Tag: Gaming

Gold Coast teen wants to play Fortnite professionally and he’s just been crowned an Olympic champion

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The explosion in popularity of esports is forcing parents and teachers to rethink their resistance to video games and welcome them into the classroom.

For decades gaming was a source of frustration for parents, viewed as an unwelcome distraction for teenagers who spend too much time glued to a screen.

The esports juggernaut has burst into popular culture and gained mainstream acceptance.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts esports’ viewership will overtake the NFL and analysis from Deloitte found “fabled riches” await investors and advertisers that tap into its young, affluent audience.

Online gaming is so ubiquitous that teachers have given up trying to fight it and are now actively encouraging esports through school-based competition.

Student gamers from 25 schools competed at the Fuse Cup national championships on the Gold Coast.(Supplied: Fuse Cup)

Many Australian schools include esports as a co-curricular activity where students practice, tryout for the team and travel to live, in-person competitions.

About 50,000 students from more than 300 schools took part in the Fuse Cup, an international esports competition for children.

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Video game industry is incredibly profitable. It’s also highly toxic

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By Paul Tozour, Video game industry professional

Recession-proof banks, retail chains, and big tech companies are crumbling from economic volatility, and the video game industry serves as a source of financial hope. 

This virtual world is worth more than music and film combined and has no plans to stop growing: by 2026, it should reach $326 billion (€297.8bn) in value, according to a PwC survey.

Gamers were eager to purchase new consoles and games during the 2008 financial crisis, which defined the industry as virtually recession-proof. 

However, if the US is approaching another recession, customer interest is likely to plummet if the industry’s public reputation remains mediocre. 

Frequent scandals, lawsuits, and general mistreatment stemming from toxic management culture remain common at many video game studios. 

To protect and further the value of the video game industry, skilled leaders outside gaming must be hired to eliminate harmful work culture and abysmal management practices.

There is a long history of ‘frat boy’ toxic culture allegations

The video game industry has famously produced countless products like Pokémon, World Of Warcraft, and Call Of Duty that are beloved by all gamers. 

But they’ve also been notorious for failed game launches, sexual harassment, excessive forced overtime, aka “crunch”, and employee burnout.

Industry giant Activision Blizzard (ATVI) faced an employee walkout in protest of working conditions and was sued by the state of California for a “frat boy” culture that resulted in an employee’s suicide. 

An employee again sued it for multiple harassment allegations later that year. 

Brad Wardell, CEO of niche strategy game developer Stardock, faced similar sexual harassment allegations in 2010, which were later dropped. 

He infamously replied to his accuser in an internal email: “I am an inappropriate, sexist, vulgar, and embarrassing person, and I’m not inclined to change my behaviour. If this is a problem, you will need to find another job.”

Industry giant Ubisoft suffered allegations of a “toxic culture,” including accusations that certain executives engaged in manipulation and emotional abuse. Riot Games faced employee walkouts and ultimately settled a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit for $100 million (€91.3m).

In 2013, developer Trendy Entertainment created a workplace culture so toxic that current and former video developers at the studio contributed to an article that labelled it “The Video Game Studio From Hell.”

No motivation to change

Despite the rampant problems, the industry’s profitability has given it little motivation to evolve. For example, the 2020 release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 39.38 million units in total and became the best-selling game of all time in Japan. 

Investors and leaders alike must recognise that success isn’t sustainable when it rides on the back of exhausted creatives pushed to their limits. 

They must understand that ignoring endemic issues results in irreversible consequences.

Historically, the industry started from college students selling floppy disks with no knowledge of the money machine they were fuelling. 

They quickly assumed leadership positions, although they lacked the necessary skills to guide. 

These issues are perpetuated by the game industry’s insular culture that refuses to learn from more mature industries. It has developed on its own with little cross-pollination from other industries and promotes internally with no management training.

Failures stemming from incompetence

In many ways, the video game industry functions as an isolated cult that doesn’t welcome outsiders with contrasting beliefs. 

This delusion results from a near-total lack of management training and unbelievable numbers of leadership failures.

