[Music]
today I'm going to talk about a concept
that has increasingly consumed my time
and energy which is the topic of gaming
addiction and I hope to share what I've
learned about it in the last five or so
years with you so first Who am I well
what am i I guess I'm an experimental
psychologist so I was I originally
trained as the kind of psychologist that
helps people but then I was approached
by my PhD supervisor who had the idea
that maybe we could use empirical
psychology quantitative psychology to
study video games in the study
benchmarking and game development so I
co-developed the pens which is an
application of motivational theory to
game development as a player experience
and each satisfaction approach I'm most
interested in behavior physiology and
human motivation and this kind of
encompasses kind of small scale data
things in the lab things you think of as
play testing and large scale or big data
following tens of thousands of people
over time with behavioral data with
trace data with survey data and I'm
increasingly interested in
evidence-based policymaking so basically
if you're a lawmaker or if you're a
regulator or if you're in charge of an
education or health system how do you
make a decision on the basis of
scientific knowledge about technology
specifically in a way that kind of
conforms to or as harmonizes with what
we know from science I'm I was also born
in 1982 so I'm really in the sweet spot
for having played the original Nintendo
and so this was my present on my seventh
birthday so why am I here what are the
kinds of things I'm going to talk about
well I'm sure that that everyone in the
room has has tiny bits or large bits or
chunks of an idea
about what gaming addiction is I'm gonna
try to cover these five topics I'm gonna
start by trying to offer somewhat of a
historic perspective on concerns about
games and addiction in particular I'm
going to talk about kind of what is the
philosophical or theoretical position
that's required to kind of understand
what gaming addiction is I'm going to
talk a little bit about the different
classes and the different kinds of
scientific evidence that that
psychologists psychiatrists
epidemiologists and some kinds of
sociologists kind of apply so the
question of gaming addiction this is
just every time we use the word
addiction you're allowed to just put
giant quotes around that word I'm gonna
talk about the direction the trajectory
that I see things going if nobody in the
industry changes their current behavior
sets what the endgame is going to be and
I'm gonna try time permitting to be
somewhat optimistic and offer an
alternative vision that doesn't involve
plowing into the side of a mountain
so to start for some historic
perspective to kind of zoom out in terms
of how we see our concerns about games
concerns about games are very certainly
not new the first documented case I
could find of a relatively popular game
was in the New York Times in the
mid-1970s there was a game called death
race I was an arcade game a
coin-operated arcade game where in I
think it was a two-player game you drove
around killing these gremlins and then
every time you killed a gremlin there
was a little tombstone and then you had
to void that all the tombstones of all
the gremlins you killed and then keep
running down gremlins any case the
coverage of this concern of this game is
basically the template for everything
that we've observed in the subsequent 40
years 40 plus years of video game media
coverage so we have an active ingredient
for our concern and and this is a pretty
common one for different video game
concerns it's that games are interactive
all right that's the thing that sets
them apart from a different form of
media that's the that's the
thing that makes them qualitatively
different in some way when people play
games they they practice and act in a
fantasy environment that generalizes
either through confusion or
desensitization it fear their experience
in this virtual environment kind of gets
mixed up with or written over what they
would have otherwise developed as as a
person if they had never played death
race 2000 and then and then when we're
talking about the effects of games on
people we typically identify a
vulnerable party they're typically not a
36 year old
straight white guy there's some other
group of people depending on the kind of
media and might be children it might be
migrants it might be women really
depending on the different kind of media
that we've had a concern about there's
always a vulnerable group if the effects
aren't obvious on this on an individual
level an argument gets made that on the
societal level the effect must be
significant and in this one specifically
the expert that they brought in he said
that this would lead to a higher level
of pedestrian traffic fatalities but
that's always but with these kinds of
concerns there's always one of these
things that even if there isn't a clear
you know transitive Rock a scratches
Rock B Rock B scratches rock C so then a
on C there's some kind of probabilistic
notion that happens across the whole
population and then I apologize most of
the time that they're an expert weighs
in they are a psychologist I'm just
because we're so fancy and and they
always end in free advertising for the
game developer this one closes with but
mr. Brooks was unfazed every time a
story comes out he said we get more and
more orders so I think these these
cabinets sold for about $1,000 each so
concerns about violent video games and I
promised him what labor this too much I
have a point depending on how you slice
the data you actually could think that
violent video games were positively
associated with youth crime for some
period of time between death race and
and when I got mine Nintendo but then
other thing
happened in society and so from like the
mid-90s until the the present era
there's almost a perfect negative
correlation between teen crime and
violent video game sales in the United
States so there are some classes of
evidence that relate to concerns that's
in that in some cases can ameliorate
them at least for certain parts of the
population but addiction is a little bit
different so when we talk about
addiction and technology or addiction
