. Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computer systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology and game designer, wrote that countless players are "amazed and depressing that they both hate this game and are captured by it."

Video games: the norm or addiction?

Of course, games are also played in order to relieve tension after a hard day, feel at least a little bit of pride in their achievements, or just relax and disconnect from everything. And not every action taken too long is compulsive. Excessiveness is not a sign of compulsiveness (even if we leave aside the question that the very concept of "excessiveness" is subjective).

There are many reasons why people play video games at the expense of other activities and at the expense of work, such as relieving boredom or wasting time, avoiding communication, or coping with loneliness. But, as evidenced by the above examples, as well as the study of the phenomenon of the psychological attraction of video games, for some people this activity still becomes a compulsion, including a destructive one.

Since the first decade of the 21st century, “reset camps” have been set up in South Korea and China to treat children who are unable to resist the compulsive urge to play video games for hours.

This, however, does not mean that compulsion is a mental illness. A panel of experts who determined which disorders should be included in the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic Manual examined about 240 studies designed to describe "morbid addiction to online games."

As a result, they decided not to include gambling compulsion in the list of officially recognized mental illnesses, agreeing only that this problem deserves further study. Today, science with certainty asserts one thing: even a person with a completely sane mind can be drawn into a compulsive game.

Stream, Intermittent Reinforcement, and Angry Birds

Nikita Mikros appears for an interview in a sweat-soaked T-shirt and a helmet under his arm, rolling a bicycle next to him. We agreed to meet at an old warehouse building on the beach in Dumbo, Brooklyn's hipster neighborhood, a kingdom of cobblestones and coffee shops.

Micros, a video game and arcade developer since the 1990s, invited me to spend the morning with his company and learn a lot of interesting things. For example, why the Candy Crush Saga puzzle game from mobile gaming giant King Digital Entertainment attracted 66 million players in 2013, Alec Baldwin allowed himself to be dropped off a plane ready to take off, just not to get lost from Zynga's Words with Friends **, and Tetris According to the results of the vote, it turned out to be the most addictive game of all time.

Word With Friends

“We've learned a lot about how to make games seductive,” Mikros emailed me. “Unfortunately, some of the trickery is scary for me myself.”
Micros quickly leads me to the premises of his game development company Tiny Mantis. These are just two rooms and a dozen workstations. Among gamers, Mikros is famous for creating things like Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom, Dungeonsand Dungeons and Lego Dino Outbreak.

The rooms are lined with flat-panel monitors surrounded by disposable coffee cups, public communications, painted brick walls, holes in the ceiling and posters with Mr. Spock and a panda serve as entourage.

Micros goes away for a minute and comes back in a fresh T-shirt - black, with the image of Mona Lisa bleeding out. I set up all morning to watch him cut in Diablo and Angry Birds, but he loads the presentation he prepared for me. Instead of emptying the guts of monsters, we dive into the ideas of Mihai Csikszentmihalyi.

Psychologist Csikszentmihalyi proposed the idea of ​​"flow" - a state of mind characterized by complete unity with current activities.

In a state of flow, you are so immersed in what you are doing that the outside world almost does not penetrate your consciousness, no other thoughts overwhelm your mind, the sense of time disappears, even hunger and thirst are not felt. Having been "in the stream", many are amazed: "Honest mother, where did the time go and why you are so hungry?"

The best game developers, Mikros explains, put players in a state of flux: “When you forget yourself, the sense of time changes. You start playing, and you yourself will not notice how it happened, but - wow! - it's morning already. The feeling of playing becomes an end in itself. But for each person, the flow zone has its own dimensions. If you put too many difficulties in front of the players, they feel unnecessary anxiety and give up, and if everything is too simple, they will get bored and quit the game.

But being in the central zone, they are completely immersed in the process. " The stream is so attractive that the experience of its experience sinks into the soul, and it is very difficult to refuse it.

One way to keep players of different skill levels “in line with the flow,” according to Mikros, is to continually adjust the difficulty. This method was used in the classics of the 1980s. Crash Bandicoot *. If the player was fatally unable to, say, jump onto the moving shelves, the game was merciful by not rolling back too far to the start in the event of a character dying and by making it easier to navigate through obstructed environments.

On the other hand, it was worth gaining experience, and it became more difficult to play. “Some people like it,” Mikros said. “Since I’m playing better, they argue, let the problems get harder, otherwise it’s just a walk.”

Another way to keep the player in a state of flux is, for example, to crush a monster using a new skill against it, and use only that skill in the next few situations.

“Your possibilities are growing, now you can defeat a monster that was previously invulnerable,” explained Mikros. "Good developers lead you through a narrow corridor in the flow area, building up the difficulty and then immediately giving you a slightly easier task, again increasing the difficulty level and again offering something simpler."

I admit that I don't see anything special about creating games that keep us in flux. Obviously, a game must have these characteristics in order to be attractive (since it needs to hold the player's attention long enough for him to get involved), but this condition seems necessary to me, but not sufficient. There is no one size fits all recipe, agrees Mikros: "If we knew exactly what to do, every game would turn into Angry Birds."

In the 4 years since the release of this game by Rovio Entertainment, it has been downloaded 2 billion times.

It seems that humans are not able to resist the temptation to throw a frenzied bird at a green pig dangling eggs with a virtual sling! Why? There are many reasons why Angry Birds is fun to play: it’s a simple game, no learning curve, and a direct hit will explode the pig, much to the delight of any inner preschooler.

But the reasons for the non-coherence of the game are deeper. If the action is guaranteed to be followed by a reward (successfully threw the bird - the pig exploded), then the dopamine production system is triggered in the brain. Previously, it was thought that its sole purpose was to induce a subjective sense of reward or pleasure, but the system turns out to be more complex: it calculates the likelihood that an action will provide a reward, and accordingly adjusts the expectation module in our brain.

“The presence of dopamine signals to the brain that a reward is expected, such as the spectacular spectacle of glass and wood houses flying into the air,” psychologist Michael Horost wrote in Psychology Today in 2011 (who removed Angry Birds from his phone to relieve compulsive gambling). ). “However, the brain doesn't know how big the reward will be.

