Tales of cyber-neurosis
April 8, 2010 Leave a comment
Another week, another of the icons of my generation’s popular culture has passed away. This time we’re mourning Malcolm McLaren, self-mythologising father of British punk.
I’m sure that there will be plenty of obituaries published over the next few days, so I’ll just link to McLaren’s most famous protégés in their finest hour.
April 7, 2010 Leave a comment
As widely predicted Gordon Brown has set May 6th as the date for the UK General Election. The campaign promises to be the most exciting since Labour came to power in 1997, since there are significant policy differences between the main parties, and it is far from clear who is going to win.
I expect that the main issue will be the economy, specifically the speed and severity with which public spending needs to be cut to bring the deficit under control, though all the mainstream parties are agreed that cuts must be made. As a public sector worker I have a keen interest in this of course, but even those not directly employed by the government will feel the negative effect of reduced services.
While our sorry excuse for a democracy does entitle me to cast a ballot, I, like a large part of the population, live in a constituency that is not going to be closely contested, so my vote doesn’t really count for anything. As with the US elections a couple of years ago I will be reduced to blogging ineffectually from the sidelines.
I, and my like-minded comrades, may be unable to greatly influence the outcome of the wider election, but we should be able to use the increased interest in politics generated by the poll to do some community organising, with a view to getting ready to oppose whatever cuts may be on the way. The problem is that the electoral process, while theoretically an expression of the population’s ability to control the executive, is in practice a demonstration of the illusionary nature of that power, and this tends to have a demotivating effect.
Still, these are interesting times. The financial crisis has caused a lot of people to question the nature of our economic system, in a way that hasn’t really happened since the end of the Cold War, which opens a door for progressive politics. The left may not make a huge impression in this election, but we can plant some seeds for the future.
April 5, 2010 3 Comments
We received a rare response to our last piece, from T Linden himself no less. True, T had descended from Olympus to tell us that we were wrong about everything, but still, some attention is better than no attention.
Anyway, one part of his comment caught my eye – “Second Life is a diverse community”. This is a sentiment that is often heard around the SL blogosphere, but how true is it? I did a quick review of the literature to see if there was much evidence one way or the other.
There are three metaverse-related publications that I read regularly (or semi-regularly) – the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking and Game Studies – but I couldn’t remember ever having seen a quantatative study focussing specifically on the demography of SL in these journals, and sure enough nothing turned up when I searched their archives. A further search through the biomedical, psychological and sociological databases that I have access to drew a similar blank. The closest thing to a scientific study on this topic that I could find is this piece of work presented back in 2007 on the SL Survey blog. The Second Life wiki does have a page entitled “Demographic Studies”, but this is marketing data rather than academic work.
There are quite a few studies that look at other MMORPGs; three that are often cited are Griffiths et al (2003) Breaking the Stereotype: The Case of Online Gaming, Griffiths et al (2004) Demographic Factors and Playing Variables in Online Computer Gaming and Yee (2006) The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments. Yee’s study is particularly impressive, drawing on data gathered from over 30,000 players over 3 years in his epic Daedalus Project.
The earliest qualitative work that I’m aware of in this area are the case descriptions of MUD users (who were mostly also psychotherapy clients) in Sherry Turkle‘s 1995 book Life on the Screen. A work focussing more on interpersonal and group dynamics is John Suler‘s 1996 book The Psychology of Cyberspace, particularly the section covering his in-depth study of the early graphical MUD The Palace.
More recent qualitative studies include Yee (2006) Motivations for Play in Online Games, Bessière et al (2007) The Ideal Elf: Identity Exploration in World of Warcraft, Hussain and Griffiths (2009) The Attitudes, Feelings, and Experiences of Online Gamers: A Qualitative Analysis and Williams et al (2010) Behind the Avatar: The Patterns, Practices and Functions of Role Playing in MMOs. Good qualitative work dealing specifically with Second Life is harder to find; in fact I couldn’t find any at all. [Update: There is a good qualitative study; I had unaccountably overlooked Coming of Age in Second Life by anthropologist Tom Boellstorff.]