and games interactivity is still a
feature of it but actually in a weird
way it's both a younger set of concerns
and a more static set of concerns so in
the same way that that interactivity is
important for both the the the the mode
or the model of the lens that we see
technology addiction or gaming addiction
through is is intrinsically different
because there is a model that already
existed for us to think about gaming
addiction so in the in the late 1990s
there was a psychiatrist called Ivan
Goldberg is one of New York's leading
addiction researchers and he was so
frustrated with the medical model of
addiction that as an act of satire on a
on a email list on a listserv he
actually created gaming a he created
Internet addiction and he just like kind
of like took the checklist approach and
just like point out how silly
psychiatrist had been about
pathologizing all these normal parts of
life in the late 90s apparently the
internet was still part of life though
maybe wasn't as fun I and he was shocked
because actually it turned real people
started coming to him with their
imagined or real problems with
technology addiction and so really
what's going on here this is kind of one
of many indicators that the challenge
that we might face with dealing with
concerns are thinking about concerns
about aggression are very different than
what we see with addiction so we can
compare these are kind of a direct basis
so when we talk about violent games we
actually have a pretty poor fitting
model from social science to describe
the effects that we would expect but
when we talk about addiction to games we
have a pre-existing model a mold people
have been studying addiction for a very
long time so there's an easy fit at
least in terms of a lot of the Lange
and a lot of the assumptions for violent
games there's a lot of similarities to
other forms of media that have come
before so we have comic books we have
movies we have novels that have you know
like crime novels and a lot of these
fears a lot of these concerns were
busted so when we think about parallels
to our concerns about games and
aggression when we think about those
parallels it kind of leads us to be like
huh
maybe there's not it there there but
when we think about addiction it's very
different with games with games there's
a lot of novel factors that other
comparison media don't have many of the
fears are supported but in a kind of
weird way like we have anxiety about
things like I don't know election
interference or the attention economy or
the monetization the monetization of
attention and they're not really about
games or addiction proper but because
they happen on the same device because
these things are kind of intrinsically
cross-platform now our anxieties don't
kind of stay with a console the way they
might have in the mid 90s so you know
there there's definitely a there's a
real qualitative difference between how
a parent or a policymaker sees a doom
sold on cd-rom in a box in the early
1990s and and how they see Call of Duty
4 with endless you know DLCs and and
added features and dynamic challenge
generation and so the the boundaries of
the media are very different and every
time that somebody thinks about the
limits or the lack of boundaries on it
it kind of leads them to think oh my
goodness what else could be happening so
actually the the I say this is draw a
contrast between the two concerns they
both involve many of the same actors
they involve many of the same kind of
stakeholders in society but they are
fundamentally different challenges
the second thing I want to talk about is
kind of the philosophical or theoretical
underpinnings of addiction
now I've heard this a few times Celia is
great with this a few others are really
great with this is that we need to be
really careful about how we use the term
addiction and we have a common use of it
we we kind of it's kind of the same as
saying something's fun or it's engaging
or it's immersive but how we react to
the word addiction really depends on the
thing that we're thinking about the
substance that we're talking about if we
say my loved one is addicted to to
smoking or to heroin or to gambling
that's very different than saying he
plays too much golf on Sundays my
teenagers just like can't stop on
Instagram or you know the the battery
keeps dying on the phone because there's
so much Fortnight being played there's
something fundamentally different about
how we use the word addiction for these
things but in English we don't have a
lot of really good ways of
discriminating the two one way you could
discriminate the two however is with the
off-the-shelf model that we inherit from
the Medical Sciences so in this model
there's an active ingredient behind
different forms of addiction so for
smoking its nicotine for heroin it's
certain classes of opioids for gambling
people think it's dopamine but they
don't really know we can see things like
when you give Parkinson's patients
l-dopa
and they have more free-floating
dopamine in their systems they they
might for the first time in their lives
become gambling addicts so there's some
treatment effects there but we're not
quite sure on both but the mechanisms
for certain kinds of behavioral
dysregulation x' things like gaming
things like shopping it's not very clear
what the kind of mechanism would be what
the active ingredient might be but there
is kind of in the way that we practice
science on this topic an assumption that
there is some shared kind of commonality
there's some kind of active ingredient
that like lives inside of all gambling
or lives inside of all sports addiction
does that make sense yeah thank you so
with that in mind with a medical model
in mind
all good psychiatrists and
epidemiologists begin to build taxonomy
x' they're basically two you've heard
about I would imagine the first is the
American model from the American
Psychiatric Association and the second
is a model from a working group at the
World Health Organization with the World
Health Organization the the American
model is there was a proposal made for
research on a topic of something called
internet gaming disorder the internet is
not defined and games are not defined
but there is a taxonomy of potential
