I just need a couple more - By Anderson Ofiyai

Source article: “I kept playing” – By Mike Fahey

 http://kotaku.com/5384643/i-kept-playing--the-costs-of-my-gaming-addiction

Most games that have been released in the past two decades have included items that you can collect in the process of completing a game. So What? There’s nothing relatively new about that concept, what’s new is the user’s perspective of these items that they collect. More and more these collectable items are seen as real, things of actual value. Games that lean towards the addictive style send us around in a never ending cycle of collecting things, even when these items have no particular importance in regards to the games main focus.

It’s agreeable that if an item takes a particular amount of skill, luck or any other combination of things to obtain, then it does hold value whether said object is encrusted with jewels or simple a set of pixels on a computer screen. According to the New York Times, ‘Virtual Goods’ is roughly a 5 billion dollar industry; South Korea has even gone as far as to legally state that virtual goods should be treated no different than real goods.

Developers are smart to appeal to humanities natural hoarding and collecting tendencies, something that comes instinctively is obviously hard to stop. In the case of Mike Fahey, a writer at Kotaku, a virtual game became his reality. “The woman I had once told was the love of my life was sitting undressed in my bed not a foot away from my computer desk, begging me to join her, and I kept putting it off. I was so close to level 40 I could taste it”. The importance of continually collected and grinding, was so prevalent to Fahey that he put off a pretty young lady, sitting naked on his bed, begging for some attention. That is simply a shame.

His ever growing time commitment to his virtual reality, made him lose sight of what was happening in the real world. It led to the loss of his job and girlfriend; it also alienated him from his family. Many in Fahey’s state would see it as reasonable to put the blame on an addictive game, say that it’s the reason their life well to shambles, but the reality is that it’s simply a game. We as gamers have to take it upon ourselves to know when enough is enough. Yes game developers intentionally want to make their games addictive in order to reel people in and keep them attached, but like all good things, it must be taken into moderation.