Spadaro’s story of video game addiction is not uncommon. Many children of the 1980s and 1990s who grew up playing video games are still playing today. The average age of a gamer is now 37 and rises with each year, according to a study by the Entertainment Software Association, the Washington-based trade association for the US video game industry.
For some adults, computer games are a hobby, a way to relax for a few hours after a challenging day at work, or something fun to do with friends on the weekend. But for Spadaro, computer games were more than a hobby; they became his life.
Spadaro began to play video games as a child, like most boys his age. Born with a heart condition and raised by a single working mother, he found games an entertaining way to pass time. But soon the pastime grew into something much larger, and by his junior year in high school, he said he often put off his homework to play computer games.
After barely graduating, Spadaro enrolled in a community college but said he dropped out halfway through his first semester because by then he was so consumed by the virtual world that the real world seemed boring and too arduous.
Game designers have spent years trying to understand and cater their products to customers’ emotional needs, said Andrew Doan, a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Hooked on Games.’’
Doan said that video games, playing to people’s desire for accomplishment, socialization, and urges for control and power, are designed so that players will keep playing forever. In the years since the development of what the industry calls “massive multiplayer online role-playing games,’’ such as World of Warcraft, game companies have been able to derive revenue not only from game sales but also on the monthly payments players make to keep their gaming accounts active.