symptoms that are identified and I'll
talk about them a little bit more in a
little bit but it is kind of like a a
syndrome without any of the core
definitions I've emailed people asking
them very desperately in industry and in
academia and psychiatry well what the
hell is an internet game and nobody can
tell me the World Health Organization
has a more general concept it is it is
called gaming disorder so it doesn't
have the Internet in it for any reason
and the basic idea here is instead of
having symptoms or some kind of
indicators of what the illness should be
they basically say that it's when you do
gaming for a year and across that year
you suffer significant impairment to
something that's important to you so
it's a bit of a tautology so it's a
little bit of a you know I'm snake
eating itself but there's a little
disclaimer that says but if it's really
bad if games are super duper disruptive
then you don't even need to have this
problem for a year and this is basically
where we're at right now because it's
it's a class of argument by analogy
which is to say that we think there
might be a problem here we think there
might be an active ingredient we think
that people's lives might be impacted
this might be the cause of a disorder or
the cause of ill health and this is kind
of where we are philosophically alright
so in some ways gambling disorders are
jumping off point and in some way
different substance abuse disorders are
jumping off point but but here's really
where we're landing so according to the
American Psychiatric Association
essentially they took the checklist of
of indicators for gambling disorder
they took out the word gambling and they
put in the word internet gaming so there
are nine possible indicators I just
counted actually I only put eight on
this slide and the idea is that if you
could say yes to five or more of these
then you might be classified as having a
problem with gaming and again the idea
here is that each one of these possible
symptoms is it's like equally indicative
of you having a problem and that
assumption is kind of supported by the
fact that or rather that assumptions
supported by the idea and that there is
something in all games no matter what
type they are that's analogous the thing
that's inside all cigarettes no matter
who manufactures them that is kind of
generally addictive for those who might
be vulnerable that makes sense all right
so in the third bit I'm going to talk a
little bit about evidence so as a
scientist I love evidence as someone who
lives in England I love that my airplane
works and gets me here and also I'm
really interested to know what
scientists have been up to for the last
twenty years
so depending on what words you use when
you look up a literature on video gaming
addiction you can call disordered gaming
problem gaming gaming addiction internet
gaming disorder gaming disorder you kind
of have to write a pretty long search
string there's between 50 and maybe 300
Studies on gaming addiction in the last
few decades and they fall into one of
basically four tranches the first this
kind of measurement so if there's a
there there how do we measure it the
second is uh neuro imaging studies so in
some way can we learn something about
how typical versus non typical gamers
approach games based on something that
is a signal that we can detect detect in
an fMRI scanner symptomatology these are
studies about kind of what would gaming
disorder be correlated with in the world
of psychopathology how does it kind of
fit
the larger excuse me in the larger
puzzle of mental illness and then
treatment so this is if somebody has a
problem how might we help them alright
so overwhelmingly the great majority of
those 250 studies are measurement
studies all right so these are large
typically large scale so maybe between
150 and you know our work has upwards of
20,000 participants and the idea is that
using some form of Survey Research you
cast as wide a net as possible within
this medical framework and you try to
test if those symptoms are those
indicators if the sniffles and coughs
that you think are related to the
underlying problem of gaming addiction
if if those are actually present in the
population and how good are those
questions at discriminating a player
who's playing out of a sense of choice
and volition from a player who's playing
out of a sense of say compulsion feeling
like they have to play instead of
feeling like they want to play
unfortunately the great majority of this
research uses what's called convenient
sampling so in the rare cases where you
actually get gamers who have problems
with play it's because the researcher
has gone to a gaming addiction subreddit
or they've gone to a part of the
internet where where gamers who have
problems regulating their play kind of
congregate and then they conduct this
research and in some ways this is a bit
like researching drug use only outside
of a needle exchange you don't get a
very clear sense of how many people in
the population have a problem if you're
sampling only within certain kind of
tranches in certain parts of certain
communities but but it but it is the
case that of these 250 studies are not
250 but of about 200 of these studies
really what's going on are these
convenience samples so people are
running a thesis they're doing a project
in a high school or a school system or
or they're having friends of friends of
friends of friends of friends take
surveys
the second class of study are different
types of neuroscience studies these are
much much smaller studies they have
small samples because the amount of the
amount of money it takes to cost of like
at least seventeen hundred dollars an
hour to give somebody to prepare someone
and then do an fMRI scan so these
studies typically have very small
samples between 10 and 20 people in them
and the basic idea behind all of these
studies is they give a large number of
gamers in a community a survey they try
to flag the ones that are like low
players and high players or the ones
they think might have a problem gaming
and the ones that think they think are
quote unquote normal alright and then
they have them do tasks in in an fMRI
where they show them in many cases
reminders of their favorite game and
