Pc games spiele: Spiele News — PCGames.de

Consequences of gambling addiction:

• self-esteem decreases, self-consciousness of a person is disturbed, over time he may feel like not a real person, but a computer character;
• people suffering from such an addiction get used to the fact that pleasure can be achieved without any serious actions, volitional efforts, over time in the real world they stop showing initiative, become passive, personality degradation occurs; nine0020
• The consequence of addiction may be a violation of family and social adaptation. The player devotes more and more time to the computer, on this basis conflicts arise in the family. Over time, friends may turn away if they do not share hobbies for a computer game;
• , the growing craving for the game is also reflected in the professional activities of a person: he can play during working hours, when some urgent business needs to be done. Lack of initiative, the desire to leave work as soon as possible, neglect of one’s work duties inevitably lead to problems at work and even to dismissal; nine0020
• In order to play some computer games, you need to pay for different services. Debts can become a consequence of addiction to such games. Hoping to win, a person can borrow significant amounts of money, take loans;
• When sitting at a computer for a long time, not only the human psyche suffers, but also its physical condition. Visual impairment, overweight and disruption of the gastrointestinal tract due to insufficient physical activity and irregular nutrition, problems with the spine — these and other diseases can develop due to excessive passion for computer games. nine0020

You might be interested in learning about computer addiction treatment.

Based on materials from the site psi-doctor.ru

sociologist’s view (18+) • Arzamas

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CourseSociology as a science of common senseLecturesMaterials

Viktor Vakhshtein* — about how the virtual world interacts with the world of everyday life

Conversation Kirill Tadpolestikov

18+

Viktor Vakhshtein — Professor of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology of the RANEPA, editor-in-chief of the journal Sociology of Power. * Recognized as a foreign agent.

— How can computer games come to the attention of sociologists? What could interest sociologists in them?

— Here it is important to understand what we generally call a game — and a computer game in particular. In natural language, the language of common sense, the concept of “computer game” is more or less clear to us, we use it, and it does not bother anyone that Tetris and Prince of Persia, Second Life and World of Warcraft fall into this class of concepts ( perhaps the two most studied games of the last decade). But any sociological research begins with a critique of natural language, and a sociologist cannot simply use the concept of «computer game» without subjecting the very object of his study to conceptualization, that is, without giving it a meaning within the language of his discipline. nine0003

Screenshot from World of Warcraft © Blizzard Entertainment

In fact, interdisciplinary fields like game studies are a collection of such conceptualizations. For example, there is a well-developed area — the economics of computer games. There are studies of how financial flows circulate in Second Life or World of Warcraft, as if these games were countries with their own macro and micro economic indicators. Or the narratology of computer games, describing them from the point of view of a narrative, a scenario, as if the game were a literary text. Those involved in cultural studies are interested in the place of games in popular culture; for example, there is a tradition of criticism of computer games in the spirit of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. nine0003

I and others involved in microsociology, phenomenology, or frame analysis are interested in exploring game worlds. That is, the world of a computer game as a special closed world of meanings, which has its own logic, its own ethics, its own common sense, different from the common sense of a person on the street. Such a world is a kind of alternative everyday life. And the question in our research field is posed as follows: how can the events of everyday life be transposed, that is, transferred into a computer game, and how these two events — in the game and in the non-game — are connected with each other, how the boundary between them is established and destroyed . nine0003

The last study I read on this topic was devoted to games with augmented reality, augmented reality. Let’s say players have an application installed on their smartphones and they need to physically get to some point in space, transfer artifacts to each other, participate in battles with other teams, squeezing pieces of physical space for themselves. And the sociologist Konstantin Glazkov describes how the perception of the urban environment begins to transform when the application on your smartphone becomes the tool for coding, experiencing and living it. nine0003

— That is, as a sociologist, you will consider actions in the game with the same reason as in life?

