National Post - Saturday, March 06, 1999

The Sport of Geeks: Don't tell them it's only a game

A generation of executive men Is addicted to video games. Is computer entertainment the new cocaine?

Bruce Boyden, supreme ruler of ancient Greece, was having logistical difficulties. "The basic problem is that I need to build catapults to guard my city -- but every time I send any workers out to collect gold or stone, they get killed off by Persian archers. So I'm trapped."

And Bruce had other worries as well. Enemy ships were attacking his fishing fleet, and enemy soldiers were laying siege to his capital. Adding insult to injury, the Persian commander was subjecting Bruce to a steady stream of abusive messages: "Bruce = super-loser," "I keeeeeeeelll you," and "Get ready to die die die die die."

Bruce is 30 years old, a member of the first generation in human history to grow up taking cybernetic playthings for granted. For old-school fanatics such as Bruce, video games represent more than just a diversion; they are a lifestyle choice. And they are addictive.

Every year, the North American video game industry generates greater sales than all the studios in Hollywood put together -- $25-billion (US) worldwide and growing. That's a lot of money, especially for a product whose very birth lies well within the memory of most young adults.

Part of that success, of course, is the compulsive quality of the games. Yet like any addictive activity, video game play can damage the social and professional lives of those who get hooked. Take Bruce's old roommate: "We played video games so much that we even set up our own local area network in the apartment. Sometimes we'd be up till three in the morning -- and the next night, I'd be at it again." He moved out of Bruce's apartment recently, but hasn't kicked the late-night habit. "On Friday, I played Starcraft with some friends till 2 a.m. Then I went online and found some people to play Worms 2 with for a couple of hours. Then, I played Half-Life for an hour before going to bed. The sun was starting to come up -- and my whole day was shot."

The development of a thinking man's video game genre in the early '80s was an important entertainment revolution. At the time, though, no one really knew or cared about it except for the small cadre of Radio Shack virgins who were on the do-it-yourself ground floor of personal computing. For them, the new games were a godsend -- an all-consuming diversion accessible to the most hopeless introvert. Life was suddenly full of interactive myth and magic, instead of just math and masturbation.

Gregory Guttmann is a bookish, 31-year-old computer whiz who now runs Montreal's highly regarded ZooNet Internet service. "The guys who got into high-end computer games," he explains, "were the same kids who had been playing Dungeons and Dragons. These were brainy types who had a lot of time on their hands."

Yet the emergence of these sophisticated new games had another profound effect, one which has outlived the Clearasil years of their original practitioners. These programs demonstrated that a video game could appeal to the mind of an intelligent adult, not just the zoned-out cranium of a strip-mall delinquent. As the years have passed, adult-oriented video games have grown into a substantial sub-industry, accounting for a full 10% of total video game sales. And still supporting this market is that original hard core, the "ur-gamers" we'll call them, who cut their teeth on that Model T Ford of video games, the Atari 2600, 22 years ago.

At the age of 29, Microsoft software design engineer Chris McBride exemplifies the graceful ageing of a hard-core ur-gamer. "I forget how they captioned my photo in the high-school yearbook, but I think it said something like 'King Geek.' I was really into video games back then -- and I hung around the school computer room a lot," he says with a nasal inflection that has survived his horn-rimmed adolescence. "I was almost always there till closing time -- except when I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends."

Does he still play? "Sure. In fact, right now I'm play-testing Age of Empires II at work; I'd play more often but I don't have the time."

The transition from video games to software design has been a natural one for ur-gamers -- hardly surprising, given that these were the same people who enjoyed using computers in the days before the term "user-friendly" had even been hyphenated. The ultimate synthesis of work and pleasure, of course, comes to those ur-gamers who now get paid to create their own games. This is what Ed Fries does as the head of Microsoft's games division.

"After 10 years at Microsoft working for the Excel and Word teams, I got enough political clout to do what I wanted to do -- which was to turn the company into a world-class games producer."

He's succeeded. This year, Microsoft's Age of Empires has become one of the most popular video games in the history of the personal computer, particularly among adult gamers.

"The key element that makes the game addictive for adult gamers is micromanagement," says Fries. "I tell the game designers to give the player a lot of small decisions to make that contribute to victory. No one decision is decisive -- and so there is no chance to let up. It leads them along, along, along, playing frantically -- and you look up at the clock and three hours have gone by. You're in another world."

Stephen Kline, one of Canada's leading experts on the social effects of video game play, is not so sure that kind of escapism is entirely beneficial -- at least to developing psyches. After studying video game play among B.C. teenagers as part of his work with the Simon Fraser University's Media Analysis Laboratory, he has concluded that video games often displace social activities in a child's schedule. "It's often argued that video games are very social -- a sort of bonding experience. There seems to be very little evidence for this. The small amount of social play you sometimes observe among adolescents is almost always among siblings. Usually, video games are played alone."

But that's exactly the draw for many adults who continue to play video games. Brett Cohen, a 28-year-old securities analyst, for instance, uses video games to relieve the stress of 70-hour work weeks. "I stopped playing video games in high school because it was considered uncool. But I never stopped enjoying them. With all the problems in developing markets, this past year has been a tough year on me professionally. When I come home from work on Friday, I turn on the computer and I play and play and play. Sometimes, I'm playing and I look up at the clock and it's, like, five in the morning."