then they try to see how much activation
there is relative activation there is
between the two groups and while this
doesn't actually tell you anything about
addiction you do observe some
differences and you don't know if that's
just because they like the games a whole
lot but there have been many many
studies like this and and one of these
will come out at least once a month
every month for the rest of our lives
the symptomatology studies sorry I'm
getting Vikram I should I should I
should not get grim for another 15
minutes all right the third set is is
much less common than then it should be
and I consider it a very interesting set
of study a class of studies where
basically people try to figure out if
you score high on these questionnaires
of gaming disorder what else do you
score high on not thinking necessarily
the gaming disorder causes these other
problems but how how do different kind
of constellations or how do different
kind of clusters of these disorders kind
of relate to each other or interrelate
it's gaming in some way a coping
mechanism this problem gaming in some a
coping mechanism for something
that's either organic going on in
someone's brain or a link to a social
environment or some kind of stressor
like school and unfortunately this is
this kind of research is really hampered
by the medical model so there are some
gatekeepers in academia who have some
very clear ideas about what gaming
addiction is and isn't and so if you
kind of come with this kind of open
minded exploratory perspective it's much
harder to publish the papers and I don't
know how much you know about academic
publishing but it's it's quite important
not as important as getting grants but
but it's up there does that make sense
alright now I saw I thought I saw a hand
I got really worried for a second there
all right and then by far thankfully the
rarest class of study are the treatment
studies so these are exceedingly rare I
found three of these and and I look
every few weeks I have a search that
runs and in these studies basically what
happens is either there is a behavioral
or a pharmaceutical intervention with a
population of players who are either
self-identify or a therapist has decided
they have a problem with games the
typical treatment is cognitive
behavioral therapy which one might think
works with a lot of different problems
but I am I am quite worried from an
ethics perspective about before we have
disorders a disorder that has real
symptoms and a real course of treatment
potential course of treatment that we're
giving people medication for gaming that
makes sense so those are the four
classes it's a great majority of the
studies are these cheap and easy studies
where you collect a load of participants
you ask them about their favorite hobby
some of them say they have a problem you
do a bunch of statistics second is you
con a research agency into giving you
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
and you scan 30 people's brains and show
them pictures of World of Warcraft and
fortnight dances
the third is you kind of do some really
cool Network science which I'm sure some
people in the room know how to do and
you try to see how these things
constellated over time and then you have
the island of dr. Moreau so if so when
you look at this literature kind of by
and large the data is actually fairly
low quality it the studies aren't done
very well there isn't a lot of
transparency nobody has their hypotheses
before they collect their data you can't
see any one statistical models because
they don't share their code so there's
been a few consortiums of researchers of
which I count myself where we kind of
try to point these things out we try to
say hey hold on a second there are two
billion video game players in the world
these 250 studies are kind of garbage
we're really going out on a limb here if
you're running a health system this
isn't you know you wouldn't you wouldn't
identify a new parasite this way why why
are you why are you talking about a new
behavioral disorder well unfortunately
games are very very popular so does
anyone know what the base rate fallacy
is all right what if I told you that
almost all serial killers wear socks all
right if you didn't know how many people
in the general population wore socks you
could interpret this as a pretty good
signal that the person any given person
with socks you don't actually have socks
it is a serial killer games are super
popular this means that a giant slice of
young people upwards ninety-five percent
depending on how you count are pretty
engaged with some form of game that kind
of hits them at the right they bounce
off a bunch of stuff but it hits them at
the right angle and they find their game
for a few months or a few years so when
something bad happens in a young
person's life which is inevitable there
is an unending stream of anecdotal
evidence and this anecdotal evidence I
have to tell you openings are getting
grim I is more than enough for this
party to stop all right
the it is true that there is actually
some evidence of absence
but because the evidence base is so crap
we have to fall back on the absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence
so we don't know what we don't know
because research isn't being done
properly and in the meantime we're going
to have monster of the week scary story
and that's more than enough to motivate
regulators and that's more than enough
to motivate people who run health
systems in a way that we would have
never seen with violence and aggression
so we'll talk a little bit about endgame
alright this is my most optimistic slide
so I think best-case scenario this party
is going to go on for about five more
years
alright so the public the people who
control taxation and commerce they're
that tiny little boat actually this this
metaphor breaks down the more I think
about it I thought I was very clever
when I drew this picture okay I'm just
gonna go with it it's a indestructible
boat it's in god mode okay so there is a
a level of understanding that the public
and policymakers have they can Intuit a
whole bunch of stuff about gaming
addiction or about kind of the larger
halo around games and behavioral
dysregulation that are kind of the