Does the bird just glide along the surface or hit right in the bull's-eye? This insecurity creates tension, and the brain craves relief. As a result, you will go to great lengths to find this relief. " For example, you will use a virtual sling over and over again.

Unsurprisingly, many people who are unable to stop playing Bejeweled or even FreeCell find it far from pleasant. They feel compelled, unable to break free from the bondage of the game, and inevitably continue to play, receiving almost no pleasure, except for rare moments of success.

Video games somehow “connect” to the deep properties of our psyche that make us expect pleasure, cause us unpleasant experiences and force us to constantly repeat the experience, although we know that disappointment and frustration are inevitable.

Games can be addicting without being particularly fun as they are exploited by their developers 2 very powerful psychological tricks: variable and intermittent (or probabilistic) reinforcement.

Reinforcement is intermittent with a variable probability of receiving a reward: sometimes you get a prize for your achievement (for example, a game trophy or advance to the next level), and sometimes ... nothing for the same action.

Variable reinforcement is a reward system in which the value of the reward for a given achievement changes. Slot machines are the quintessence of variable and intermittent reinforcement. Each time you play, you perform one and only action - you pull the handle of a one-armed bandit, - or, with the transition from mechanical devices to electronic devices, you press a button. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose - but most of the time you lose. The input is the same, the output varies from jackpot to bust. It is not surprising that the textbook image of a slot machine lover is a man chained to a machine, as if hypnotized, mechanically thrusting quarters into an iron gut. Compulsively gambling until he lowers everything, and forced to return home by bus.

Like a slot machine, “Diablo uses variable rewards, and that's one of the reasons it's so addictive,” Mikros explained. Let me explain to the uninitiated: Diablo is a 2012 release as part of a game franchise founded in 1996 by Blizzard Entertainment.

All three releases are an action role-playing game with an emphasis on mass extermination of opponents in close combat (the so-called hack-and-slash, or simply "hack-and-slash"). The player, who is also the hero, leads his avatar through the kingdom of Handuras, fighting against vampires and other enemies to end the rule of Diablo, the lord of Dread.

If you manage to pass 16 levels of dungeons and get to Hell, the hero will clash with Diablo in the final battle. On the way, the player throws spells, gets weapons and other useful things and interacts with various characters - a warrior, a robber, a wizard and others.

At the beginning of the game, the rewards are, in fact, fixed: you kill the monster, and something good happens, say, leveling up or increasing "experience" (in fact, combat power). However, as the game progresses, the likelihood of being rewarded with an effective new weapon or other means of survival and advancement decreases, but the value of the reward increases.

“You still expect it, but you don't get it every time,” says Mikros. - You are already accustomed to the fact that the destruction of this demon or monster will provide you with something useful, say, gold, a special sword or bow. But now you do not know if you will receive anything, and you look forward to this moment with impatience, even with anxiety. "

Game developers call this effect a "compulsion loop." It is rooted in the way our brains work and allows us to understand the essence of the hybrid nature of games. Like other electronic honeypots such as mail and messaging services, video games are a textbook example of an activity in which addiction and compulsion flow into each other like a demon disguising itself.

Gambling addiction: access to dopamine

Addictions are fueled by a desperate need for another dose of pleasure. The reason for this is that addictions are born of pleasure - the initial experience is always enjoyable, exciting, enjoyable and thrilling. These sensations are formed in the so-called reward system in the brain.

The system is activated when we experience pleasure, and consists of neurons that connect to a network under the influence of dopamine. "Connection to a neural network" means that an electrical signal, having reached the end of one neuron, passes through the synapse to the next neuron due to the fact that the first neuron released dopamine into the synaptic cleft.

Dopamine bridges the gap between two neurons and is assembled by the recipient neuron, just as ISS modules are assembled by the Soyuz spacecraft. The "gateway" of a neuron is called the dopamine receptor. The fact of docking promotes the movement of an electrical signal along the entire length of the recipient neuron, and the process is repeated many times until it is perceived by us as pleasure - a subjective feeling caused by food, sex, alcohol, nicotine, cocaine and the destruction of monsters in Diablo.

That is why all these substances and activities, being sources of deep euphoria, have such a pronounced reinforcement effect.

However, the processes occurring in the brain turned out to be more complex than the scientists initially thought, and the production of dopamine is no exception. The activity of the pleasure center is easier to understand when viewed as a waiting mechanism: it forms predictions of how pleasant the experience will be.

To better understand how video game developers use the dopamine system, I turned to Jamie Madigan, a psychology doctor who has worked for a game company for many years. Madigan has become famous in the world of gamers thanks to the site psychologyofgames.com, where he puts materials on topics of interest to me, including "dopamine rush" - which, by his own admission, he barely coped with playing Diablo.

At the end of Diablo, he said, “you complete the storyline” of exterminating vampires and monsters in order to get to Diablo and fight him, “and you get more and more effective trophies to kill more monsters and get more stronger trophies ”. There are more than ten levels, “and the better equipment you get, the more tenacious the monsters become. There is no end to it. Gradually, I realized that I was doing the same thing for 3 hours every evening, and I was no longer happy about it. If I, knowing what elements of the game make it sticky, are hooked ... ”He trails off.

But what are these elements that provoke compulsion? Nick Mikros gave another textbook example of a game that, like Diablo, exploits a variable / intermittent reward system. This is the super popular World of Warcraft, also known for its ability to plunge players into compulsion, offering them unpredictable and unexpected discoveries.

World of warcraft

A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), released in 2004, it has over 10 million subscribers, each of whom chooses a character and goes through a quest through many levels of the virtual world. In World of Warcraft, players choose a profession, such as blacksmithing or mining, and can master any of four secondary skills (archeology, cooking, fishing, or first aid).

They unite to perform tasks, either ad hoc or within the framework of permanent associations - guilds, inviting each other through the messenger built into the game, group "text channels" or, in some games, voice communication systems.