For example, 3D Realms spent a shocking 14 years and more than $20 million (€18.2m) to develop Duke Nukem Forever and were sued by their publisher before handing development to another studio. 

More recently, CD Projekt RED, creators of the wildly successful Witcher game series, hit the wall in 2020 with Cyberpunk 2077. 

A nearly unplayable release triggered an investor lawsuit. It also faced countless demands for customer refunds, forcing Sony to pull Cyberpunk 2077 for seven months.

The game industry’s artistry, design, and technology continue to evolve at a dizzying pace, but unqualified executives remain. 

These leaders are often incapable of managing growing teams and guiding massively complex development projects because they obsess on maximising output in the short term while ignoring the culture and values necessary for long-term growth.

With the industry’s nonstop growth, companies hire and promote leaders with no concern for educating them on the necessary leadership skills.

Qualified leaders could turn the tide

Having well-trained leaders is essential to dismantling the destructive way many studios operate. 

Purging immature and reckless management from the equation is a necessary step to cure a potentially fatal business problem. 

An unwillingness to accept wisdom from other industries and learn from modern management science underscores the overall immaturity of the gaming industry and all too often holds it back from its true potential.

Some outliers, such as Valve and Supercell, have become wildly successful by explicitly outlining their values and making culture their top priority. 

Investors need to pick qualified leaders from outside industries that make values and culture central to operations and institute rigorous leadership training for internal promotions. 

Only then will video game studios stop squandering the efforts of brilliant artists, designers, and videogame engineers with deeply incompetent leadership and invest in the future of gaming as a mainstream money maker.

Paul Tozour is a video game industry professional with 28 years of experience, including technical design, AI programming, creative director, and more. He is the author of The Four Swords and the founder of the video game studio Mothership Entertainment.

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Video Game Addiction: Noticing Warning Signs, Getting Help

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Jan. 23, 2023 – Tomer Shaked, an 18-year-old high school senior in Florida, started gaming around age 9. “I began spending more and more time playing video games in what I now know was a gaming addiction,” he says in an interview.

“At first, I didn’t play all that much, and still put school and homework first. And when I turned 10, I was still playing only during the weekends,” he reports. “But the screen time increased. My parents set some limits, but I eventually learned to get around my parents’ rules to get my ‘fix’ of gaming.”

By the age of 12, gaming consumed every free moment and was the only thing he thought about. He began lying to his parents about how much time he was gaming, which damaged his relationship with them. “All I wanted to do was game, game, game.”

Soon, “gaming wasn’t just one activity I enjoyed. It had become the only activity I enjoyed.”

Most youngsters who play video games do so “as a form of entertainment, which is what it’s supposed to be, but approximately 5% to 6% of video game users do so to the point where it interferes with their lives and use it as an addiction,” says David Greenfield, PhD, founder and clinical director of the Connecticut-based Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. 

Considering that there are about 2.7 billion gamers worldwide, with 75% of U.S. households having at least one gamer, even 5% to 6% is a staggering number of people.

Shaked has written a memoir, Game Over, which he hopes will “highlight important topics associated with gaming addiction that can speak to both teens and their parents who are experiencing this conflict in their own lives.”

He hopes other teens “can realize they can also live a full and productive life away from a video screen.”

A Problem of Staggering Dimensions

Video gaming has been around since the mid- to late 1970s, but not at the level it is now.

“When video gaming met the internet, it was like mixing peanut butter and chocolate together. As the internet’s popularity blossomed in the late 1980s and 1990s, that’s when it got out of hand,” Greenfield says. His clinic treats people who have addiction to internet content, and “by far the most common area we see is video gaming.”

 

What Makes Video Gaming So Addictive?

Greenfield says brain mechanisms involved in video game addiction are similar to the brain mechanisms involved in other addictions.

“The brain doesn’t know the difference between a drug and a video game because gaming activates the same receptors responsible for all other addictions, including substances and gambling.”

The key brain chemical involved is dopamine – a neurotransmitter involved in pleasure and reward, Greenfield says. From an evolutionary point of view, dopamine is what made mating and eating – the two most important survival activities – pleasurable and “increased the likelihood that we would continue to engage in them.”

