New areas of law and gaming addiction

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With 2011 now upon us, let me play the prophet and look at possible legal developments in the next decade. What kind of new claims will be filed in courts around the world, including Malaysia?

Consider the following scenario. A 19-year-old student walks into the headmaster’s office looking dishevelled, lacking personal hygiene, with red eyes, and has lost weight. The student avoids eye contact, seems uncomfortable, angry, and anxious to leave the office. His academic report shows that he is frequently absent, falls asleep in class, and his assignments are late or non-existent.

He has few friends, procrastinates, isolates himself in his room, has carpel tunnel syndrome, eats irregularly, sleeps two hours each night,

has migraines and backaches. Welcome to the new medical and psychological or psychiatric ailment of the next decade that may give rise to a new type of claim in tort ñ the Gamer Addiction.

What is gamer addiction?

Gamer Addiction is an obsession with video game playing that usually begins in kindergarten and primary school. By secondary school, the individual progresses from simple to elaborate games and the student is game-hooked.

An activity becomes an addiction when it is used to change an individual’s mood. It becomes abuse when it interferes with one’s work or school, or disrupts personal or family relationships, and becomes increasingly necessary to feel good.

Addiction takes away from life and reduces motivation to do anything beyond the focus of the addiction. It is found that video games are part of the daily routine for 65 per cent of American girls and 85 per cent of American boys.

NBC News in 2005 reported that one in eight gamers develops patterns similar to other types of addiction and abuse. A survey of 1,500 teenagers indicated 25 per cent were compulsive video gamers. Fifty per cent of those surveyed used the word ‘addiction’ to describe a friend’s gaming behaviours.

Today’s video games are available in a plethora of avenues that draw individuals into the world of the game. Games are designed to keep the player riveted to action. Players experience a sense of control when they enter into the fantasy world of speed, realism, violence, new morals, and interoperability. Many games offer online anonymous interaction with other people; a ‘hook’ is a sense of family or belonging in the form of a pseudo persona the player develops when repeatedly playing the game. The longer the game is played, the more the pseudo persona can replace reality.

Symptoms: The two major indicators of Gamer Addiction are withdrawal and isolation. The common thread in addiction is an emotional dysregulation. Individuals are often depressed, lonely, angry, shy, afraid to go out, in a high conflict family situation, and have low self-esteem. This affects significant relationships with roommates, fellow students, parents, friends, faculty, and advisors. Players can have difficulty separating the game or fantasy world and reality. The compulsive playing tends to cover these underlying psychological problems.

Gaming addiction in court

Gaming addiction has now come to courts of law. A lawsuit was filed against the makers of Lineage II, a video game has just survived a motion to dismiss in the United States.

In this case the plaintiff player claims that he became addicted to the game, which made it almost impossible for him to function in real life, causing him significant monetary damages, and emotional distress.

A federal judge refused to dismiss the lawsuit. Now, this doesn’t mean the plaintiff has won and far from it. It just means that his complaint alleged some cause of action for which relief can be granted. If this case goes to trial, he’ll have to prove all of those allegations.

The claim made by the plaintiff is basically that the video game should have carried a warning that it might be psychologically addictive, and that he would not have bought or played the game if the package carried such a warning. He claims to have played the game for over 20,000 hours between 2004 and 2009.

According to the Google calculator, there are about 43,000 hours in five years. That means he spent nearly half of his time and not just half of his waking hours, or half of his free time and playing this game. That’s kind of hard to imagine, but there it is.

The plaintiff has an uphill fight, to say the least. There are very few cases where the law has imposed a duty of care on a particular industry because their product is addictive. The most obvious example, of course, is tobacco. The other is casinos and if you’ve been in a casino in the US in the last decade or so, you probably see pamphlets with information about problem gambling, and you can bet that casino owners don’t provide them out of the kindness of their hearts.

With tobacco, the cigarette companies misled the public for years about the addictive nature of their products. Gambling is a heavily regulated industry in places in which it’s legal, and gambling addiction has been a well-known problem for years, and while any addiction can lead to personal and financial ruin, a gambling addiction is particularly likely to have this effect.

But alcoholic beverages don’t have to carry warnings about alcoholism, and junk food doesn’t have to warn consumers of compulsive overeating. The fact is that people can become addicted to any activity which activates the pleasure centre in their brains. If they have an addictive personality, they might be unable, or find it extremely difficult, to stop that activity. That’s an unfortunate fact of life, and if someone has recognised that they have an addictive personality, they need to be very careful with just about everything.

But is addiction really a legal issue?

When a person spends over 12 hours per day playing a video game, at the expense of their careers and relationships, they have problems that run much deeper than the financial harm they’ve caused themselves, and should probably seek professional help.

And unless this plaintiff ends up proving at trial that the video game companies knew their products were addictive and/or harmful, and actively hid this from the public a la the tobacco companies (not likely), he should not prevail.

But what do you think? Send your views to [email protected] or SMS 012-4405867.

For more news go to my website @ lexborneo.com. A Happy New Year 2011 to all readers of Lex Borneo and The Borneo Post in Sarawak and Sabah.