obvious salient features
very few people like real money
transactions
no one likes plate to pay to win right
loot boxes are like if I ever hear that
word again and anti-social behavior on
platforms where people don't take we're
developers don't take these things
seriously and kids come right rightly to
their parents terrified or minorly
traumatized by a irresponsible design
decision there are some things over the
surface that that quote-unquote normal
people can see there that are kind of
illnesses in the industry all right but
as the little boat that's indestructible
gets closer to the iceberg they're gonna
be able to see all the other stuff
and once they start poking around with
regulations their hands are just going
to go into all of these different pies
there's a lot of booths around this kind
of stuff I don't know you should walk
around the expo center it's kind of cool
stuff so why is this happening why why
is this collision inevitable well there
are some things that you don't that the
people in this room don't have a lot of
control over all right first generally
there's been a deterioration in the
quality of science journalism so a lot
of newsrooms don't have scientists
covering science beats anymore because
of just things that are happening in
that profession second there's been
since the year 2000 there's been a rise
in what could be called moral
entrepreneurs so these are it's not
necessarily morals in terms of right or
wrong but it's morals in terms of norms
this is an idea from sociology so the
idea is that there are people who kind
of listen to to the feel the way the
wind is blowing interpret what the norm
is around a technology and then what
they do is they sell that back to us in
the form of parenting advice in a kind
of a high profile book and in the last
in the last two decades we've gotten
this increasingly with social media with
games the does anyone in
one in the audience do that raise your
hand if you know who Phil Zimbardo is
this is good oh I heard a little I heard
a ringing noise somebody didn't listen
to my rule about ringing okay it's not
my rule
just give me perfect scores please all
right I don't care you can all make
noise I just need the perfect scores so
anyway so some of you had your hands up
let's assume 11% who knows that Phil
Zimbardo wrote a book about video games
one two okay I might have yeah we
probably talked - you talked about it
all right he did he wrote an entire
fills and Bardo the guy who did the
Stanford Prison Experiment he wrote a
whole book about how video games are
feminizing boys this was completely new
to me I read the book it was thankfully
it was quite short just type just just
type of Zimbardo show Bilski debate when
you have some free time and you can
watch what happens but but there is now
and there's kind of an economic thought
leader niche around technology and so
every six or ten months it's kind of
like behind like pulling a lever or a
loot box we get a different new
technological demon and a lot of them
land on games you don't have a lot of
control over that I do my best as a
scientist um there's a lot of
technological anxieties in the air so in
the same way that we might be very proud
about games being able to play on all of
these different platforms not mentioning
any giant company it's the case that we
also do other things on those devices
like our email or our grinder or like no
I didn't say that but I we and so in our
minds when we use this device we have a
pretty undifferentiated sense of what it
might do for us or to us and if games
are part of that ecology that part of
that kind of that blurring of our hopes
and our anxieties then what we might
think of as an affordance helping
somebody play a game on a platform it
might actually associate our other
feelings about arguing on Twitter with
lovely games of fortnight and then the
final thing is that and this is
absolutely true and I'll speak
autobiographically there are a lot of
really bad psychologists out there
there's a lot of bad academics and
professors out there and I can't control
their behavior and I try to call it out
when I can when I have knowledge of it
but your industry has some pretty bad
actors in it and and they might ruin the
party for you and you don't necessarily
have control over that things you do
have control over all right I've heard
the answer to bad speech is good speech
more speech you just keep pulling that
again you just keep finding analogies
one way you can say is the answer to bad
science is good science the problem is
is there's no good science and that's
partly because it's actually very hard
to do good science on gaming addiction
because unlike other things when you if
you're a researcher and you want to know
the effects of nicotine on on smokers or
on on mammals you can go out to the
store and you can buy cigarettes and you
can analyze everything that's in them as
a biochemist alright then you can
synthesize your own thing and you can
run your own study you actually can't do
that with a lot of games because of how
they're designed how they're updated how
the IP is traced and taken care of and
so actually scientists have a much
poorer idea
a much less enriched idea of what
actually happens inside of games because
so much of it is considered IP so much
of it is considered proprietary so much
of it is outside the scope of of
scientific inquiry it's a bit like
imagine that you're coming across it's
late at night and you come across a
drunk and he's looking you know
furtively around at the ground
underneath the street lamp and you say
to him you know sir what are you doing
and he says I'm looking for the keys to
my house and you say why did you drop
them here and he says no but this is the
only place that I can
what's happening part of the reason why
the literature on on gaming addiction or
on aggression is is so irredeemable is
because you all have the data that's
required to actually study it and what
many academic scientists are left with
are the scraps and this is part I think
in some way of two things the first
thing is a lot I know people in the
industry were really burned by the
aggression debate and the First
Amendment's basically the reason why
we're not having a very different set of