— My field, the sociology of everyday life, at first glance, is connected only with the study of the interaction of people in specific material circumstances. For example, here we are sitting and talking to each other. But suppose you, like in the movie A Beautiful Mind, are talking to imaginary friends — would that be a social interaction? Yes, it’s just the interaction in quotation marks. And from this point of view, interactions in computer games are also second-order social interactions, interactions in quotation marks. nine0003

Alfred Schutz. 1940-50s © New School Archives and Special Collections Digital Archive

This is where Alfred Schutz’s sociological theory of the plurality of worlds comes to the rescue. According to Schutz, theater, madness, religious revelation, even sociological theory, are independent autonomous worlds that are located on a scale, one pole of which is the world of everyday life, and the other is the world of dreams. Each of these worlds has its own rules, but at the same time, they can reflect interactions that take place in other worlds or in everyday life. A vivid example is the mentioned games with augmented reality. Or the situation when the US authorities are investigating the activities of the casino in the Second Life game, treating it as real (if you can lose real, non-fictional money in a fictional, virtual world, this world automatically becomes real for the federal authorities). And it is these mechanisms of transference that the sociologist will study. nine0003

Exploration of the worlds began long before computer games, in the 19th century, and was driven by legal precedents, the most famous of which is the so-called Macnaghten case. This is the case of the murder of the secretary of the British Prime Minister by the Scotsman Daniel Macnaghten, who was obsessed with persecution mania and believed that the Prime Minister initiated the hunt for him personally. Then the question arose before the lawyers: in what cases should the defendant still answer for his crime, despite the fact that his mind is clouded? The judges came to the conclusion that it is worth evaluating a person’s actions as if all his delusions caused by illness were real facts: if the madman imagined that he was defending himself, he must be found innocent, and if he believed that he was taking revenge, vice versa. Half a century after the Macnaghten case, the philosopher William James has pondered how the rationality and sociality of our daily lives are transposed into the world of imaginary events of a mentally ill person. nine0003

Daniel Macnaghten. Illustration from the Scottish Reformers’ Gazette. 1843 © Wikimedia Commons

— Is this relevant in modern life, outside of disputes about the mentally ill?

— A classic example is hockey, in which it is not only possible, but necessary, to beat other people. Formally, this is a violation of the rules — but such a violation of the rules that is inscribed in the scenario of the game itself. A tough guy who hits an opposing team player is put on the bench, but not in jail — although if he had done the same not on the court, but on the street, he would have been put in jail for assault. However, at 19In 1988, Minnesota North Stars hockey player Dino Cissarelli was fined $1,000 and a day in prison for assaulting another player in the heat of a hockey battle. “We are shocked by the court’s decision; in fact, hockey has always dealt with such incidents before and did not need external intervention, ”said then team manager Jack Ferreira. But Judge Harris decided otherwise: “Hockey has no immunity from litigation. When people see an attack [in the arena] as a heroic deed, violence can easily spill over from the arena to the street.» nine0003

Dino Sissarelli hits Luke Ridchardson with a stick. 1988 © Bernard Weil / Toronto Star via Getty Images

Another example: in the German Parliament in 2009, the possibility of a ban on paintball was discussed — Bundestag member from the Social Democratic Party Dieter Wiefelspuetz argued that «paintball imitates killing a person with the use of firearms «. Allegedly, a person who has played paintball ceases to distinguish between the world of a sports game and the world of everyday life and then can go to kill neighbors with live ammunition. nine0003

The third example: a ban in a number of countries of computer games-shooters. Tellingly, first-person shooters, that is, those in which the maximum identification of the player with the character is achieved, are more often banned. This is the kind of argumentation that frame analysts study.

— When two players meet in World of Warcraft and then start a family in real life — is that it?

— Not really, there is no destruction of the tightness of the game here. That’s when in Second Life — a game that does not have an unambiguous scenario — two players get to know each other and start a family, and then they get to know each other and start a family in real life — that’s closer. They are a couple in two worlds at the same time, and these are two different marriages. nine0003

Screenshot from Second Life game © Linden Lab

— Is it as relevant for computer games as it is for hockey? Usually everything is more separate in them: I played at home, then went to work, worked.

— Schutz has a wonderful phrase that there are no exchange offices on the borders of the worlds that could allow exchanging experience and competencies accumulated in one world for experience and competencies operating in another world. But is it really so? We can choose two logics and decide within each of them. nine0003

Suppose we believe that the worlds are closed and do not intersect with each other. Then, for example, a mentally ill person cannot be tried for a crime: this would roughly mean that the laws of the United States or Russia would apply to a country called «mental illness». There was a story when one Japanese woman deleted the character of another person in the game (where he was her husband) — and he sued her for murder; this avatar for him was a much more living being than his own bodily self. Or, for example, you cannot judge George R. R. Martin for the murder of Eddard Stark. nine0003

— Or I can’t offend anyone in the game because it’s not an insult.

