作者：Ramin Shokrizade

电脑游戏会让人上瘾吗？网络游戏必须受监控吗？虽然国际消费者保护和执法网络组织已经在讨论这些问题了，但韩国政府不等国际社会达成共识，最近就单方面出台网络游戏管理法案，以保护该国的儿童免受被他们等同于吸毒和酗酒的威胁——游戏的侵害。

我不打算直接回答上述问题，因为我认为那些问题本来就问得不对。相反地，我打算提出更好的问题并解答。虽然任何娱乐活动都可能致瘾，但现代科技的进步改变了我们整个社会的互动方式，其影响远不止使人类对某一种产品上瘾那么简单。我们看到的和感受到的是，我们这个物种形成社区的方式被彻底改变了。

我认为社区既是心理上的需要，也是生理上的需要。人类是高度社会化的物种，我们甚至有一种奖励我们的社交互动行为的激素——催产素。催产素不足可能导致抑郁和疾病。因此，我认为社交互动不是一种高层次的享受，而是一种基本的人类需求。人类在不摄取必需维他命如B-12的情况下仍然可以比在缺少社交互动的情况下存活得更久得多。

如果你同意社交互动是必要的人类需求而不是高级享受，那么你就不难看出互动媒体行业确实为我们的社会提供了高价值的产品。有人可能会反驳，我们可以在任何时候任何地方任何条件下提供社交互动，而且比以前的所有娱乐形式更省钱省时。

现在，并非所有娱乐媒体生而平等，因为技术仍然是新的，可以说，品质仍然相当低但一直在稳步提高。甚至像食物一样必需的东西也可以杀死你，如果你总是吃缺乏营养的东西。因为儿童往往无法区分哪些食物对身体有好处哪些食物对身体有害处，这就使父母、政府和食品生产者之间产生竞争。儿童食品生产商因为利用卡通元素向儿童推荐低营养的产品而招徕恶名，他们知道儿童是脆弱的消费人群，可以轻易地欺骗他们购买无益的产品。我认为，碳酸饮料生产商也有类似的恶名。

所以，这是一场父母和食品生产商之间为争夺儿童健康而展开的永恒战争。政府有时会介入其中。一方面，当政府追求财政收入时，就会同意快餐店开在学校内，不顾它给公共健康带来灾难性影响。另一方面，政府花钱提高校园餐饮的营养水平，有时候确实卓有成效。

我认为，归根到底，我们的行业给消费者提供的社区。你可以说这是人造的或虚拟的社区，但在网络游戏中，这些互动活动通常发生在使用电子界面的两个或以上的真人之间。我所谓的“我们的行业”是指互动媒体。我把社交媒体也纳入互动媒体的范畴，所以出于本文的目的，我不只是讨论游戏，还包括所有形式的社交媒体如Facebook和Twitter。

community(from ssaatscsu)

出于必需，人类被社区所吸引。如果“虚拟”社区提供的归属感比“真实”社区的来得强烈，那么人们就有充分的理由抛弃真实社区而选择虚拟社区。这通常被那些“真实”社区中的人误解为沉迷和上瘾，因为从他们的角度出发，他们无法看见“上瘾者”的虚拟社区。相反地，一个人在真实世界的身体状态是不为虚拟社区所见的。这意味着互动媒体的用户可能在遭受饥渴、贫穷、失业或失学却得不到他们的虚拟社区的任何帮助。某些人的虚拟社区可能对他们的日常生活造成潜在的破坏，这是互动媒体被满足多种“上瘾”定义的原因之一。

随着同伴群体越来越依赖向虚拟社区寻求支持，不可避免地，他们渐渐地放弃真实世界的交流。如果朋友偏好用互动媒体而不是面对面交流，那么你也会被迫使用相同的媒体，否则你可能会失去这个朋友。这就促进了虚拟社区的病毒性传播。

这样，两个通常不重叠且不能各自满足一个人的全部需求的社区之间就形成竞争了。父母应该介入这场竞争吗？如果他们是合格的父母的话，他们应该会。如果我们回到过去，比如50年或更早以前，父母会鼓励孩子尽量与周围的人去玩，除了晚上应该呆在家里的时候。有时候这就叫作“宵禁”。