In guilds, players get access to tools that will come in handy in quests - missions that form the plot backbone of the game and give players experience points, useful objects, skills and money. In addition, World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs provide the opportunity to escape into a carefully designed, complex, interesting world, where there are no parental assaults, tyrant bosses or ungrateful spouses. They exploit our desire for achievement, although achievements - defeating enemies, destroying monsters, saving princesses, accumulating wealth or raising status and moving to higher levels - are not entirely real.

This, however, is a psychologically obvious and relatively harmless attraction factor for multiplayer games. Jamie Madigan fell victim to a different mechanism. He once ruthlessly exterminated bandits in World of Warcraft, earning a chance to replenish the arsenal of armor, weapons, or other consumables - trophies that will be useful in subsequent battles and quests.

Trophies are of different quality, which is indicated by the color of the accompanying text: gray - the weakest, white - a little more valuable, then green, blue, purple and orange. The character that the player chooses as an avatar also has a specific place in the hierarchy. "Classes" - monks, rogues, shamans, warriors and druids - have their own style of behavior, determined by the weapons and defensive techniques available to them, as well as skills, powers and magic, which are earned by passing all kinds of stages.

His character did not shine in anything special and could hardly count on valuable acquisitions, so Madigan "was shocked by the trophy that fell - a rare pair of blue gloves that ideally met the needs of my class at the time," he recalls. For a grassroots character, “finding a blue object on a random enemy is a unique case, and I decided that a colossal dash awaited me.

More importantly, at the same time, there was a strong desire to keep playing and kill more bandits. " Intermittent rewards in the form of a rare trophy keep the passion alive like no expected and predictable prizes. “This is an incredibly effective way to keep people in the game due to the way the dopamine reward system works,” explained Madigan.

Remember, “dopamine neurons” anticipate the burst of pleasure in a pleasurable experience by firing even before the reward arrives (for example, when a microwave signal tells you that your favorite meal is ready). “But that's just one of the reasons why trophy-based games are so powerful,” he continued. “The main thing is that dopamine neurons just light up as soon as your brain learns to predict an event, but literally go around, having received an unexpected, unpredictable dose of dopamine, and turn you on even more. Something like “ Blimey! One more portion - out of the blue! Keep doing what you are doing while we try to figure out how to achieve repetition! ” And you keep on playing».

So what if the rational brain convinces you to stop! If you're on an emotional platoon - like taking out villains in an online shooter game, or racing down the devilish tracks of Gran Turismo with squealing tires - don't remember to take care of your daily bread, prepare for tomorrow's presentation, or finish your coursework.

« All intentions dictated by common sense are powerless - you are already thinking with a different brain, after some stinker broke your record in a shooter, or you yourself performed an amazing feat in another game- explained Madigan. - Rationality crawls away, tail between his legs, and you suddenly realize that now at a quarter to three and there is a working day ahead, but you still mutter that you will make another one, and that's it ...»

Nick Micros is not thrilled that video game developers have learned to use the dopamine system. It seems like half of the basement space in Brooklyn is occupied by game designers who have built compulsion loops into their creations. However, not all people in this profession take pride in this perfected skill of their colleagues.

"My hair stands on end from games, which are the material embodiment of Skinner's box," admits Micros as a curtain. “That's not why I want to make games, not for people to get food. Pushed the lever, got a pellet. I doubt that this is the path to human progress. "

Homebrew neuroscience

I was beginning to feel like I was going through a quest in Halo in the hope that the next room I entered - the next expert I interviewed - would reveal the rest of the secrets of the compulsive game. My next location was the Game Development Center of New York University.

He had settled so recently at the MetroTech business center in Brooklyn that its director, Frank Lanz, who met me at the elevators, did not work the office key card. (A graduate student rescued us.) The monitors in the break room were still wrapped in cellophane, boxes were piled everywhere. The Game Development Center, founded in 2008 as a Chair of the Tisch School of the Arts, offers a two-year Master's program in Computer Game Development.

Lanz is a legend in the gaming world. He is the co-founder of Area / Code (acquired by Zynga in 2011), which has developed Facebook games such as CSI: Crime City and Power Planets. sources of energy to support the development of their civilization ").

He has made many iPhone games, including Drop7. In Sharkrunners, created for Discovery Channel Shark Week 2007, players can feel like marine biologists interacting in the ocean with real sharks attached to GPS sensors that feed the game with telemetry data.

Lanz sat down at an almost empty table (his belongings had not yet been unpacked) and expressed his satisfaction that game design was finally recognized as a full-fledged academic discipline, especially since ideas from such diverse spheres as architecture and literature converge in this area. “Most game creators are more creative than the desire to make a game that players can't refuse,” he said.

However, if the developers are guided by aesthetic and other lofty considerations, the companies selling games are more than ever eager to get an obsessive game for their investments. In the old days, a teenager would have shell out $ 59.95 for Gran Turismo, and that would be the last thing Sony could make from it. If the player lost interest, nobody cared.

In the 2000s. a different business model emerged: instead of paying up front, gamers were given free, free access, often in the form of downloads to a mobile device, but then “micro-payments” were assigned to them. For example, in Farmville, you can buy magic for one dollar to restore crops (withered due to your neglect, damn you these homework!) Or accelerate its ripening (so that you have time to collect vegetables before you are sent to sleep).

Farmville constantly encourages players to return to the virtual fields, as it has a timer: the crop dies if you do not visit it often enough. Many people hate to lose what they have gained, and this effect is so strong that psychologists have named it - "loss aversion."

Other games ask you to pay $ 1 or $ 2 for obstacle avoidance, access to a more exotic part of the game world, cool outfit for your avatar, or virtual food and drink for the virtual inhabitants of CityVille.

In the micropayment model, stickiness - an attraction so strong that gamers can't stop playing - is alpha and omega. “The commercial operation is built into the game,” says Lanz. - This causes a really serious controversy around game design, since some of the techniques are perceived as manipulative. They are not intended to improve the player experience or to embody the developer's vision, but to nudge you towards micropayments. I doubt that game designers are calculatingly employing behavioral psychology tricks to get players to stick to the game. Very few developers know what the compulsion mechanism is. They want people to rate the experience and say it was cool and fun. Nevertheless, they understand that they rely on the knowledge of psychology. "

And that's putting it mildly. Whether through trial and error or through deliberate research, game makers have achieved intimidating power in creating obsessive games. According to Lanz, this is facilitated even by such an elementary thing as a table of records that awakens the desire to get into it and, thus, exploits our deep need for high status, for which we are ready to play and play until we break into the first hundred (or our fingers will not dry out).

