Podcast 16: Can gamification lead to game addiction?

Welcome to this week's episode of A Question of Gamification. And this week's episode is all about game addiction. In fact, I had a question this week, can gamification lead to game addiction? My name is An Coppens. I am the show host for The Question on Gamification, and also the chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. Now, I often receive the question, what about my kids, they are always playing Fortnite or they are always playing X-Game. At the time of Pokemon Go, it was Pokemon Go. Today its Fortnite, tomorrow, it may be a new game. And the thing is, game trends will come and go. The one measurable that you always need to look out for is do your kids do anything else but play video games or computer games or tablet games? If they do, then you're probably fine. Can gamification lead to addiction? I guess it could. So the honest answer is that anything where we're rewarding people and making them feel good, which is releasing positive chemical reactions in both the body and the brain can have the impact of achieving addiction. So I suppose the grassroots ingredients are there. Now, when we look at gamification, most of the time, we're speaking about business applications or applications that are not focused purely on entertainment, namely work, fitness, health. Now, I know people who are totally into using their Fitbit, and they would often come out with saying, "Oh, I'm addicted to my Fitbit" and "Oh, I'm addicted to my health statistics, etc." But not to such an extreme that nothing else matters. And this is where I would draw the line. The place when something becomes an addiction is when the person has to achieve beyond all else beyond all other reason. The fact that the World Health Organization has recently approved game addiction as a real ailment or real addiction is sort of to make the point that anything in too many doses or too much will be detrimental to someone's health, be detrimental to someone's well being, both mentally and physically. And those risks exist. The risk with gamification is that, yes, you may do something for a certain time, for longer,  more often, you may be more committed. But so far, I have yet to come across a situation where gamification has become an addiction. Gaming can be an addiction if nothing else exists beyond the game. That means no more social life, no more friends, no more work. In fact, the game always comes first. That's when it gets to that point where you have to win, and would even go as far as potentially ringing the support line of your favourite game, to say, Hey, I'm about to do serious damage, if I don't get a life, or I don't get my points back, etc. That's when we're really talking about a serious situation. In those cases, it's important to work with the individual to make them aware that something is wrong and to also seek professional help to help them through this. This is not something you should tackle on your own or the individual on their own. Like anything, most of us do things for the greater good for and we design for gamification and for games, we want people to become better. We wanted to have every great and positive intention. We also still want people to have a life outside of what we build. So we don't want them to play all of the time. We don't want them to be stuck in a game. And I think if your children go through phases where one game is so all-consuming and all-absorbing if they're still playing with friends, if they're still enjoying, play sports if they're still inviting friends over to come and play the same game, it's okay. Now if we look at the benefits of gaming, and that is something I often get asked about by parents is like my kids are always playing, and they're always looking into this, I want to limit their time. Think about it this way. For a lot of introverted kids,