现在，当所有人，包括儿童在内，晚上伴着电子设备入眠，早上伴着电子设备醒来，宵禁的概念似乎显得过时了。当你在家就能进行社交活动时，你还有必要东奔西跑寻找社交活动吗？你甚至可以同时和多个人交流互动，而这多个人可能互相不喜欢或存在竞争关系，但他们不会知道你与他们当中每个人都有交往。

如果父母或甚至整个社会都要求把虚拟活动限制在虚拟社区中，以维持至少一些必要的真实社区的结构，会怎么样呢？我认为晚上没收所有电子设备等到放学以后再归还，有点儿不切实际了。何况有些设备的作用就是让家长和孩子保持联系。政府为了限制儿童使用互动媒体而把这种媒体贴上“致瘾”的标签，我认为这种做法完全没有抓住关键。在国际消费者保护和执法网络组织的十月大会以前，我确实主张游戏卡牌的买卖应该受监管，因为它们的使用者是儿童，没有得到父母的许可的儿童。

在北美，至少有22%的玩游戏的儿童（680万）在没有得到父母许可的情况下在游戏中花钱。这是来自电子娱乐设计研究中心的调查，所以如果我们把未被注意的消费和使用游戏卡牌也考虑进去，这个数字恐怖要更高得多。显然，父母监视和批准孩子的活动的能力正在迅速下降。我认为让父母独立监管自己孩子的活动更合理，而不是让政府去监管所有人。最糟的情况是，也就是我们现在所面临的，似乎是宣告那700万以上的儿童的行为是违法的。虽然这对劳教所来说可能是个好消息，但我认为这不是一个长久的解决方案。

我认为这个问题的最快速的解决方案是，家长和父母想办法补救家长给他们的孩子设置电子宵禁的能力。真正的宵禁。这要求设备制造者将父母监控置入设备中，从而只允许孩子在父母决定的时间范围内使用某些功能。比如说一部智能手机，我们设置22：00-08：00期间为锁定状态，只能用于给父母打电话或发短信。家长可以临时或永久地撤销这个锁定状态，当然解锁需要密码。

从08：00-15：00，任何教学所需的应用都可以使用，电话号码可以被独立批准。孩子可以自由安装他们想要的应用，随时添加新的电话号码，但在父母逐个批准以前，这些应用都不可使用、这些号码都无法拔通。当然，父母可以选择放弃某项控制，但默认设置是完全封锁的，这样父母就必须有意识地放弃这项控制。

这样，虚拟社区的病毒性传播就被打断了，至少在某段禁止的时期如孩子在上学时。孩子会有更多机会学习如何在现实空间中与他人互动，和至少保证在他们长大后有了自己的智能设备后，仍然会保留现实的互动活动，而不是放任社交能力萎缩。

如果所有游戏/社交应用都默认不能在儿童的设备上运行，除非父母同意，那么免费游戏、未成年人使用社交媒体造成的所有问题和对上瘾的担忧就都消失了，并不需要政府的干预。核心问题不是这些产品是否危险或父母是否尽到作为父母的职责，而是技术制造者故意生产出破坏父母控制和职责的产品，且伙同营销公司（游戏邦注：平台所有者通常回报营销商30%的收益）绕过孩子的父母直接向孩子推销产品。

当然，这导致智能设备变成管制物品，所以在没有其父母的同意就买卖、赠与或出借智能设备给未成年人都会变成犯法。

为了我这么担心进入虚拟社区？我个人已经花了不下50000个小时研究和编写关于虚拟社区的东西，所以显然我必须看到虚拟社区的价值。人类有促进真实社区发展的激素——就是我在前面提到的那种激素。当你与喜欢的人（包括宠物）接触和说话时，你的身体就会释放这种激素作为回应。如果电子交流提供多巴胺和脑内啡，而没有催产素，那么我们就只得到三种主要奖励化学物质中的两种。这已经足够让我们感到满足了，但缺少催产素会导致精神抑郁和免疫力低下。回到快餐的类比，这可能使虚拟社区的居民觉得“满足”来自吃没营养的食物，导致患上各种疾病。我们已经知道不理解这种长期危害的儿童，会吃许多垃圾食品。如果成年人在没有完全了解自己的行为后果的情况下，也可能做出同样错误的选择。