This brief review is not terribly systematic and certainly not comprehensive, but, having read these papers, as well as some of their references and citations, and a load of other work that I haven’t mentioned because it seemed only tangentially relevant, I feel I can hazard a qualified opinion on the question of diversity within the Second Life population, the qualification being that my impression is an overview based on a general familiarity with the source material rather than a rigorously evidence-based analysis.
SL residents may well vary along several dimensions, such as age, gender, nationality, education level and occupational status, but I suspect that a cluster analysis would resolve this seeming heterogenicity into a much smaller number of discrete groupings. Furthermore, I think that below this apparent diversity there may well be a large degree of psychological similarity; in other words, although residents may be different in terms of the demographic categories listed above, when one looks at their internal mental functioning they may have much more in common than one might expect.
If this last proposition is true then it should be possible to draw up a psychological profile of a typical Second Life resident, and to devise some sort of scale that would measure how likely it is that a subject would take to the SL experience, then see if that correlated with any particular personality types. I’m not aware that anyone has published any work like this, though I may well have overlooked it.
I’d be surprised if Linden Lab didn’t have a psychologist on their staff researching this kind of thing, since it would be very useful for marketing purposes, but I guess they wouldn’t want to put it into the public domain.
I have some ideas about the psychological features that one might expect to find in an average Second Life resident, and I’ll expand on these in a future post.
March 24, 2010 2 Comments
Towards the end of last year the BBC aired a documentary on the Great Banking Crisis of 2008, which featured various bankers, government ministers and officials recounting the emergency meetings where the decision was taken to nationalise large parts of the British financial system. The Royal Bank of Scotland, once one of the most successful institutions in the world, had, by late 2008, been reduced by an ill-advised expansion strategy to a virtual basket-case, and was only hours away from total collapse. Faced with the prospect of millions of citizens waking up to find their accounts frozen, the government called the RBS management into the Treasury to finalise the details of the deal that would eventually see the state acquire 84% of the bank. During the course of this meeting, officials realised that Fred Goodwin, RBS Chief Executive, seemed to have only the flimsiest grasp of the trouble his bank was in, believing that a modest cash injection would be enough to stabilise things. Goodwin retired shortly afterwards, with a generous pension, leaving the taxpayers to contemplate the lesson that, as Chancellor Alistair Darling ruefully noted, when it comes to running banks it’s a good idea to hire people who know what they are doing.
We tend to assume that, when someone reaches a position of responsibility, this must be as a result of some rational process that evaluated their competence for it. However we are often faced with evidence, like the poor decision making that led to the financial crisis, that contradicts this, and suggests that other, unknown factors must play a part in the selection of our leaders.
Laurence J. Peter, who died in 1990, is best known as the author of the Peter Principle, which states that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” Workers who are good at their jobs are promoted until they are in a job they can’t do, at which point they get stuck. Since big organisations tend to find it difficult to get rid of people, eventually every position will be filled by someone who is incompetent to manage it.
I was thinking of all this when I read about Linden Lab’s latest marketing wheeze; an advertising campaign that seeks to dispel a supposed “Fat Naked Guy in a Basement Anti-Second Life Meme” by showcasing the attractive people behind selected avatars. This seems to me to be wrong-headed on so many levels that it does raise doubts about how well the Lab management understand their own product and what makes it attractive to their paying customers. One only has to google “Linden Lab incompetence” to come up with plenty other examples of Lab strategy that have proved unpopular with the resident community.
On the other hand, Mark Kingdon has an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, and years of experience in senior management, whereas I am an embittered loser with a blog (though, I must point out, reasonably slim, fully clothed, and currently resident above ground). Who would you trust to run a successful company?