— Yes, because it is part of the game; maybe, in it, on the contrary, not to offend will be an insult. But if we say within the phenomenological logic that the worlds are hermetic, then, for example, the riddle of Don Quixote arises. In his imaginary world, Don Quixote is at war with the giants, but in general he spoils the property — mills. Can we demand from him for damage to property or not? nine0003

Don Quixote. Engraving by Henry Spencer Ashby. 1895 © University of California Libraries via Flickr

This is a very significant problem for contemporary performance art, which continuously breaks these boundaries and strives — for example, in the case of Pyotr Pavlensky Pyotr Pavlensky (b. 1984) — Russian action artist . Known for his political actions. — to carry out an intervention from the world of art to the world of everyday life. But at the same time, when he is in court, the first thing everyone will say is: leave him alone, this is art. nine0003

— This leads to another conclusion: the worlds are not hermetic.

— Yes, and then we can accept the second logic: worlds are constantly invading each other, and experience from one world can be converted into experience in another. Modern games increasingly suggest this logic — for example, games with augmented reality or educational games. Second Life does have online universities. Let’s say your avatar in the game is a gray-brown-raspberry leopard that can fly to any location at any time. You fly to the campus of an Australian university that exists in the game Second Life, and you are being lectured by some kind of monstrous monster, but in fact — a professor of this university. And you, like a leopard, hand in an essay to him (the monster), and as a result you get an Australian diploma. Thus, you have converted the experience of the game world into a non-game world diploma. There, in the game, there are employment agencies: you come to an interview as a leopard, you are interviewed by the same leopard, and then he gets you a job in the real world. There is a grinding of the worlds, the border between them becomes dotted. nine0003

Screenshot from the game Second Life © Linden Lab

Irving Hoffman proposed a puzzle about the interpenetration of the metaphorical and non-metaphorical worlds. Imagine the theater of the era of Titus Livius. According to the plot of the play, the criminal must be executed. To add realism to the action, a bag was put on the hero’s head, dragged backstage, then a real criminal sentenced to death, similar in physique, was dragged in and his head was cut off. Question: what is it — an execution or a performance? nine0003

— And what is the solution to this problem?

— Hoffmann’s decision is absolutely dogmatic: yes, they cut off the head, blood is gushing, but it’s still a performance. (A soup can or a toilet in a museum of modern art is no longer a can or a toilet.) A more sophisticated empirical frame analysis would most likely suggest first collecting material about what happened and looking for the answer in it. A similar example: we studied elections in the Balkans and found that in one Bosnian village, voting at the polling station is organized as a religious ritual, and in the next one it is like Sabantuy, a village holiday. Q: Is this still a vote? The answer depends, in particular, on whether the elections will be recognized as valid in this precinct. To answer, you need to collect data and, highlighting the elements of human interaction, establish in which of the worlds their actions took place. nine0003

The next very important question is about translation mechanisms. Suppose that the two worlds are not completely incomparable, but, on the contrary, are structurally similar: our interaction in life is structurally similar to the interaction of people in a game. Here is the business in life — and here is the business in the game; here is the murder in life — and here is the murder in the game. How to describe the mechanisms of such correspondences? Irving Hoffman, for example, distinguishes between games like game and games like play and proposes to make a special scale out of them, a special continuum. Then there will be theater at one pole, and sport at the other. All untransformed real actions can be translated either into game or play. Imagine a chase: someone is chasing someone to kill. In sports it will become a run, in the theater it will become an imitation. nine0003

The question of the mechanisms of translation is very important, because if we prove that mass murder in a school and paintball are more or less structurally similar actions, then paintball can become arbitrable and lose its autonomy as a game. (But we are proving the opposite.) Here, of course, the bills of our domestic parliament are a gold mine for a frame analyst. Recently, a proposal was received from one of the deputies to ban children’s champagne — that is, ordinary soda poured into a bottle imitating a champagne bottle. It allegedly provokes children’s alcoholism. Obviously, this is suggested by people who do not have children or who do not understand how children’s play works — then let’s ban pencils and pens, because children sometimes hold them in their teeth and pretend to smoke. nine0003

Casino in Second Life © Linden Lab

Sometimes worlds do lose their autonomy — for example, again, when the real FBI is interested in the virtual casino in Second Life, because the Linden dollars (local currency) won there can be at a certain exchange rate for real dollars. Let’s say I’m the same grey-brown-crimson leopard, but I didn’t go to the campus to get an education, but to the casino to lose money. Can we judge people for this? Here is a game of chance that is placed inside a non-gamble game — and a question arises, reminiscent of the movie Inception: is playing within a game a game? nine0003

— There is an idea that the real and virtual worlds are gradually blending and soon there will be no difference between them.