conversations right now uh and the
second is an on by default defensive
posture a reactive posture and it's true
that things are only steadily slightly
getting worse every six months and so
area under the curve profit things are
fine but they are getting irredeemably
worse there are certain authorities that
are looking very closely at regulating
I'm on - in the United Kingdom and there
is blowback so a few months ago so it's
very easy to think of something like the
World Health Organization as an
organized body that really has its ducks
in a row see them in America so I can
use duck idioms and they really weren't
they were really internally quite the
the World Health Organization they were
really quite fraught about this Gaming
disorder thing the the the people who
were working in the icd-11 they had
really gone out on a limb alright and
there was a lot of debate internally in
the UN and then the ESA decided to
publish a rebuttal to the evidence and
it cherry-picked some of my research
just the parts that show games aren't so
bad not the parts that say that people's
thoughts about them being good are also
overblown cherry-picked some stuff about
games being great for cognitive
development yada yada yada
and then went to town with a press
release and you know what
everyone woke up to the next morning in
the UN they circle the wagons moment so
now they're much more convinced that
they were right the whole time and
you're all evil I would have warned you
not to do that so my my piece of advice
here is I think you probably all should
consider bracing for impact there are a
lot of bad things that can come from
this reactive stance from there not
being good science from there being
monster-of-the-week anecdotal Anik data
from from rightfully scared parents the
first is there's going to be stigmatize
we're gonna stigmatize a hobby of more
than a billion people on this planet the
second is that there's going to be a lot
of really dumb regulation coming down
the pipe it's going to be inspired just
like the medical metaphor the medical
model metaphor it's going to be inspired
by that so in the in the EU we have
these I don't know if they're in America
yet like these giant packet warnings on
cigarettes that show you like a lung
that got coughed out of a Dilophosaurus
or something you're gonna get that
there's going to be depending on the
patchwork of markets and regulations in
some places more aggressive regulators
are going to fragment the market the
marketplace and you're going to have
certain kinds of labeling rules they're
going to be sin taxes
cost of doing business it's gonna it's
going to make the violent video game
stuff look like nothing and then there's
going to be fines so there's going to be
a lot of compliance and that's going to
have two effects the the first effect is
it's going to start siphoning giant
amounts of money out of your
organization so Google can sustain four
and a half billion euro is followed by
1.7 billion euros and they can pay
really really clever lawyers to like
kind of like make that follow a
diminishing function I don't know how
many gaming companies consistent I don't
even know if the big boys can sustain
more than a few billion dollars of
direct fees their fines and I don't
think they can afford to leave the EU
market so in a lot of ways there have
been short-term victories that are going
to lead to long term defeats on this I
see someone wearing a Nintendo shirt and
I think Nintendo might be fine actually
so you know what can we do and I'm not
I'm going to intentionally try to end a
little early so we can have questions
not comments what what what can you guys
possibly do to turn a corner on this and
to turn turn this defeat into an
opportunity you need to be proactive
there needs to be a fundamental shift in
your approach to something like gaming
addiction or gaming an aggression or
whatever and there'll be other I promise
there'll be other things that people
will make up if addiction ever goes away
it's be afraid of this is going to
involve you considering what are your
first principles or articulate what do
you want to be in developers as
responsible citizens and designers of
playgrounds for children this is going
to involve reading human rights law so
the UN Council UN Charter on the Rights
of the Child say that young people have
a right to information and they have a
right to play and if I have my way
they'll also have a right to play video
games and other forms of entertainment
when this gets revised because it's from
the late 1980s but the only way that we
get there is if you are at the table so
Lego has ethical design principles for
their embodied toys they check in with
those before they build their
environments and I understand that Lego
environments are a little bit more
constrained than League of Legends but
but but they they've got a touchstone
and they're all and the touchstones in
this industry or rather fragmented
I think that you need to be part of good
science I think you need to promote it
and there's a lot of ways that you can
and I'll detail some of them in a minute
and I think that you probably need to
coordinate because none of you are as
big as a Google or a Facebook and I I
really think that there needs to be in
the same way that the free put wait fair
fair play alliance sorry I have a
sticker I should check it but in the
same way that the Fair Play Alliance is
trying to articulate a certain set of
standards I think you're going to need
that more broadly to answer kind of the
big questions of play so it's not just
about reaction I'm so I'm gonna close
with this um
I think you need to foster and model
good science I think that involves in
engaging in in strategic tactical and
strategic data sharing you need to think
about the the kinds of data that you
collect to improve your product or to
monetize your product you need to think
about that in terms of how that can be
used to improve our fundamental
understanding of how billions of people
spend tens of billions of hours of every
week of their lives hopefully having fun
this can involve data sharing hackathons
at different levels of education with
your data you get to figure out which
kids are really the ones who are you
know potentially potentially hireable