这就是互动媒体的未来？我不知道。没人知道。当前科技对儿童的影响是什么，可能几年或几十年后才看得出来，到那时，我们应该已经推出新的技术了。我们的孩子成为实验室的小老鼠，虽然这是收集数据最好的方法，但拿我们的后代做赌注，测试整个种族，似乎太冒险了。如是要家长们自愿贡献出孩子帮我们收集数据，我认为那就太好了。我喜欢数据。当然，允许那些觉得我们自私/想保护孩子的人选择不参与我们的实验。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Community Vs. Addiction in IM

by Ramin Shokrizade

Are computer games addictive? Are online games needing regulation and oversight? While the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network has debated these issues, the Korean government recently decided to act unilaterally to protect its children from what they perceived as a threat, not waiting for the international community to come to consensus.

I am not going to attempt to answer the above questions directly, because I think they are the wrong questions. Instead I am going to suggest better questions and solutions to those questions. While any entertaining activity can be addictive, recent changes in technology are exposing us to changes in the way we interact as a society that go far beyond the issue of addiction to a single product. What we are watching and feeling, in real time, is a fundamental change in the way our species forms community.

I see community as a fundamental need, both psychologically and physically. Humans are an extremely social species, and we even have a hormone, oxytocin, that rewards us for social interaction. Not having enough oxytocin can lead to depression and disease. Thus I do not see social interaction as a luxury, I see it as a basic human need. A human can live a healthy life a lot longer without a supply of an essential vitamin like B-12 (we can store up to 5 years of it in our bodies) than we can without social interaction.

If you agree that social interaction is an essential human need, and not a luxury, then it is not hard to see the interactive media industry as providing goods of high value to society. One might also argue that we can provide social interaction anywhere, under any conditions, at any time, for arguably less money per time unit than all previous forms of entertainment.

Now not all interactive media is created equal, and since the technology is still new it can be said that the quality is still relatively low but increasing steadily over time. Even something as essential as food can kill you over time if you repeatedly make poor nutritional choices. Because children typically do not know the difference between food that is good for them and food that can harm them, this sets up a competition between parents, governments, and food producers. Children’s cereal producers have been notorious for selling inferior nutrition products to children using cartoons, knowing that this is a vulnerable consumer group that can be manipulated easily into making harmful nutritional choices. I think it is fair to say that carbonated beverage makers have a similarly mixed reputation.

So it is a constant battle between parents and companies for the health of children. Governments will sometimes get involved on one side or the other. When governments seeking additional revenues agreed to place fast food franchises right on school campuses, the public health effects were catastrophic. Other times governments spend money in an attempt to improve nutrition in schools, sometimes successfully.

I believe that ultimately what our industry provides to consumers is community. You could argue that this is synthetic or artificial community, but in online games these interactions are usually between two or more real people using electronic interfaces. When I say our industry, I mean interactive media. I include social media in the larger category of interactive media, so for the purposes of this paper I am not just talking about games, I include all forms of social media including Facebook and Twitter.

Our species is drawn to community, by necessity. If a person’s “virtual” community gives a greater sense of inclusion than their “real” community, then there is good reason to abandon the real community for the virtual community. This will often be misinterpreted as withdrawal and addiction by those in the “real” community, because from their perspective the other person’s virtual community is invisible to them. Conversely, a person’s real world physical state is invisible to the virtual community. This means the user of interactive media could be suffering from hunger, thirst, lack of hygiene, or professional or social irresponsibility without any help from their virtual community. This is where the person’s activities of daily living can be undermined by their virtual community, causing heavy interactive media use to meet many of the definitions of addiction.

As peer group members increasingly rely on virtual communities for support, they increasingly abandon real world communication by necessity. If a friend prefers to use interactive media rather than in-person communication, then you are forced to either adopt the same media or possibly lose that friend. This can force a certain amount of virality in virtual community adoption.

Thus you have a competition between two often non-overlapping communities that may not individually meet the needs of each person. Should parents be involved in this dynamic? Presumably they are if they are indeed parents. If we were to go back in time to an ancient era, say 50 or more years ago, children would be encouraged to socialize with most everyone around them until some time at night where they were expected to be home and social time would wind down. Sometimes this was called “curfew”.

