As endless hours in front of a screen go by, more and more people may be getting sucked into the personality and life of the character they are playing in a video game, or of the faceless gambler in an online casino, betting from the comforts of their own home.
In order to assess how big of a problem these forms of addictive behavior are becoming, the UCLA Gambling Studies Program designed a study that would pinpoint the prevalence of problematic video gaming and Internet gambling among UCLA students in the form of a massive online survey.
“The genesis of this study came about after we started to see more students and younger patients with Internet gambling and video game addictions,” said Timothy Fong, codirector of the program. “It led us to wonder how big of a problem this was.”
This survey is now in the process of collecting responses and will continue to do so each quarter for a year in an attempt to paint an accurate picture of the UCLA population with regards to these behaviors.
The study also aims to identify which games are the most popular, how Internet and casino gamblers differ and who is most susceptible to getting caught in the web of addiction, Fong said.
Most people who are gambling online or playing video games have no problems at all and lead normal and balanced lives, but for some, it can cause problems when done in excess.
“Many lose the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy and even begin to prefer fantasy,” said Dr. Richard Rosenthal, codirector of the program. “They just cannot stop playing.”
Online gambling
Third-year chemistry student Garni Arakelian said many students are gambling online because of the easy access and the speed at which you can win money.
“I’ve even seen people playing online poker in class,” he said.
He said he was one of these constant online poker players during his first year, betting smaller increments of money but still making enough money to support himself by gambling.
Arakelian said he still gambles, but only for fun with friends. He came to the realization that he could be spending his time elsewhere and coming out more profitable relative to the large amounts of time he was putting in to gamble online.
While Fong said everyone has a different reason for gambling, he added that one of the goals of this survey is to figure out the kind of reasoning that puts one at higher risk for losing control.
Fourth-year economics student Igor Gampel said that gambling is much more than a hobby for him; it is currently his full-time summer job.
“By playing poker online, I can stay in the comfort of my room, play 12 hands of poker at a time, and make more money than I would in any other job,” Gampel said.
Expecting to make $10,000 this month alone, Gampel said it is all about strategy and control when it comes to online poker.
This gambling Cinderella story is not rare among gamblers, but the horror stories exist, too.
“We have seen students come in with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, accumulated from Internet gambling, which is a dire circumstance to deal with,” said Elizabeth Gong-Guy, director of Student Psychological Services.
Gong-Guy said there have recently been an increasing number of students coming in specifically for problematic online gambling, but no research has been done to document a real trend. Most patients come in after having lost a lot of money and say they started to gamble through the Internet for the convenience of not having to drive two or more hours to the nearest casino.
With easy access to Internet gambling sites, many say the bill that was signed last year by President Bush that banned U.S. banks and credit card companies from processing payments for online gambling activity had little or no impact in hindering players and online casinos. The bill caused some gambling sites to be shut down, but most overseas operations continue to serve online gamblers in the U.S., Fong said.
Kenn Heller, associate director of student programming at UCLA, said the school currently has no monitoring technology to keep track of what students do online, and there have not been any studies done to assess whether or not the Internet gambling levels on campus are high.
With no current regulation on these sites or by the school, there is no way of knowing the fairness of the games, no way to protect compulsive gamblers and no way to determine who is playing, Fong said.
Video gaming
Though compulsive gaming was recently rejected as a mental illness or addiction by the American Medical Association, the diagnosis for it is essentially identical to the criteria used to diagnose pathological gambling, Rosenthal said.
There is a progressive failure to control the impulse to gamble, followed by disturbances in personal and family life ““ it works the same way for gaming, he added, stating that an addiction is essentially the loss of control.
In many ways, he added, compulsive video gaming can be viewed as the purest form of addiction, since it does not require a substance as seen in chemical dependency, nor does it require the rewards of monetary loss and gain present in gambling addiction.
With video games, the lure of the fantasy world is especially pertinent in massively multiplayer online role-playing games, said Kimberly Young, a clinical psychologist from St. Bonaventure University.
An example of this kind of game is World of Warcraft, which reached a new milestone of 8.5 million players worldwide this year, according to a statement by Blizzard Entertainment.
Young said the signs of addiction range from playing more than six hours a day, becoming isolated from social activities, and becoming irritable when away from the game.
Dan Tran, a chemical engineering alumnus, started playing World of Warcraft in his third year for 10 hours a day. He said it consumed almost all of his time, causing him to become isolated from other activities and his grades to plummet.
“When I wasn’t playing, I would still be thinking about the game, and it started to become hard to concentrate on other things like studying,” Tran said.
The game offered an escape from real life and eventually from problems such as low grades, he said.
Tran said that when reality set in and he came to the conclusion that he would not be graduating unless he got his grades up, he decided it was time to face up to his problems.
For three months, Tran quit playing and was able to get his grades together and graduate, but he experienced intense withdrawal symptoms similar to that of other addictions.
After only two weeks without the game, Tran experienced vomiting, anxiety and physical pain from being without World of Warcraft and dealt with it alone.
Both video gaming and Internet gambling are products of growing technology that is constantly being updated and becoming more appealing to people all over the world, Fong said.
Reality has been taken over by fantasy with the thousands of online casinos that are available all the time to anyone with Internet access due to the minimal amounts of government regulation, Rosenthal said.
The speed and anonymity appeals to Internet gamblers, he added, and with video games, it is the equivalent of entering a completely different world, away from everything a person is seeking to escape.
When more research is done documenting the risk factors for developing these forms of addictive behavior, treatment will become more available, Fong said. The survey will provide the data necessary to implement policy changes and help those in need, he added.