March 23, 2010 Leave a comment
Technorati are once again listing Second Life Shrink, and, I’m glad to say, seem to have recognised our influence by giving us an authority score of 112 (our previous best was 4), and an overall ranking of 57,472 (the highest we managed under their old system was 751,289).
I’m not sure why we suddenly seem to have become more authoritative, since we are, by and large, just posting the same rubbish we always have. We have been getting a few more incoming links, notably one from the Alphaville Herald last month referencing our analysis of the JLU story. We did get some increase in traffic on the back of that, though less than I was expecting, more of a blip than a surge.
I suspect our authority will prove to be transient, since Technorati claim that their rankings are calculated over a much shorter period of time than under their old system. I don’t know if ArminasX is planning to update his SL blog list, but if so I hope he does it soon, while our figures are still good.
March 21, 2010 Leave a comment
In my last post on internet addiction I mentioned a few of the treatment options available; in a new development the Capio Nightingale Hospital in London has started offering a Young Person Technology Addiction programme. This is as far as I know the first specialised therapy programme for IA available in the UK, though I’m sure there are other people like me who are interested in the subject, and have been seeing cases as they come up in our routine work.
The Capio programme offers inpatient and outpatient therapy, and is only available privately, though I guess it might be possible to get it paid for by the NHS via an extra-contractual referral. The therapeutic model they are using seems to be a mix of CBT, IPT and behavioural interventions. I did train in IPT a few years back, but I’ve only ever used it in depression, so I don’t know how effective it might be in IA, though, now I think of it, it does seem likely it would be useful in cases where lack of confidence in interpersonal relationships is an issue. It’ll be interesting to see if they publish any outcome studies.
March 19, 2010 Leave a comment
Well this is sad news; Alex Chilton died earlier this week, at the tragically young age of 59, just days before Big Star were due to play a reunion gig at SXSW.
I came to Big Star via Teenage Fanclub, who were heavily influenced by the harmonies of the Memphis-based band. Thirteen, the Fannies 4th album, is named for this classic Big Star track.
I’ve not listened to #1 Record for a while – although it came out in 1972, in my mind it’s associated with the mid-90’s, when I had it on a lot. I’ll get it out and enjoy some good memories – just a shame I’ve been reminded of them in such sad circumstances.
March 17, 2010 2 Comments
I wasn’t going to say anything on the sad story of the Korean couple who allegedly left their baby to starve while they spent time in the virtual world Prius Online, because, you know, it seemed a bit exploitative, but I noticed that a few other blogs had referred to the issue directly or indirectly, and of course I couldn’t resist putting my two cents worth into the comments, (though it turns out that last post wasn’t inspired by the Korean incident after all), so I thought I might as well draw a few thoughts together and post them here.
Actually I’m not going to address the Korean story directly, since all I know about it is what I’ve read in the papers, and in cases like these one really needs to have all the facts before formulating any opinions. Instead I’ll say something more general about the concept of internet addiction – whether it exists at all, and, if so, what can be done to help those suffering from the problem.
My personal opinion is that problematic use of the internet should be regarded as a pathological behaviour, and that it is best thought of as an impulse-control disorder. I first became interested in the topic after reading Caught in The Net, by Kimberly Young, who did a lot of the early work in this area, and who runs the Center for Internet Addiction. Her book is aimed at a lay audience – she does tend to throw around terms like “obsession”, “compulsion” and “addiction” a bit freely – but her conceptualisation of dysfunctional online activity, drawing on the model of pathological gambling, is basically sound.
The existence and nature of internet addiction is still the subject of academic debate though. I thought Jerald Block made a good case a couple of years ago in an editorial in the AJP, Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction, but the draft DSM V, out last month, fails to include it. Interestingly the draft also proposes to move pathological gambling out of “Impulse-Control Disorders Not Elsewhere Classified” and into “Addiction and Related Disorders”, a move that has been labelled one of the “The 19 Worst Suggestions For DSM5“.