In addiction, “you’re piggy-backing onto these ancient neural pathways and hijacking the reward mechanism that dopamine is responsible for,” he says. “On some weird level, your brain acts as if the activity is survival-enhancing when in fact it’s the opposite.”

Soon, people with this type of addiction feel there is no other source of pleasure in their lives because they’ve allowed other parts of their lives to fall by the wayside in their almost exclusive focus on gaming.

That’s what happened to Shaked.

“I think the appeal of gaming is the constant reward system in place,” he says. “These are virtual worlds that allow you to win battles that can’t be fought in the ‘real world’ in real time, allowing you to win soccer and basketball games and making you very popular in the ‘virtual’ world.”

You get to the point “where you know the games and how to play them, you get attention and admiration online, which have no value in the real world but are very addictive in the virtual world.”

And time goes by seamlessly. “Anyone who has ever played a video game – even someone without an addiction – can attest to the fact that time simply gets lost,” says Shaked.

Red Flags for Parents

What might start out as a break for parents – the kids are busy playing their video games and the parents have a few minutes to themselves – expands into something much bigger. But the progression doesn’t happen overnight, and parents might miss the clues.

Things like: 

  • Not wanting to leave the house unless required 
  • Not wanting to go on vacation without gaming equipment 
  • Refusing to go outside 
  • Rushing through normal activities, like meals, to get back to the games 

Greenfield says parents should look for changes in patterns of daily living – fewer social interactions, changes in patterns of hygiene, less physical activity, eating less, and worse academic performance. 

“The majority of people who come to treatment in our center are brought in by parents or other family members. Many have stopped showering and taking care of themselves, they’ve become more isolative, their friendships are related only to gaming or through apps they can use to communicate while gaming,” says Greenfield, who is the author of the book Overcoming Internet Addiction for Dummies.

Addictive video gaming can take a toll on the body, even leading (in extreme cases) to blood clots from sitting for so long, electrolyte imbalances from going without food for days, and other problems (like obesity) associated with sedentary living. Being in front of a computer can contribute to neck and back problems, headaches, and visual problems, among others.

Kicking the Gaming Habit

Shaked’s journey was unusual: at the age of 17, he had an epiphany while driving home from school. “I looked at myself and asked how I had been spending my childhood. I had been in front of the computer screen more than in front of my parents. You never want to say you’ve been in front of a computer screen more than in front of people, because that’s pretty sad.”

He realized that he had “lost” himself. “I had been so lost in a fake video game world that I had lost my identity and had become a video game character, not a real person.” He decided to completely stop playing video games.

But most people don’t have these types of epiphanies and need family intervention or even professional help to give up gaming, Shaked notes. He doesn’t advise others to “go cold turkey,” although that’s what he did. Doing so creates a tremendous void because the person does not yet have an activity to fill that time.

Greenfield, who’s also author of the book Virtual Addiction, agrees. His center helps parents gradually reduce screen time by helping them install software that limits how much time the teen can spend on the screen. “Kids have to get used to real-time living because the brain gets used to the level of dopamine that comes from gaming. They need to relearn how to experience normal pleasure in other areas of life.”

Some parents and kids might simply need education about gaming addiction, although others also need therapy. Some might even need residential treatment. “The needs of gaming addicts run the entire gamut.” 

It’s important to find a therapist familiar with video gaming addiction, Greenfield warns. Because videos are so pervasive, less knowledgeable therapists might dismiss a gaming addiction as harmless fun. But gaming addiction should be taken as seriously as any other addiction.

Today, Shaked leads a full and meaningful life. He’s involved in rowing and has received a varsity award. He completed a law fellowship for high school juniors, joined a beach cleanup crew, and received first prize in a state Spanish competition. He also has volunteered at the Jack and Jill Foundation of America and plans to donate the proceeds of sales of his book to the foundation, which helps children from underprivileged communities get access to educational programs.

“The organization really touched my heart, and that’s why I dedicated this book to them,” he says. 

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