Brett is a fan of Civilization, Age of Empires and other strategy games. "I get completely involved in this other world. I guess you could call it escapism. It's nice to have a microcosm where you can win or lose in a matter of hours. I like the fact that when I lose, I know I lose -- and that I can start again and keep playing again and again till I win."

So where does this leave Brett's wife? Gwenn Cohen is pragmatic: "I'm in first-year medical school, I don't have a lot of time to spend with him anyway -- but it is kind of weird . . . Once I was cleaning his desk and I found this detailed map he had scrawled. There were all these tiny markings like 'green slime swamp' and 'supermonster.' Then I realized it was a map he made for one of his stupid games."

"It's like an obsession," admits Brett. "I have to get to the end of the game. I probably shouldn't have them in my house. Sometimes I end up giving the games away because I'm too addicted. It's sort of a problem."

Bruce Boyden, who competed with his college chess team at Oxford University, says: "The enjoyment I get from strategy video games is much different from the enjoyment I get from chess. You feel like a general when you play video games. You don't feel that way when you're playing chess. It's more of an abstract logic puzzle."

Obsessive computer gaming activity may have a biological cause as well. Researchers from the Neurological Institute at Montreal's McGill University announced last year that they may have discovered a link between video game play and the release of dopamine, a pleasure-inducing chemical that is released into the brain by cocaine, nicotine, and other habit-forming drugs.

However back at Microsoft, Ed Fries does not see video game play as wasted pleasure-seeking. "I see it this way: What are we competing against, timewise? Television. That has to be the comparison, because that is what is being traded off. It's got to be better for someone to be thinking and interacting with what's on the screen than having something beamed straight into his head through the TV. It seems self-evident that people playing games are thinking more and making more critical decisions."

Fries also uses the comparison to TV to attack the idea that video games have a negative effect on social development. "If you see people playing video games against each other, you see them talking and laughing and taunting each other. But if you see them watching TV, that's a more solitary experience."

Simon Fraser's Kline remains skeptical about the kinds of claims made on behalf of video games. "People say that hand-eye coordination is improved. This is possible. But if you want to teach players hand-eye coordination, it's better to give them a $1 ball instead of a $2,000 computer. The same goes for so-called "strategic coordination" skills. They already learn this in traditional games like Monopoly."

While products targeted at adolescents, such as Gameboys and Sony PlayStations, currently represent the primary video game market in terms of product sales, the buying power of adults such as Chris McBride is creating a strong upscale market. The popular video game magazine PC Gamer, for instance, boasts an average reader age of 30 and an average reader income of $63,000 US (about $94,000 Cdn). Reilly Brennan, managing editor of Gameweek, reports: "To get to the mature crowd, you see a lot of sex creeping into video games. I mean, take Lara Croft, the star of Tomb Raider III. Instead of Mario or Luigi or some other little cartoon guy, you have this totally hot chick."

But "totally hot chicks" remain, for the most part, onscreen; it's hard to find women players in the almost exclusively male world of hard-core adult gaming. For the more violent games such as Quake and Diablo, in fact, men account for more than 90% of Internet participants.

Could there be a genetic reason why women shy away from video games? Mary Seeman, a University of Toronto psychiatry professor who specializes in gender differences, thinks so. "Male brains are specialized. Specific functions are concentrated in one or other of the brain hemispheres. Female brains tend to be more equibalanced. The specialist function gives men certain advantages in some activities. A lot of video games, for instance, require fast spatial intelligence. Also, in games where the end point is killing your opponent, women are at a disadvantage because they don't have the same killer instinct."

There are exceptions, however. A case in point is Lisa Renninger, who likes video games so much that she took her journalism degree to PC Gamer, where she is now managing editor. She is proud to have been hired on to the magazine's formerly all-male editorial staff "There's no question that the vast majority of our readers is male," she says. "But I think that's partially because games are almost all marketed toward men -- including our ads. They say stuff like, 'This is a really cool game to play when your wife isn't looking.' But no one at the magazine disrespects me because I'm female. It's different when I play games online, though. When I log on to play on the Internet, I use a unisex name -- Sparky. That way I don't get harassed."

Renninger's interest in computers was triggered by her father. "He took me to a computer club for kids. I remember the first day I went. There were 50 kids, but only two of them were girls -- including me. I thought, 'Oh, I guess this is something that I'm not supposed to be doing.' All my girlfriends were still into their Barbies, and the ones who weren't were already getting into makeup and boys. Computers was something I just did with my dad."

However, Renninger no longer has to make a secret of her video game habit. That's because the nerd stigma against vid-gamers (of either gender) seems to be on the wane. But even if it weren't, it seems that few adult gamers would care. Many of the enthusiasts who now play video games are the hardened '80s high-school crew who persevered with their art at an age when being a geek was a mark of shame rather than earning power.

With high school behind them, these members of the Atari generation are free to indulge their gaming desires in a wedgie-free environment. On the Internet, on corporate networks, and at home when the wife (or husband) isn't looking, the spirit of Zork lives and breathes among yesterday's addicted loners.