This argument about classification may seem a bit arcane, but it reflects a division of opinion that was also evident in the discussion of the Korean case; to what extent does labelling a particular behaviour an “addiction” absolve the person concerned of responsibility for their actions?
When it comes to MMORPGs (which for the sake of this argument we’ll take as including Second Life) there is a tendency among pro-game writers to deny that virtual worlds have any addictive properties at all, and to focus instead on the personal characteristics of the “addicts”, and especially their “personal responsibility” or lack thereof, when seeking to explain the problem. This is evident in the posts I linked to above, and more so in the comments, and is understandable when one considers that politicians and the media are quick to stir up moral panics about the supposed corrupting influence of games on society.
It’s true that impulse-control disorders are rooted in individual psychopathology, which in turn develops from the complex interaction of neurobiology, psychodynamics, cognition, social factors and environment. However I think it has to be acknowledged that games, and especially MMORPGS, have features which may promote problematic use in vulnerable people.
What are these elements? The ability to produce feelings of mastery, to increase confidence in social interaction and to explore hidden aspects of personality, which can combine to boost self-esteem. (These are of course the same things that make the worlds attractive in the first place.) Add in the variable reward schedules that are designed into the games to a greater or lesser degree, and you have the potential to set up cycles of dysfunctional behaviour.
This doesn’t mean that games are inherently dangerous, since clearly the vast majority of players manage to use them without coming to any harm. It does suggest though that there is a particular subset of players for whom over-use of games might become a problem, and raises the question of whether game developers like Linden Lab should be responsible for raising awareness of the possible hazards among residents of their worlds. I would argue that there should be some material about recognising the signs of internet addiction included in the orientation process, and perhaps a timer built into the viewer that that pops up after, say, two hours on the grid and suggests that it might be time to take a break. I can’t see this happening though, since steps like these could be construed as an admission by the Lab that they are aware of the potentially harmful nature of their product, which would presumably expose them to some sort of liability.
What of treatment? In general terms, my experience of treating this sort of problem has convinced me of the importance of taking a non-judgemental approach. Although therapy for impulse-control disorder does focus on the choices that the client makes in certain situations, with the aim of helping them regain a feeling of control, over-emphasising “personal responsibility” is usually not helpful. These clients start with low-self esteem, and the condition further erodes their confidence in their ability to take charge of their lives, so reminding them that they could have avoided the mess by making different choices tends not to make them feel any better. Instead it’s more useful to focus on the positives, the areas of their lives that they feel they can manage sucessfully, and try to build on these.
It’s interesting that discussion of addictions, and particularly process addictions (which, as mentioned above, I prefer to conceptualise as impulse-control disorders, though plenty of people would disagree with me), often takes on a rather moralistic tone, with implicit, or sometimes explicit, condemnation of addicts for failing to take “responsibility” for what they do. I tend to think that this position represents a defence against acknowledging the extent to which everyone is a potential “addict”, a projection of intolerable unconscious “irresponsibility”. I think it’s healthier to recognise that we are all fallible humans, and we can all make bad choices, and remember that when we do mess up it’s nicer if people treat us with sympathy and compassion, rather than going on and on about “personal responsibility”.
In internet addiction specifically the treatment with the best evidence base is CBT – Young published a paper on treatment outcomes in 2007. There was also an interesting paper last year from the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University last year looking at various treatment approaches to videogame addiction, including 12-step, CBT and Motivational Interviewing. 12-step programmes for internet addiction are widely available – at On-Line Gamers Anonymous for example – but I’m not aware that these have been rigorously evaluated. I’m not as familiar as I would like to be with the published work coming out of South Korea and China, where they take this problem very seriously, but what I have read suggests that behavioural and family therapy approaches are useful, in younger populations especially. I expect there will be a lot more research into treatment of internet addiction published in the West over the next few years, and the best therapeutic options should become more evident.
Second Life Shrink 