you might consider funding an actual
research organization to study play kind
of an extension of what's going on in
the uxu E space user experience space
right now think about collaborations
with academics when you do them not as
like you bring in in a petri dish or not
picture just but like you bring in a
sample of an academic or you share data
with just him or her but actually think
about this is more of a team-based
activity about joint knowledge
production and I think that really the
defensive miss to stop or you'll all go
extinct there are things about games
that are great and there are probably
things about games that aren't and I
think it's important that we know what
those are
and we know how that we're sure about
them as we are about our reasons for
things like airplane staying in the air
all right because so much of ourselves
are invested in these mediums they're so
amazing and we owe it to everyone who
plays to to learn as much as we can and
that means we might find some scary
stuff but I firmly believe that we
everyone's entitled to their own
opinions about art and about this medium
but they're not entitled to their own
facts so with that I'm gonna say thank
you for your time and attention and
please for the love of God ask me
questions
[Applause]
hello hi so uh I'm someone with a deep
interest in this to begin with I work at
valve now as an economist but prior to
that I spent about fourteen years as a
social policy researcher so this is this
is very dear to me and I see what your
point is about the bad evidence that's
out there in the market right now but
you know obviously you and and we are
interested in the actual truth about
this and I'm wondering if we as game
companies are to fund research or do
partnerships especially given that you
know many game organizations are gonna
have interests and just showing the
positive signs of game and not the
negative are we gonna be combating bad
science that says that gaming is a bad
thing yeah with bad science that says
gaming is a good thing mm-hmm that's a
great question so and this is not a
problem that is specific to games or
getting the games industry I think that
it is a natural human instinct to want
to see the positives of the things that
we're most invested in and we love the
most I think fundamentally this comes
down to whether or not the money the
data the research
is the cooperation whether or not that's
contingent on the findings so in the
social sciences more broadly and the
Medical Sciences there's a movement to
something called pre-registration and
registered reports this is the idea that
you write down what you're going to do
before you do it and you or it's peer
reviewed before you collect your data
and that's the only way that this will
work so basically it is a this is why it
requires open-mindedness and a certain
level of letting go of control because
there will be things that but
transparencies the thing that will save
us on that so you may not be able to
share the exact data set that comes out
of one of these collaborations or the
projects but you can create a simulated
data depending on the class of data
which other people can can question your
code or your models so well I'm happy to
follow that up but there's a number of
people unless you have one more just
very small yeah I agree with everything
you said about standards I'd also
advocate for transparency in how data
sets are created yes because that's an
important piece of it
yes computational reproducibility is
something that scientists are horrific I
thank you everyone's horrific at it
you're welcome I think there and then
I'll alternate or not alternate
obviously thank you
I find that when we act as advocates for
games and ambassadors of our industry
and we have to defend ourselves against
things like internet gaming disorder
classification and the certain kinds of
studies the the bad science studies I
find there's a real danger and tendency
to dip into dog mattes ISM and in some
cases come off as anti intellectualism
what do you recommend especially if we
are not scientists or psychologists how
do we sort of avoid coming off that way
I think curiosity is the thing that's
missing so one of the one of the real
tragedies of you know both of concern
focused research in psychological
science and these other sciences is that
there's actually a very low level of
curiosity or interest and what the hell
games are and so when I was training as
a scientist I
wanted to do Studies on motivation and
so the way I learn is through examples
and so I'd have to read other lab
studies and it really ground me down the
lack of curiosity and so I I think
remembering that you're not going to
lose your job if you listen to a parent
who's flustered or trying to identify if
the person has try to try to identify
what their interest or where their
passion comes from for arguing with you
and I think that the insights you get I
mean it's very banal when you get to the
moral entrepreneurs or their whole
reason for being is to sell a book and a
consultancy etc etc you do not need to
listen to those you can your please feel
free to argue with them but I think a
lot of people just don't have a lot of
clarity on what exactly they're unhappy
about hope that helps absolutely thank
you okay
sorry what do you think is there risk
but the responsibility of conferences
like GDC that host talks that teach dark
patterns and promote the attention
economy I think in the first instance we
need to understand the the reasons why
those things either work or don't work
on a very thorough level so you talk to
say Tristan or these guys who are doing
the time well-spent
movement the other kind of like they
have come to they're found Jesus moment
they've decided that when they worked at
Google they were evil because they
manipulated people and now they've
realized that that was wrong and now
they'll help right but when you ask them
about the research that underlies their
thinking that they were these kind of
Oppenheimer's of social control they
point at studies that are garbage from
the social sciences like there's this
there was a Cornell professor Brian
Wansink who like had this unending Super
Bowl experiment but he's a fraud stirrer
