Addict Nation (11 page)

We all know how drugs and alcohol can lead to child abuse. But how can anyone be so completely hooked on a
game
that they let their kids starve in RL (
real life
in cyberspeak)?

Like most drugs, online gaming presents itself as the solution, when it’s really the problem. In
Unplugged: My Journey Into the Dark
World of Video Game Addiction,
Ryan Van Cleave explains that, as an addicted player’s real life deteriorates “the playing of online games can (somewhat paradoxically) help the player numb, destress, relax, and ‘zone out.’”
³
The author is a recovering gaming addict himself, who once contemplated suicide over it, and explains why it can become impossible to walk away from the game. It comes from the expectation and anticipation of the next reward or point, which the player always hopes is just a click or two away. These games are brilliantly designed with the promise of another point always on the horizon.
Oh, just a few
more minutes in Eberron and then I’ll feed the kids.

A Complicated Cultural Contagion

Cyberaddiction is perhaps the most complex societal contagion America is facing today because the nature of the Internet is so complex and all encompassing. Along with online gaming, there is e-mail, texting, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Skype, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, iTunes, eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, Tumblr, innumerable chat rooms, and something like 240 million other websites, a number that just keeps skyrocketing.
⁴
The portal to cyberspace can be a desktop, a laptop, a BlackBerry, an iPhone, various other smartphones, an iPad, or a Kindle. “Internet clouds” now exist where a person’s files can be stored in cyberspace to be viewed from any Internet-accessible device anywhere in the world. Hasta la vista, clogged hard drive. Never again will we be tethered to only one computer.

“When I’m playing a game, everything stops and I have something to focus on. It’s like a meditation. I get relief from thoughts of the oil spill, my budget and income, my age, the end of the world, my mother, where I would rather live, why I can’t buy property, and how will I retire. Playing a game over and over gives me a sense of control in a world that feels entirely out of my control.”

—April East, online gaming addict

The Internet Is Truly Becoming a Whole New World

When it comes to escaping, nothing beats an alternate world, especially one where you can assume any identity you want and create an alter ego. Many games encourage you to reinvent yourself in the form of an avatar that you can imbue with all sorts of powerful, daring, and desirable physical characteristics that—in real life—you may not have. Could you slay a towering dragon if it appeared before you in real life?

The Internet Is a Portal to All
Manner of Addictive Behavior

They talk about pot being a gateway drug to hard drugs, which I don’t necessarily believe. But I do believe that the Internet can be an easy-access entryway to gambling addiction, sex addiction, workaholism, prescription drug abuse, compulsive texting, and celebrity obsession. Every aspect of our lives that the Internet touches, it transforms. Bye-bye CDs, DVDs, newspapers, magazines, books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, bank tellers, etc., etc., etc. In the same manner, the World Wide Web has transformed our cravings, making it easier than ever before to get more of what we’re jonesing for.

“We all know that screen media is habituating. It’s hard to pull ourselves away from our computers. Screen media is incredibly compelling.”

—Susan Linn, Ed.D., director of the Campaign
for a Commercial-Free Childhood

The Internet Has Supersized
and Accelerated Our Addictions

Take gambling. In just the last decade, online poker websites have gone from making virtually no money to raking in about $5 billion a year. The new cyber-trained poker players study their laptops. The hand they are dealt is not nearly as important as the stats they are processing at lightning speed. And that’s precisely why they are quickly turning the old-fashioned, instinctive poker players—who trust their gut—into a joke. It’s no longer about bluffing and reading the telltale expressions of your opponents. Today, a good poker face is a pasty mug that has spent many hours staring at a computer screen mastering probability and patterns. While the old-style poker champs would play in a couple of dozen tournaments a year, the new cyber-poker players can knock that out online in one night, accumulating heaps of information upon which to base their betting decisions. This revolution in poker was laid out in a fascinating
Time
magazine article, “World Series of Poker: Attack of the Math Brats,” which profiled a “new breed of math nerd, those guys using a mountain of sortable data from the millions of hands played online to dominate the game.”
⁵
These new hot shots are not pretending to be emotionless. They are emotionless. They basically have little regard for how bad a hand they have because, says
Time,
they “rely on online software, which tracks every move and provides instant feedback on how a player is likely to respond.” For them, it’s truly a numbers game.

But for every mathematically gifted professional gambler who treats it as a job, there are thousands of amateur gamblers out there who are losing their paychecks, their homes, their relationships, and their self-respect to a gambling addiction that no longer requires a drive to a casino or a smoke-filled backroom. The temptation is now a mere click of the mouse away.

Leaving Las Vegas

Even the most inveterate traditional poker player eventually has to fold ’em so he can sleep, eat, change his clothes, or go to the bathroom. But the Internet player can literally take his gambling table into the kitchen, the bedroom, or the bathroom. Imagine a full-blown alcoholic locked inside a liquor store. That’s what it’s like for a gambling addict at home or the office. The casino is living with him, as an ever-present virtual reality.

Gambling is skyrocketing in the United States. It’s particularly on the rise among young people. The Internet is a huge reason. It may not feel quite as sleazy to lose a game on your home computer as it does to lose at a table filled with badly dressed people in a raggedy casino on the edge of the Las Vegas strip. But money lost is money lost. The average debt of a male pathological gambler in America is between fifty-five and ninety grand. The stress and anxiety of this addiction can be fatal. Experts say one in five pathological gamblers attempts suicide.
⁶

The Internet Magnifies the Addictive
Nature of a Substance or Behavior

In recovery we are told to stay away from people, places, and things that can trigger an addictive craving. Recovering alcoholics often avoid the bars where they used to get drunk. Recovering drug addicts often sidestep the corner stoop where they know their old pusher is hanging out, ever ready to lure them back into their disease. But there’s no running away from the Internet. Most of us are required to use the Internet at work, and increasingly, it’s becoming an indispensible part of our home life. We hop on to find a takeout restaurant, e-mail a friend, or advertise on Craigslist.