Or, for example, "nested" goals. In the 1991 video game Civilization, participants took turns taking turns "building an empire that could withstand the test of time," as the annotation said. In the role of the ruler of the future empire, each began his journey in 4000 BC. with a single warrior and a few commoners who he could move to organize settlements. By exploring new lands, diplomacy and wars, players developed their civilizations, building cities, accumulating knowledge (what will you invent first, pottery or the alphabet?) And mastering the surrounding territories.

“Why is it so addictive? Lanz picks up my question. - Because urgent goals converge here: for example, the resettlement of peasants or the successful completion of a quest by your character, medium-term, which must be achieved in the next 3-4 turns, for example, the creation of a city, and long-term, designed for 10-15 turns [reaching the flourishing of civilization] ... The game is permeated with rhythm, and when the nearest goal is achieved and the mind can rest, you are already thinking about several upcoming moves. Overlapping, or “nesting,” near, middle, and far planning horizons is incredibly exciting. In the real world, we often do not even know what is connected with what. "

For example, we do not know what momentary achievement could result in something more in the future. The digital world of the video game gives certainty: from "A" necessarily follows "B".

Another developer trick to make your PC game sticky is instant reward... “You do something and the character jumps,” Lanz explained. "It's very appealing because in the real world, a lot of buttons are broken." You click on the button “study hard at school,” but you don’t get to the chosen college as promised, or you click “graduate,” but it doesn’t help you get a good job.

In video games, the button works as promised, "which is what makes them so addictive."... World of Warcraft, which provokes compulsive play through variable / intermittent reward, has another psychological lure, as in a good novel, detective story, or thriller. “That's why you open War and Peace every night to read the next chapter,” says Lanz. "You want to know what happens next." Ignorance creates anxiety - the very one that makes compulsive play.“It’s not so easy to immerse yourself in the plot, follow it to the end and be able to part with it” - to overcome the compulsion.

Ryan Van Cleave was convinced that not everyone can do it. Born Ryan Anderson, in 2006 he adopted a new name borrowed from World of Warcraft.

In 2007, on New Year's Eve, his passion for the game almost turned into a tragedy. Van Cleave, a college professor, poet, and editor, was stripped of his teaching position due to compulsive gambling: he played up to 80 hours a week and was completely estranged from his wife and friends. On December 31, he told his wife that he was running for cough lozenges, but instead drove to the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington, from where he planned to jump. Slipping, he almost fell into the icy waters of the Potomac, but caught himself at the last moment and managed to crawl away from the edge. In 2010, he published Unplugged: My Journey into the Dark World of Video Game Addiction, where he described his fall into gaming hell. The game became the most important in his life, to the detriment of everything else: his wife threatened to leave, the children hated him, and his parents refused to come to visit. “I was so deeply immersed in virtual worlds,” wrote Van Cleave, “that I can hardly remember what happened in real life. Almost everything passed me by. "

Lanz is bitter to know that the skill and creativity he sees in game design can be the cause of such tragedies. “I think game development is a bit like homebrew psychology or neuroscience on the knee,” he said. - An emotional experience is created, so, of course, the developers take psychology into account. Long before the advent of free-to-play games, there was a goal of providing gamers with an immersive experience, but that meant making a good game, not just a slot machine.

The developers know that if you toss the resources necessary for the players: strength, capabilities, lives, weapons - for example, in every 4th trash bin, this will force people to continue examining the boxes... This is the power of intermittent reward. "

“There is a lot of shamanism in all this,” Lanz concluded. - We still don't know the exact reason for the popularity of Angry Birds. It's just something inexplicable. " As I was getting ready to leave, I asked him what his favorite game was. It turned out that go is an ancient Chinese board game in which you have to make moves with black and white stones on a 19x19 square board.

Game addiction: a digital drug

A video game fan may develop a compulsion in an interval that resembles a narrow mountain peak: it is worth going down one step from the top, and you will find yourself in a valley of excessive simplicity, in the other - in an abyss of excessive complexity. We give up games that are too simple or complex because of boredom or frustration, so game designers use adaptation to stay in the gamer's Goldilocks zone all the time (in astronomy, the habitable zone, or the zone of life. on the surface of the planets located in it will be close to the conditions on Earth and will ensure the existence of water in the liquid phase).

One of the first such examples was Tetris. In this geometric puzzle, blocks of different shapes fall from the top of the screen to the bottom - in the form of letters L, T, I, squares of 2x2 cells, and the player must manage to unfold and displace them during the fall so that they form a solid wall below, moreover, the filled lower rows disappear as the upper ones grow.

« They called her a pharmacist, this electronic thing that affects the brain like a drug. "Says Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield. According to him, Tetris is incredibly sticky, also because it uses a psychological phenomenon - the so-called Zeigarnik effect.

Once, sitting in a Berlin cafe, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik (1901–1988) noticed that the waiters perfectly remember orders that had not yet been delivered to customers. But as soon as the order is completed, it is immediately forgotten. “You remember unfinished business,” Stafford explained, “and Tetris makes a great use of it. This is a world of endless unfinished business. With each completed line, new blocks fall from above. Each block you put in place creates a new space where you can attach the next block. "

We remember unresolved tasks, and this makes us want to finally get the job done and anxiety until it is completed. “The game of Tetris ingeniously exploits the ability of memory to catch on unfinished business and pulls us into a compulsive spiral of completing tasks and creating new ones,” continues Stafford. - The desire to complete the next task makes you play endlessly.

If we started to do something, took certain steps towards the goal, then we feel obligated to finish. However, unfinished actions take possession of our minds not only by virtue of the Zeigarnik effect. There is also a sunk cost effect: we hate leaving a business in which we have invested time and effort. If you are faced with the task of writing and sending a letter and you are halfway through it, then you feel the need to continue working.