the experiment never worked and these
guys who think that they have you know
fooled the world you know it's possible
they still did but the the evidentiary
basis
for their claims for good or bad are
kind of based on his whole series of
assumptions so I get tricked by dark
patterns it makes sense to me that that
happens but I think that the first duty
of an organization is to actually
document the phenomena closely because
if we regulate it without understanding
it or if we kind of set rules about it
without understanding it you know it's a
dinosaur's amber scenario so good yeah
Thanks hello so regarding the iceberg
metaphor Oh God an algae it's a very
strong boat okay anything quickly well
my question is why do you think that the
boat will catch up with the iceberg
because as it seems to me like you said
every six months something new comes up
uh-huh so what do you makes you believe
that the regulators will actually get
y'all because they haven't been able to
catch up I mean that's a I don't know so
I have two answers one is is polluted by
my own experience which is that I had
years of my life where I wasn't on
parliamentary I wasn't giving evidence
the parliamentary subcommittees on these
topics and now an increasing amount of
my time is spent doing that and I think
it's just a matter of historic record
that you know different companies in
countries different countries are
looking more closely at these mechanics
now so as your question is it happening
or why is it happening I mean will they
ever catch up because it seems to well
but we are developing new ways what
they'll do what they do in the plane
right so what they'll do is they'll
write a rule that is oh I just remember
the second part of answer that I didn't
give they'll write a rule that is like a
catch-all rule and then when a company
that's large enough to step out of line
steps out of line they'll sue it right
or though the levy of fine and sorry and
that was the other thing I wanted to say
that it's not just the companies can't
sustain these fines
it's that the cost of compliance is very
high so it may cut out smaller studios
from certain markets
and then that's a real opportunity cost
for human play some make sense yeah okay
I mean we talk more about that it's
really boring regulatory frameworks for
me I would you say that screen addiction
ties into video game addiction at all is
that similar in that it's not entirely
properly studied or it's it's entirely
the same thing is it yeah so you just
take out literally you can just take out
the word video game and you can put in
smartphone screen social media it's all
the same kind of my Azzam of social
science so the fundamental problem is
that it's large-scale social data from
surveys and so because one person fills
out the survey everything that they
reply to has kind of a background level
of correlation and so things like I use
a screen a certain number of hours a day
and I feel sad those things share 1/3 of
1% of covariance and if you just if all
you care about is a p-value if all you
care about are statistical significance
then you can say something scary but I
work by Amy or Ben and I on screen
impacts you will overdose on that if
you're interested thank you thank you
and I think I can actually do the next
two in the next three minutes if they're
reasonable yes when it comes to these
sort of like research organization are
there any good examples and other
industries where that's actually been
not a defensive thing I'm aware of is a
super defensive like makes it worse kind
of organization yeah I don't know so I
think in my mind the model is a there's
something called a psychological science
accelerator which is a coalition of
hundreds of psychology labs all around
the world and we all run the same
experiment at the same time and that way
we know what we find is either there or
not there psych science accelerator
unfortunately all the collaborations
that I'm aware of in the gambling gaming
industry that one and different kind of
health organizations and governmental
organizations those have all failed
pretty in different ways though
spectacularly in different ways so their
their use cases but but yeah I'm writing
a white paper on how it not how it
cannot be a dumpster fire and so it
should work with Facebook too I hope ok
all right one last one good a from
Rochester nice oh well no one's perfect
yeah so you talked a lot about I really
like the slide where you you were
talking about like when you're addicted
to like drugs at you and like I think
it's it really hit a note where like
we're trying to isolate this X right
this X that is video game addiction and
let's say 20 30 years from now every one
of us in this room knows exactly what
makes a game addicting
right we found X yeah and I really think
that at that point in time there's gonna
be a lot of companies which I won't name
names that want to be the marburo
of games they don't care about morality
they just want to make addicting game so
people play them and there's gonna be a
lot of people who just want to make fun
games that are the opposite of whatever
this X is right and so how do you think
that as you know a community we can deal
with something like that because I feel
like that would literally tear like the
entire games in its riot so this is this
is where I returned to my facts versus
opinions thing so if we actually have
good scientific evidence scientific
evidence that this thing is an opiate
you know let's just imagine it's it's a
horrible addictive thing yeah right
it's like it's kryptonite to children ah
but addictive kryptonite what I think
that if we have clarity on it if we have
the facts on it it'll be very very easy
to regulate okay and and it's not going
to be up to a mom and pop game studio on
I I don't know they're gonna make like
3d augmented body suits in this future
that you have but it's not going to be
up to to you to police them I think that
if we if we have a common set of facts
it'll be ridiculously easy to to
regulate them okay all right I think
that that is time and I thank you all
for your time and attention I don't know
what the scale is but if it's a
ten-point scale you give me a ten and if
it's an eight and eight
right alright thank you so much