— Many people come to this conclusion, but I still do not see a convincing theoretical logic behind it. The fact that people around the world spend many hours a day in virtual worlds says nothing. Here is the appearance of augmented reality — when, for example, people move around a real city, guided by virtual, gamified applications — this is already more interesting, there is space for thinking. nine0003

— How does a researcher distinguish when worlds are autonomous and when they interpenetrate?

— This is always a theoretical choice, because the correct answer cannot be taken from the material. For example, you say that the worlds are mutually impenetrable. You will look at them as two different languages, establish correspondences of words, but not claim that these are the same word — because you have chosen such a logic of thinking. And vice versa, you can say that everything has long been mixed up, there is a constant intervention of one world into another. You will give an example of the intervention of the game world in everyday life — say, a check-in competition: which of us will become the mayor of this cafe. Standing in this position, you will be sharpened in search of plots that demonstrate that what seems to be a literal interaction is in fact transposed, changed. nine0003

— That is, if I want to sue because of computer games, then I will need to find out what the theoretical background of the sociologist, whom I will involve as an expert.

— Yes, it is better to take care of this in advance. Proponents of one theoretical solution will produce a set of convincing examples that will prove that a computer game cannot be banned simply on the grounds that it fakes some events — say, Grand Theft Auto cannot be banned because it teaches people to steal cars. And others will say: of course, it is possible, because for a long time there is no longer a separate virtual, a separate real, we live in a world of intersections. nine0003

Screenshot from Grand Theft Auto V © Rockstar Games

— And will they both go to court? This will be pure rhetoric.

— Any expertise is rhetoric. The question is whether this rhetoric can offer the logic of a persuasive argument.

— Will the one with the brightest result win?

— The one whose way of argumentation is more convincing. A classic example is the challenge of the famous French philosopher Paul Ricoeur to the Chamber of Justice of the Republic, which alone can judge statesmen. It’s 1999, in the dock are former ministers who created a blood bank in the 1980s. Due to a flawed donation procedure, HIV-infected blood got into this bank. It was poured into hundreds of people; the trial took place many years later, many of them died, and it is not clear exactly why, but several cases of infection were firmly proven. This is discussed as a national crime, a trial begins, and a philosopher is called to it. Paul Ricoeur creates a whole philosophy, which is expressed in the words «responsible, but not guilty.» The logic of argumentation he created makes it possible to recognize the minister as responsible, but does not allow him to be found guilty. And two of the three defendants are acquitted, but the one found guilty is not punished. nine0003

And sociology is also not a description of this world, but a way of coding it in its own language. We are creating an interface that allows you to display this world in a certain way on the screen. And judicial practice, jurisprudence, does the same. My favorite example is the late 19th century German Supreme Court decision on whether a person could be tried for attempting to escape from prison. In most countries, if you were imprisoned and you escaped, then you committed another crime. And in Germany, it was decided that the desire for freedom is an immanent property of human nature. Therefore, if a prisoner escapes, he is returned and forced to serve out his term. nine0003

— But do not increase.

— They increase for sawing through the bars or bribing a guard, but not for the escape itself. Law conceptualizes this world, sociology conceptualizes this world, and their dialogue in court is a dialogue of different ways of coding the world.

— And one of the parties can influence the other — relatively speaking, theorists to practitioners?

— And vice versa. Much of what I said about computer games is just cases when precedent decisions in court become food for science, for conceptualization, for theoretical thinking. It was the same with the McNaughtan case, which stood at the origins of the creation of the theory of multiple worlds. First there was a legal precedent, fifty years later there was a philosophy that gave a way to think about it, another eighty years later there were computer games that became an ideal arena for practicing this way of thinking. nine0003

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