Many MMORPGs exploit the penchant for sunk cost avoidance, engaging us deeply from the start. "These games have what is called a high absorption rate," says Zahir Hussein, a psychologist at the University of Derby in the UK. - Starting to play, you find yourself in a very comfortable environment: nice colors and sound effects, simple quests that you cope with without any problems, getting a reward for it.

This makes us spend more and more time playing. ” This is also facilitated by the use of another feature of the human psyche, discovered by the behaviorist B.F. Skinner in the 1950s: if the rewards become rarer and harder to achieve, as is the case with many online games, you don't just keep playing, but become more compulsive about getting a damn prize seemingly only available at 1 or 2 levels. back .

In World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs, there is a status indicator at the bottom of the screen that tells you how many quests you have completed and how close you are to the next level or reward - in Hussein's words, this is "an incentive to keep playing."

Stopping so close to the next achievement, especially if it throws you back to the beginning of a level or quest, means wasting time and effort already spent.

Be that as it may, Guardian readers in a 2014 poll named Tetris the most addictive * game of all time, with 30% of the vote. World of Warcraft took second place (22%), third - Candy Crush Saga (10%).

Oh, that Candy Crush! To discover the secret of her devilish charm, I once again turned to Jamie Madigan, who was tortured for dopamine. I was intrigued by his analysis of compulsion spirals, and I thought that no one could explain better than him why millions of people are so immersed in Candy Crush that they pass their bus stop, spit on homework, housework, and just work and forget about the existence of children , spouses and friends.

For the uninformed, I will explain what the game is. The screen is filled with "sweets" of different colors and shapes, and the player must move them to collect three identical ones in a row (the predecessor game, Bejeweled, was arranged in a similar way). As soon as the result is achieved, the trinity disappears, the surrounding elements are rearranged, and you get a reward in the form of multi-colored flashes, glasses, increasing the volume of the sound and the appearance on the screen of words-stimuli, for example "yummy".

At the most basic level Candy Crush appeals to our mind's tendency to detect patterns in seemingly random groups of objects. - due to this gift, the ancient Greeks and Romans saw a swan, twins and a bear in the chaos of stars scattered across the night sky.

candy Crush Saga

“In the course of its development, the brain learned to notice something good even where it shouldn't be, for example, to find a food source that was previously absent,” Madigan explained. - Thus, by virtue of evolution, we are so much. We are so structured that we look for meaning in schemes, especially in unexpected schemes. "

Moreover, Candy Crush builds on our habit of putting things in place, getting things organized, and generally putting things in order. It is for this, by your own feeling, that you undertake when you look at the playing field, where complete confusion reigns, knowing that you can rearrange the elements so that the same ones are next to each other. Therefore, the game attracts and brings joy.

There are, however, many activities — watching movies, gardening, cooking, or whatever you prefer in your spare time — that are fun, but not sticky. What makes Candy Crush sticky, Madigan says, is that the rewards don't just keep coming in, but come out of the blue.

Sometimes with the fall of the triple of elements you have collected, a combination is formed in which there are many such triples, and they all immediately fall through the playing field, exploding with bright flashes, loud sounds, a demonstration of the points gained and congratulations in full screen.

Because of this, "the dopamine areas of the brain go crazy," Madigan said. - Something similar was experienced by our ancient ancestors, hunter-gatherers, who knew perfectly well where they could find food, when they suddenly stumbled upon a rich gift in a completely unexpected place, for example, a fish stream or thickets of berry bushes, which were not previously suspected.

A 2013 study identified the mechanism of action of this psychological phenomenon. Psychologists Jordi Quoidbach of Harvard University and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia split the volunteers into 3 roughly equal groups and gave the following instructions:

1. Some were banned from eating chocolate for a week until a second visit to the laboratory.;
2. Others were given almost a kilogram and told to eat as much as possible so as not to get sick.;
3. The third were not told anything other than asking them to come back in a week..

Upon their return, everyone was again treated to chocolate and asked if they liked it. " Participants who temporarily gave up chocolate found it much tastier and more enjoyable "Than those who were implicitly allowed to eat as much as they wanted or were explicitly pushed into chocolate gluttony, according to scientists in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Potential gambling addicts

The time has come to solve the next task - to find out whether the danger of becoming a compulsive gamer depends on the individual characteristics of the personality, age, gender or other variables.

The scientific study of this problem has "been ill" by the mass of childhood illnesses characteristic of the new field of research. Even basic concepts - say, what makes a behavior problematic and what exactly such behavior looks like - is defined differently by scientists in their own research.

This behavior “is neither consistent nor specific,” said Scott Kaplan of the University of Delaware. The problem is illustrated by the change in the description of the person who has the greatest risk of developing compulsive gambling addiction.

In the early 2000s, when there were fewer people on the Internet than there are now, studies of excessive online gaming (and excessive Internet use in general) aimed to identify predictive factors for such behavior. Unfortunately, as evidenced by even a cursory look at the published results, scientists “found significant correlations with a large number of psychological characteristics,” said Daniel Kardefelt-Winter of the London School of Economics and Political Science in a 2014 article in Computers in Human Behavior. he continued, “virtually all psychological characteristics contribute significantly to the likelihood” of developing gambling addiction. Calling a spade a spade, the biggest risk factor is the presence of a human brain.

At first, the typical compulsive gamer was "a lonely, communicative type, possibly with social anxiety," Kaplan said. Thus, personality traits were the external manifestation of the true, deep-seated reason for excessive enthusiasm for the game, and not the cause itself. For example, such a feature as neuroticism is associated with an inability to endure anxiety, and therefore it is recorded in studies of the characteristics of gambling addicts. But it is not neuroticism as such that forces people to play online games, but anxiety that they cannot otherwise reduce.

