Computer Health and Addiction

Traditional health advice for computer usage has concentrated on computer design (keyboard layout, screen brightness etc) and advice to users (taking breaks, good posture). However, there has been some recent coverage of the danger of becoming addicted, particularly to computer games. The consequences are then not just the physical health impact of sitting staring at a computer screen for too long but also on social and personal relationships.

In part it is possible to be quite skeptical about this. Scares around the addictiveness of something new, and how it is contributing to social breakdown, are common and of course high quality computer gaming environments are quite recent. To put this in some context, when books started to become relatively cheap at the end of the eighteenth century (due to advances in printing techniques), there were various addiction scares and allegations that books were diverting women from their real jobs of looking after husbands and houses.

However, just because the computer game addiction scare can look like a repetition of a story that merely changes to fit circumstances, it is not to deny there can be problems. At the core, computer games (as with any) are designed to be engaging (or no one would play them). This is true regardless of genre type and it is very easy to slip into a mindset of "one more turn, one more level, five more minutes". Essentially the biggest danger in this respect is tiredness and short term health problems and the solution is spend less time on the computer.

However, the concern is not just in spending too much time on a computer but of becoming actually addicted to computer games. The focus of this seems to lie with on line role playing games. The problem has become an addiction once the individual starts to define themselves more in terms of their computer activities than in any other social terms. At this stage the problem is not just of enjoyment (and over-use) but that you feel more valued on-line/in game rather than outside that environment.

It is not really clear how large a problem addiction to computer games really is. For most heavy computer users, the problem in reality is the damage to their health. The key issue is if you find yourself not just spending too long on line but that your engagement with computer games is the main source of self-esteem. At that stage, over-use probably is in danger of slipping into addiction.