Well, as the song goes, a man sees what what he wants to see, and disregards the rest.
Speak for yourself.
You seem to be under the impression that I've disagreed with the legitimacy of gaming addition as a phenomena, or somehow haven't acknowledged that 'Fortnite' itself is especially good at it. Not one iota of the content of my posts in this thread should have implied anything of the sort.
Likelihood of addiction not demonstrated, or even suggested?
"Such likelihood", meaning a significant enough rate to even consider overriding personal choice or parental decisions on the matter.
And not even remotely.
The game has nearly 250 million registered users. Unless you've seen a credible estimation of millions of
Fortnite addicts, the game would seem to be less addictive than countless activities few would consider banning.
I've read the articles and the medical journals (I have access to all the paywalled stuff because my wife is a research professor) and while the consensus definitely seems to be that games can be addictive (which was about the furthest from a surprise as any conclusion can be), I haven't seen even the slightest shred of evidence that it hits any threshold I'd consider prevalent, or significant, enough to be a problem that could possibly justify legislation that would limit access.
It is clearly acknowledged by
psychologists who have studied the effects of such games on the human brain that Fortnite is particularly clever and subtle in the way it triggers the dopamine hits that keep players going for hour after hour after hour.
And what's the actual addiction rate? How many people that try
Fortnite are ever going to have a clinically relevant problem related to it?
Roughly
ten percent of people who are prescribed opioids develop some lasting addiction to them and the consequences of this addition are vastly higher than anything generally noted for gaming addition. More than a hundred people die of overdose of opioids in the US every day and it costs 80 billion Dollars a year. I know people who have ruined lives or died because of their addition to opioids. This is the sort of magnitude of a problem that
almost, but not quite, trips my threshold for regulation. I would rather watch a few of my weaker friends die and see hundreds of the dollars a year I'm extorted out of in taxes go to handling the addiction fallout, than be told what I can or cannot do, or tell anyone not beholden to me what they can or cannot do. Of course, the system being the way it is, I have to put up with both.
Obviously, no matter how clearly I understand the facts of the matter behind video game addition, and no matter how much our facts agree with each other, I am not going to be in favor of legislation to restrict access to video games...for exactly the same reasons I'd scoff at legislation to control masturbation or masturbation accessories.
It's a matter of values. Yours are as alien to me as mine surely are to you. I just don't require anyone else to subscribe to my beliefs, as long as they are willing to leave me and mine out of theirs.