Similarly, researchers have found correlations between excessive online gaming and a wide variety of personality traits, such as, say, loneliness, depression, anxiety, shyness, aggressiveness, interpersonal difficulties, thirst for thrills, and lack of social skills. These traits, however, did not so much distinguish those who were predisposed to compulsive online behavior, as the majority of Internet users, both compulsive and non-compulsive. “Everyone uses the Internet today, including through smartphones, and the description of the type of people who do it compulsively should also change,” Kaplan added.

As with other compulsions, compulsive video games are not in themselves a pathology or manifestation of mental disorder. People play games for many hours every day (they use the Internet, Twitter, messaging services or Facebook, which will be discussed in the next chapter) “for the same reasons that they commit other acts compulsively - boredom, escapism, competitiveness and sociability, as their friends do it, ”explained Kaplan.

It is fundamentally important that online games, especially multiplayer games, provide social interaction behind the life-saving avatar , which is attractive for people who find it easier to communicate anonymously than to personally communicate with friends.

Fragile people may prefer online communication simply because personal is too stressful or poorly given to them - virtual life is more comfortable for them. Thus, many people spend a lot of time playing video games as compensation. It is an adaptation strategy, a way to deal with stress or depression, escape loneliness, boring work, or any other nasty side of the real world.

In a 2013 study, Kaplan and colleagues surveyed 597 teens who regularly played online games. The most reliable predictor of problematic play behavior and the negative impact of play on the rest of a person's life was turning to play in order to normalize mood (for example, to get rid of despondency, boredom, or feelings of loneliness) and the inability to solve this problem in other ways.

“If I'm lonely and go online, that's compensation,” Kaplan explained. "This is not a primary pathology." Games give us something that we need or want. If compensation is effective and becomes a routine anxiety relief, it can become compulsive.

Are we all at risk? Not equally. As you may recall, massively multiplayer online RPG games like World of Warcraft masterfully use the one-armed bandits' trick - variable / intermittent reinforcement provided by baits such as unexpected prizes pressing our dopamine buttons ". Susceptibility to such baits is almost a universal human trait. but, as in any other respect, there are many weaknesses.

Madigan made another point about compulsiveness associated with video games. Among other charms, the simplest games like Candy Crush and Angry Birds are distinguished by the ability to play tiny periods of time, say, between tasks at work, household chores, or on the way from point A to point B.

In the 21st century, it is difficult to imagine life without a computer. Virtual reality has firmly established itself in our home, and every day it captures more and more people. We are attracted by incredible opportunities, fantastic prospects. When the passion for games and the Internet goes beyond reason, when a person does not eat, almost does not sleep, and what is happening on the other side of the monitor becomes more important for him than what is around, we can talk about a painful addiction. Doctors call it computer addiction, gambling addiction. It is especially alarming if a child becomes a prisoner of virtual reality.

It usually starts in one scenario. Moms and dads, hoping to get an hour and a half of free time, give the kid a tablet or phone. The offspring is busy, the house is quiet, the adults are happy. Then the grown-up child masters the Internet and realizes that it is much more interesting there than in ordinary life. And after a few years, parents do not know where to look for help, what to do with the child's obsessive craving for high technology.

And their fears are not unfounded: the child is not interested in studying, does not want to walk with friends in the yard, does not dream of going to the sea in the summer, does not help with the housework, and sometimes forgets to eat and does not sleep well.

Let's try together to figure out what computer addiction is in children and adolescents - a disease or just a hobby? What to do to prevent its appearance? And what if your child is already addicted to virtuality?

Diagnosis or hobby?

There is no consensus on this matter yet. The International Classification of Diseases does not contain a diagnosis of "computer addiction", although the question of including this term in the list is raised annually. But many doctors tend to consider computer addiction as a disease, on a par with alcoholism and drug addiction. An experiment was conducted in Germany, during which two dozen people were shown screenshots from their favorite computer games. The reaction of people turned out to be identical to that observed in alcoholics and drug addicts when they are shown a bottle of alcohol or a dose of drugs.

According to statistics, 12 out of every 7000 people are addicted to online computer games. 19% of the 250 million Facebook users admitted to feeling addicted to gambling.

Many doctors insist on adding computer addiction to the list of serious illnesses.

Network games are the most addictive. In 2005, a teenage girl died of starvation in China. She played World of Warcraft for several days. A year later, in Bashkiria, a 17-year-old boy died of an epileptic seizure, which developed on the basis of playing for many hours at the computer. The sad statistics can be continued further, because such cases have recently occurred more and more often.

It is no secret that schoolchildren who have outplayed bloody "shooters" can arrange carnage in real life. Shootings and massacres are occasionally organized by American and Japanese schoolchildren.

Passion for computer games in itself is not dangerous. But when does it become addictive? The main signs that your child is a gambling addict or a victim of Internet addiction:

• He began to communicate less on abstract topics.... All conversations are around your favorite game.
• He is not interested in studying, he has stopped attending the sections, or is doing it extremely reluctantly.
• The child spends all his free time at the computer. Any attempts to force him to turn off the technique lead to a scandal. Parents' attempts to limit the time at the monitor cause the child to cry, rage, and hysterics.
• The child has become more irritable his mood often and for no reason changes - from excitement he easily passes to a depressive blues.
• He does not know how to control his time spent at the computer. He says that he will play for two hours, but can sit much longer.
• The child has ceased to take care of himself- without a reminder, he may forget to wash, brush his teeth, change clothes.
• He has no friends left. He hardly communicates with anyone.
• Your child has memory gaps. Short-term memory suffers, he may not remember what he said or promised a few hours ago.

If you find at least three matches in this list, this is a reason to take urgent action. There are now special tests on the Internet that allow, after filling out the questionnaire, to understand how great the risk of developing computer addiction is. They are largely subjective, and do not allow one hundred percent diagnostics, but they will help to draw up a general idea of ​​the problem.

If, when separated from a gadget, a child throws tantrums - this is a clear sign of computer addiction.

Causes

Almost all children like to sit at the computer. But why do some develop addiction while others do not? Why is it easy for some children to do behavior correction while others find it difficult? It's all about the personal characteristics of your offspring - his temperament, level of self-esteem, the type of organization of the nervous system.

If a teenager is not confident in himself, he has little communication outside the home - with a great degree of probability he can become addicted to online communication. There he will find what he lacks in life.