Now with everyone, including children, increasingly going to bed with an electronic device and waking up with an electronic device, the idea of curfew seems archaic. Why run around at night seeking social interaction when you can do it from the comfort of your home. You can even interact with multiple people at the same time that don’t like each other or are in competition with each other, and they will have no idea you are doing so.

What if a parent or even an entire society wanted to restrict the viral movement to virtual communities to preserve at least some of the essential real world community formation? I think confiscating all electronic devices at night and returning them after school is a bit impractical. Some of these devices serve as a link between parent and child. Governments trying to restrict access to interactive media by children by classifying the media as addictive is, I think, missing the point completely. I did advocate before the ICPEN in October that game cards should be treated as a controlled substance because they are being used by children (and corporations) to bypass parental consent.

Already at least 22% of children (6.8M) playing mobile games in North America are spending money on mobile games without parental consent. This comes from an EEDAR survey of parents, so if we factor in unnoticed spending and the use of game cards, these numbers are likely much much higher. Clearly the ability of parents to monitor and approve the activities of their offspring is rapidly being undermined. I think it makes more sense to give parents the option of individually regulating their own children, than to have governments attempt to regulate everyone. The worst case scenario, the one we have now, seems to be a movement to criminalize those 7+ million children. While this may be welcome news to the prison industry, I do not think this is a long term solution to the situation.

I think the most immediate solution to the issues that parents and regulators are seeking to remedy is the ability for parents to set electronic curfews for their children. Real curfews. This would involve the makers of devices capable of accessing the internet placing parental controls that would allow all but certain functions on the device being disabled during parent determined time ranges. Let’s say we have a smartphone, and we set a 22:00 to 08:00 lock on the device where it can only be used to call or text the phone number of the parent. This block can be removed temporarily or permanently by the parent and of course the process would have to be password protected.

From 08:00 to 15:00 any app needed for school could be enabled, and phone numbers could be approved individually. The child would be free to install any app they wanted, and input new phone numbers any time, but none of these would ever work or be enabled until a parent authorized them all individually. Of course a parent could just opt out of controlling any of this content, but the default setting would have to be total lockout so that the parent has to consciously give up this control.

The result would be to disrupt the viral move to virtual communities, at least during certain proscribed times like when children are in school. Young people would have more opportunities to learn how to interact with each other again in real space and would at least retain that as an option as they get older instead of being forced to compromise that path of social development once they are handed a “smart” device.

If all game/social applications are disabled on all children’s devices by default until approved by a parent, then all of the issues that arise with F2P games, underage use of social media, and concerns about addiction disappear without the need for any government intervention. The core issue is not whether these products are dangerous or whether parents are doing a good enough jobs as parents. The issue is that the makers of technology are willfully introducing products that undermine the control and authority of parents, and in doing so allowing complicit companies (that typically pay back 30% of revenues to platform holders) to market directly to children without the knowledge of parents.

Of course then this makes the smart device the controlled substance, so that selling, giving, or lending one to a minor without parental consent would become illegal.

Why am I so worried about the move to virtual communities? I’ve personally spent over 50,000 hours studying and writing about virtual communities, so obviously I must see merit. As a species we have a hormone that promotes real world community building. It is the same oxytocin that I mentioned earlier. It is released in response to touch and speech with loved ones (including pets). Texting does not appear to trigger release. If electronic communication provides dopamine and endorphins, but not oxytocin, then we are getting only two of the three primary reward chemicals. This is enough for us to feel content, but lack of oxytocin leads to psychological depression and immunosuppression. Going back to the junk food analogy, this could make participants of virtual communites feel “full” from consuming a food that has low nutrients, leading to various disease states. We already know that a child, not understanding the long term implications, can eat a lot of junk food. Adults can make the same poor choices if they do not have complete knowledge of the consequences of their actions.

Is this what is actually going on? I don’t know. No one knows. It could be years or decades before we know the effects of our current technology on children, and by then we will have moved on to a new technology. Our children are the lab rats, and while this is the best way to gather data, it seems risky to gamble the future of our species by testing the entire species. If parents want to volunteer their offspring to help us gather data, I think that is great. I love data. Those that feel more selfish/protective should be given more “opt-out” options. (source:gamasutra)