The latter half of my ‘fruits’ from a Daily Mail search.

Doctors are now claiming that playing too much on your 360, PS3 or Wii could give you the “same highly negative character traits associated with a form of autism“.

Dr. Charlton (Why do these people have almost expected names) studied almost 400 members of an online MMORPG, called Asheron’s Call. What the entire article said, is that 3% of these players exhibited similar symptoms to Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, where you basically have problems forming relations, and communicating. He even says that many of these symptoms are already present in people that are ‘normal’.

OK, here I go again.

• Do not consider analysing players of an MMORPG for game addiction. That’s skewing the results, and represents a tiny portion of gamers as a whole. The sample just proves how small the game is. Anyone who’s been playing it since it’s release date in 1999 is addicted anyway, so this report just warps the results, damaging the reputation of video games further.
• 3% is still an absurdly low figure. If we assume that he tested 400 people, that means 12 people had symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome. aka 388 people showed no symptoms whatsoever. Not to mention, some of these people might have genuinely undiagnosed Asperger’s.
• Asheron’s Call is a Pay-to-play MMO, and as such people will of course spend more time on it than most computer games, because, quite simply, they want to get their money’s worth.
• PC Gamers are amongst the worst for spending time online, quite simply because it requires a lot more than just pushing the power button and inserting a disc. If you really want to skew the results, do the same on World of Warcraft. If you want a genuine sample, choose console gamers, and monitor them. I spend less than two hours a day on Live, but I spend a load more on the computer (mostly ratting out publicity stories like this)

In conclusion, this report has been deliberately set up so it’s already giving them the results they want to hear. And even then, it’s a small percentage. So, take today’s paper with no salt, no sugar, straight to the recycle bin and save yourself the trouble.

Tags: videogame addiction, aspergers, syndrome, autism, asherons call, daily mail

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under News about Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.