International Author Warns Public Not To Befriend, Date, Or Marry Gamers. Rizvi is best known as a secular humanist writer and podcaster, while also being a columnist for the Huffington Post.

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[–]Alienhunter 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Well it's emotional immaturity and poor self control. It's not at all uncommon for men especially to have issues with this. The game is simply exasperating it and can form a vicious cycle where they become more angry and more frustrated due to gaming more and accomplishing less.

It's a common issue with the kind of bulldozer parents that try to remove any and all obstacles from their kids lives. Poor sportsmanship and the like, the absence of any kind of "bullying". You'd be ridiculed and shunned if you behave that way in a sporting event. But a game is private so it doesn't happen.

[–]raven9 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I think it is a normal human reaction to being so manipulated by these games manufacturers.

They create an extremely addictive alternate environment that provides the user with low effort goals that reward them with the kind of dopamine rush that is usually associated with high effort life achievements.

Then they dangle that next dopamine fix behind a much more difficult to achieve goal that provides frustration instead of achievement. Over and over. The user attempts to achieve the goal ten times, twenty times thirty times almost completing it then falling at the last hurdle. This is all carefully designed to create increasing levels of frustration until that frustration naturally turns to anger.

[–]Alienhunter 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah I mean there are many games especially smart phone games that do essentially work this way to get you addicted and then charge you money as a way to remove the frustration. But not all games are equal here, this is largely the problem with microtransactions essentially being a form of gambling.

Typically any sort of game or sport or anything worth doing is slowly going to ramp up the difficulty as your skill level increases or else it will become boring. I think a lot of the problem is though that you've got kids totally engrossed in the game and giving it far more significance than it actually deserves. I've always been the type of person that ramps the difficulty up in games because I find the intellectual challenge of finding ways to overcome the stacked odds to be stimulating,in that case failure is welcome because no failure means the game is too easy and not worth my time. but a lot of people play games with a more mindless simple dopamine release with no actual intellectual effort provided.

Using a simple example is something like chess. Some people will get totally engrossed in it to the point they become upset and angry when they lose even if the loss is fair. They allow their competitive desire to win to overcome their sportsmanship and reality that it's merely a game and winning or losing is less important than improving your skills at it.

In the context of a video game, turning the difficulty to zero on chess is basically what a lot of mobile games do, you get the dopamine rush from winning , you aren't actually doing anything productive at all, it's not engaging your mind, you aren't learning to adapt to new situations, it's just mindless.

Lots of online games basically fall into this category where the game is designed merely to maximize time spent online so you keep dragging your subscription out. In order to get to the parts of the game that are stimulating and fun you've basically forced to spend inordinate amounts of time farming for items or slowly watching numbers go up for repetitive tasks. There's no real challenge or skill it's merely a case of work. That's not a good way to spend ones free time as that work is ultimately pointless towards anything material.

The anger issues are what happens when you've devoted so much time and energy of yourself that you've allowed the game to take an unhealthy status in your life. Anger at a game shouldn't result in outbursts and screaming, it should just result in you turning the game off going outside and doing something else.

I think the problem for a lot of kids is that with modern society, parents are essentially hampering their children's normal development do to various reasons, fear, not having enough time to spend with them, not having a safe engaging environment for them to explore on their own terms. Kids feel this but can't express it, the games offer some of what they are longing for so they are attractive to the child but they won't provide all of it. I think for the most part kids will lose a lot of their obsessive interest in games so long as they have something else engaging for them in real life to make use of instead. But I think for a lot of parents especially in urban environments they do not allow the child enough freedoms to really go out and be a kid on their own so that leaves the games as the child's primary source of exploration of the world and only real outlet for them to truly be a child in the traditional sense.

It's s very difficult issue to deal with, on the one hand I think some games like Minecraft despite having the potential for addiction as with anything are essentially open ended sandboxes where the kids are free to essentially build and play with whatever they can find so it's naturally very interesting to them. I'd go so far to say it's good for them provided it doesn't eclipse real world experiences and life. Especially if they are in the game playing with their in real life friends it's not wholely without benefit. It's better during covid lockdowns for example for the kids to do that vs being alone 24/7 with absolutely no social contact bored out of their minds.

The issue though comes from providing kids with that real world experience now. You've got to really give the kids more independence than most parents are willing to give them anymore. Got to let them go out and play largely unsupervised or at least supervised by the other kids and not try to give them these kind of very restrictive controlled overly safe child environments that are so common these days.

The only way we can really do that anymore is by promoting very strong communities where neighbors know each other and are able to trust that at the very least they are all looking out for their kids safety. I don't think we really have that anymore as people are becoming more and more increasingly fearful and scared of the world and this will push the kids further and further into these virtual spaces because they become the only real place the kids can play since we've more or less prevented them from going anywhere else.