I can't speak to formal definitions of addiction, but I can shed some light on the more social and anthropological nature of how we look at addiction and games. I've recently done some content analysis research into how video games have been represented in the media over the last 20 years. What I found was consistent with Wartella & Reeves' theory about new media (cite at end). When a new medium appears, it tends to go through stages of vilification before either being phased out or accepted. The fears generally come first from how the medium is displacing some more valuable behavior, e.g. playing outdoors, reading great books, etc. Then the fears manifest themselves in health risks, physical and psychosocial. This is what I found in coverage of video games, suggesting that there is a social process at work, instead of, or in addition to, actual effects. What I found interesting was that video games actually had a grace period in the media from about 1972 to 1981ish. In this time frame, the users (a telling term, no?) were mostly adults socializing in bars and clubs. But around 1981 or 1982, games suddenly became deviant, especially for adults, and became socially constructed as child's play. At this point, the articles began to use this addiction language strongly, going so far as to suggest that arcades were sources of drugs, gambling and prostitution, and that players were "junkies." My suggestion is not that "games" are or are not addicting. I don't know (although I would really hope that we could recognize game content as highly varied across many dimensions and qualify our stimuli more rigorously than just "games"). Like others, I would be interested in any citations. But what I do know is that how we think of video games--and any other technology, for that matter--is certainly a social construction. It's probably not a coincidence that the shift in attitudes towards video games in 1981 and 1982 was concurrent with a rise in fears about a breakdown in families and a generally conservative movement in US politics. -Dmitri Cite: TimesWartella, E. & Reeves, D. 1985. Historical Trends in Research on Children and the Media: 1900-1960. Journal of Communication 35:118-133. **************** Dmitri Williams Ph.D. Candidate University of Michigan Department of Communication Studies dcwillia@umich.edu http://www.umich.edu/~dcwillia