Children with a high level of anxiety and fears often "get hooked" on heroic computer epics. They like to identify themselves as the omnipotent character of the game, who kills hordes of monsters with one left. In this case, the child, as it were, compensates for the lack of courage and decisiveness in reality.

Game developers know all this very well, and every year they are improving their product more and more - high-quality sound, 3D graphics, the effect of presence ... Everything is created to make a person feel “for real” inside the game. Children's psyche is more labile, it is easier to captivate them than adults, they quickly believe in what is happening. That is why for every adult suffering from computer addiction in our country there are now more than 20 children with the same problem.

What's really going on? The child ceases to perceive the world as before. As computer addiction develops, he loses his best human qualities - empathy, love, honesty.

Most of all addiction to gadgets are susceptible to:

• Children with attention deficit disorder. Parents devote little time to them, and then their peers ignore them. The best prevention in this case is love and participation in the child's life.
• Children are choleric and children are melancholic. Their worldview is special even without computers. Guys with such temperaments "get used to" the proposed circumstances easier than others.
• Children from “problem” families. We are talking about families where domestic violence is practiced - scandals, beatings, coercion. And even if another family member is the victim of violence, the child will psychologically strive to escape from this uncomfortable reality to another. Why not virtual? The same partly applies to families where the parents have recently gotten divorced, and it is still difficult for the child to accept the changes.
• Children who are not accustomed to save time. If a child has not been taught how to manage his time rationally since childhood, then by the age of 10-12 he has too many free minutes and hours. He sincerely believes that the obligation to clean the room or take out the trash can be postponed for later. It's much more interesting to spend time in virtuality. Without parental control, such children will not hit the housework, but they will sit down at the computer with great pleasure.
• Children with complexes. A girl who does not like her own appearance has a chance to become a beautiful warrior in a computer game. A shy and timid boy manages to be a hero - a winner. The game fills the voids in the child's soul, and gradually he ceases to be himself, but becomes a character in the game.

If you do not pay enough attention to the child, he is likely to develop computer addiction.

Consequences

Computer addiction can lead to very dire consequences:

• Social isolation, lack of the child's ability to communicate and negotiate.
• Nervous and mental disorders of personality - psychosis, clinical depression, hysteria, schizophrenia.
• Difficulty learning, lack of motivation.
• Associal behavior, lack of understanding of the boundaries of what is permitted, including the law. As a result, the child can become a criminal.
• Diseases: gastritis, poor posture, hemorrhoids, chronic fatigue syndrome, exhaustion of the whole organism, gastric ulcer and duodenal ulcer, myopia, glaucoma, dry eye syndrome, hyperopia, display syndrome.

Help

There are several ways to help your child get rid of computer addiction. But you should consider the degree of addiction. In some cases, parents can help their child on their own, and in some cases, the help of specialists is needed.

Conversation is the first step to getting rid of computer addiction in a toddler

Educational conversation

A great way at the very beginning of addiction. It is important to understand the reasons for addiction. Why is the child on the other side of the monitor better off than with you? The most common mistake is to start lecturing about the dangers of a computer, to scandalize and appeal to the child's conscience. All this will only annoy him. Try to become a "companion".

Spend the evening with your child in his favorite game. Play with him, chat. Let him tell you about all the characters and their capabilities. In the course of your virtual adventure, gently elicit from your child why he likes to be this hero and not another? Why does he need so many weapons? Who is he fighting with? Contact will be established, perhaps not the first time. But when you understand for yourself what attracts your son or daughter to the game, you will be able to plan his leisure time a little differently, including in it the missing one.

Scandals and swearing are your main enemies in the fight against addiction

Psychoanalysis

Today it is the most common way to combat computer addiction in both children and adults. An experienced psychoanalyst will help reveal the true deep reasons for leaving for another, virtual world. Sometimes, after just one session, the specialist will accurately determine which family problems, personal complexes, moral trauma are pushing the child into a different space and dimension. Parents are encouraged to participate in therapy.

If you take the whole family with a sincere desire to change something in your life, then the result will be positive. The main condition is that parents must be ready to make changes in their own way of life, in their habits and character. The services of a psychoanalyst are not cheap. But this method is effective when the addiction has long passed the initial stage.

Hypnosis

Psychotherapists began to treat computer addiction using hypnosis about ten years ago. Sufficient experience has been accumulated. The hypnologist puts the child into a trance (with the consent of the parents) and gently gives him psycho-attitudes towards indifference to computer games and communication on the Internet. Something like this is coded for alcoholics.

but don't think hypnosis is a panacea. Firstly, not all people succumb to hypnosis, and secondly, the symptoms of addiction may disappear, but their hidden causes will remain. And then the child, from whose life computer games have gone, will begin to fill the voids with something else. Not the fact that something good and useful. Computer addiction can be replaced by other pathological conditions - from theft to drugs.

Hypnosis is not effective in all cases.

Medicines

Often, drug treatment is used to get rid of computer addiction (especially in the "advanced" stages). Prescription drugs are prescribed by a doctor. Usually, this happens when a child is diagnosed with personality disorders, depression, anxiety. The specialist prescribes antidepressants, sedatives.

It must be said right away that it is impossible to get rid of computer addiction with pills and injections alone, since they again treat the consequences, not the cause. Whatever one may say, one cannot do without psychological assistance and rehabilitation. And the use of psychotropic drugs has never brought much benefit to the child's body.

• If you find a computer addiction in your child, don't panic. You can scare him with your reaction and drive him even deeper into a detached state. Analyze the situation and make a plan for getting out of it.
• Don't scream, don't blame your child. It's not his fault. After all, didn't we ourselves, once gave him a gadget to keep him busy for a while? Take responsibility and be patient. Computer addiction does not recede quickly.
• Find a good time to chat with your son or daughter. Look for the reason for his voluntary departure to virtuality.
• Offer your child interesting ways to spend their leisure time. Remember, they must be in tune with the cause of the addiction. If a timid child is carried away by games, in order to feel omnipotent, send him to the boxing section, karate, organize a parachute jump. If a teenager lacks thrills in everyday life, offer to go and play paintball together on the weekend or take part in an interactive quest in reality. They are now common. There, the child will be able to feel like the same hero, but for real. If your son or daughter has problems with communication, enroll the child in a theater studio, dance classes, wherever the principle "we are a team" applies.