Practical and harmless, right? Not if you’re a sex addict.

The Internet Turbocharges Sex Addiction

If you’re a sex addict, the Internet is like having a mistress, a brothel, a dungeon, an orgy, a sex slave, a dominatrix, and every manner of fetish device ever invented at the tip of your fingers 24/7/365. Now that’s temptation.
Cybersex addiction
is a subcategory of both sex addiction and Internet addiction. I would call cybersex addiction a blended cross-addiction, where two addictions merge into one compulsive behavior. Estimates are one in five Internet addicts are engaged in some kind of online sexual behavior, either watching porn, having cybersex, or seducing someone in a chat room.
⁷

There are currently an estimated 5 to 6 million adult websites.
⁸
It took me less than a minute on my laptop to get to serious hard-core, triple X–rated porn. I simply Googled “top adult websites,” clicked on Adultreviews.com, and was presented with links to various featured sites like PornstarsPunishment.com (which is exactly what the title suggests it will be). Clicking on another link, Penisbot.com, brought me to dozens of categories of graphic porn. The site features dozens of different fetishes, all possible orientations, uniforms, combinations, positions, and activities including BDSM, which stands for
bondage/discipline/sadomasochism,
along with practices simply too extreme to mention in this book. In a matter of a few minutes I saw dozens of extraordinarily graphic still photos, video trailers, and short films often culminating with what they call “the money shot.”

The proliferation of webcams have also brought us what are called “chat models” or “cam girls,” who perform erotic acts, often naked, in real time before a webcam on a pay-per-view basis. A whole industry—complete with videochat studios—has cropped up around these “private shows.”
⁹

Sex is one of the most pleasurable and electrifying aspects of the human experience and, hence, can easily become very addictive, even when done the old-fashioned way . . . in person. I don’t consider myself a sex addict. Still, I have to be honest. I had a hard time pulling myself away from some of the triple-X imagery that is simultaneously revolting and mesmerizing. Knowing what I know about addiction, if sex were my drug of choice I think I would be surfing porn for hours or even days on end. The Internet offers the kind of extreme sexual acts it would be hard to arrange in real life.

The Online Sex Addict Rapidly
Develops a Tolerance for Porn

When an addict develops a tolerance for the standard fare, that means he or she will require ever more graphic imagery to achieve the same state of arousal. This is where the Internet experience differs from the real-world experience. In the real world, things end, whether it’s a live porn show, a lap dance, or an hour with a hooker. In the virtual world, there is no end! There is always another website with another porn video or another webcam show at the next click. And there’s complete access to that next addictive rush.

All addicts build up a tolerance for their drug of choice. The more they have of it, the more of it they need to experience an equivalent high. This progressive vicious cycle is accelerated on the Internet. Just as the online gambler plays in one night what the quaint old-world gambler plays in a year, so an online sex addict can build up a tolerance on the Web that would take him years if he stuck to real contact with real flesh-and-blood sex partners. So a porn addict is liable to need ever greater amounts of ever more stimulating porn, which is liable to take that person into some extremely disturbing content. All addiction leads to moral bankruptcy, and online sex addiction is one of the more florid examples of that principle.

The Internet Creates Faux Intimacy

Next to porn, one of the largest categories of paid content on the Web is online dating.
¹⁰
Addiction to cyberdating is a growing phenomenon, and women are particularly susceptible. Match.com, JDate.com, Chemistry.com . . . these are just some of the dating sites that have become household names. But some of the lesser known sites offer more insight into the deeper motivations behind many online daters’ machinations.

One particularly candid dating site begins by reminding the visitor of the old saying that it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one. It tells the prospective female “Sugar Baby” that she deserves to be treated like a princess and to have successful men make her life easier and better financially. And it promises that all this can be arranged within a few minutes. There is a picture of a beautiful female described as ambitious, affectionate, and in need of pampering by a classy, mature man. A photo of a handsome older man projects affluence and generosity. He offers to mentor, pamper, and spoil the right woman. I’ll let you do the math on that equation. The site claims to have 2 million members and says it’s inundated with men and women trying to join.

Millions of Americans now come home from work only to dive into their laptops, eager to see what responses have come in from their dating profile listings and to flirt via online chat with their new prospects. But all too often, the hours spent engaged in sexual intrigue are wasted by the lies and distortions of two strangers, who’ve never met, trying to impress each other with the best photo they’ve ever taken while robbed of their most effective communications skills. We’ve all heard the expression, 99 percent of communication is nonverbal. When we chat online, we vainly attempt to get a read on someone without the benefit of any of our natural instincts and intuitive tools, namely sight, sound, smell, and touch. The cyber chatterbox who brags of slaying dragons in a chat room might well be terrified of a firefly in RL, but how would we know that from the tap, tap, tap of his fingertips?

No Face Time

There’s a very dangerous trend that’s an outgrowth of cyber addiction. There is growing resistance, among all of us, to engage in face-to-face communication. American teens now use their cell phones, computers, video games, and TV for almost eight hours a day. Add in multitasking and the figure is even higher.
¹¹
So kids are spending the equivalent of an adult’s entire workday with their nose in some sort of electronic media, tuning out the natural world around them.

“I was driving with my daughter down this country road. And while driving, there was this beautiful scenery outside, but she’s in the car staring at this little screen on her cell phone. There is a risk of losing a connection with the natural world in favor of a connection with a piece of technology.”