Give your child vivid impressions and unforgettable moments!

• Set goals for the addicted child. And gradually teach him to set goals on his own and go towards them.
• You should not forbid him to sit down at the computer or take away his gadget, trying to wean him off the tablet by force. This will cause aggression and resentment. And these feelings are not conducive to establishing contact.
• Outline your child's responsibilities... Lessons, cleaning, dog walking, garbage removal. Don't be afraid to overload it. No one has ever died from household chores. Reward for what you have done, but not extra time at the computer. Install the incentive system yourself. What could it be? A little money that a child can save up for their dream sneakers or whatever they want.
• Computer addiction is rapidly growing younger. If 10 years ago 14-16-year-olds suffered from it, now you can meet mothers who complain that they cannot kick out their 4-5 year old baby because of the monitor. If the child is not yet 10 years old, try to strictly dose the time spent in the game. Desirable, no more than half an hour a day. And the best thing is to find an alternative activity, the computer is not the best toy for young children.
• Get ready to change yourself. Together with your child, you will jump with a parachute, learn roller skating, go fishing or dance. Remember that he cannot cope with addiction alone.
• Don't relax. As in the treatment of alcoholism or drug addiction, the patient may experience relapses, breakdowns. Just about, it would seem, the child was able to distract from the "tanks" and "war", but you had a falling out, and he again moves away, trying to hide in the game.

You need to know the enemy by sight

Parents whose children are overly addicted to the Internet and games need to know which games are the most addictive and crippling.

In this list, according to experts, The Sims, horror Five Nights at Freddy's, Second Life, Prototype, Left 4 Dead 2, Fallout 3, Splatterhouse and World of Warcraft. Recently, children and adolescents have gone headlong into " World of tanks».

"Tanks" are not as bloody as "Splatterhouse", where severed limbs, skin stripped from enemies is the norm, not fanaticism, but they have their own nuances. The game of "Tanks" requires cash investments - after all, the technique needs to be improved ("pumped")... Where will the child get the money? That's right, at the parents. And if they do not give it, then it can steal from outsiders, since the desire to have the coolest tank at this moment is stronger than common sense. I saw adult men who "invest" most of their income in tanks, not thinking that they have families, children, obligations. What can we say about adolescents? Take the time, ask what your child is playing, try to play it yourself, get to know the enemy as much as possible by sight.

If your child has an Internet addiction, you need to be on the lookout every day. Fraudsters, pedophiles, perverts of all stripes have lately been waiting for children not in the alley at home, but on the Internet. See which social media groups your child is in. Did he fall into the so-called group of death? These are communities where teenagers are trained to commit suicide. Are there any adults you don't know among his contacts?

It would be unfair to write down all computer games without exception as malicious. Of course, there are educational games that develop logic, thinking, memory.

So, my eldest son once studied the English alphabet. He was helped in this by Winnie the Pooh from the game marked 3+. When I noticed that my son in grade 3, instead of lessons, was concentrating on destroying another batch of bloody zombies from a shotgun in Left 4 Dead, and when asked where we would go on the weekend, he answered: “Can I stay at home?”, The question was posed point-blank - either now or never. By that time, the son, by the way, weighed under 70 kilos, was obese in the first stage, and did not want to go to any sections in principle. As soon as he turned away, he grabbed his dinner plate and went to eat at the computer. As a gift for the holidays, I asked for a new game or another disc with the continuation of the game ...

So I brought him to a cadet school, where he put on a military uniform, learned to run and pull himself up, jump with a parachute and disassemble a Kalashnikov assault rifle. At first, he was capricious, of course, incredibly, suffered and complained. When in the fifth grade he announced that he would be a military man, we were almost not surprised. Now he is 17. He graduated with honors from the Stavropol Presidential Cadet School. She studies three foreign languages. This summer he intends to enter a higher military school. His dream is to become a scout.

Peers who spend their free time playing computer games, calls them a not very printed word and wonders how he himself could sit at the computer for so long. Now I am grateful to fate that I was able to discern the symptoms of the onset of addiction in time, and quickly block it. Now I'm looking at my middle son. So far, there is no talk of addiction, but I am always ready.

Recognizing the child's addiction to virtual games in time, you can save his future

Other extremes

Once an old friend called me and burst out with a long and detailed text on the topic "How to live further?" Like, "this fool" will not achieve anything in life, because apart from the "computer" he does not need anything. He spends all his free time there and does not want to hear anything. It was about her 13-year-old son. My imagination immediately drew the darkest images, and I promised to stop by the other day and talk to the teenager.

Misha greeted me with a dull semblance of a smile. It was evident how exhausted he was by the constant reproaches and even tantrums from his mother. I walked over to the table and, to my surprise, found books on programming and graphic design on it. A few questions were enough to understand that the child does not play at the computer. He works for him. With great difficulty, I managed to convince him to at least slightly reduce the time spent in front of the monitor, and my friend - to leave the teenager alone. Now Misha is studying at the university and will soon become a programmer. He is already a recipient of a presidential scholarship and a regular at all kinds of IT events and gatherings of an all-Russian scale.

Conclusion - do not rush to label the child with the labels "gambling addict", "addicted", "sick" ... Understand, figure out what your child wants and dreams about... Whether he is addicted or not, you will understand pretty quickly, and spoiled relationships and broken contact with a teenager will still cause a lot of trouble. The main thing is to love the child, to accept him with all his oddities and hobbies. But at the same time, love does not go blind and in time to discern the symptoms of impending disaster. If computers have already begun to "consume" the identity of your son or daughter, do not hesitate to ask specialists for help.

Communicate with the parents of other children who have fallen into tenacious virtual paws, share your experience. It is possible and necessary to overcome this dependence. But this can be done only by all together, by joining efforts.

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Computer addiction