It's Official: You're Sick In The Head

Posted by Gary Hodges at 12:34 PM Apr 04, 2008

“Our research supports the idea that people who are heavily involved in game playing may be nearer to autistic spectrum disorders than people who have no interest in gaming.”

Well that’s just fabulous.

This was one of the conclusions drawn by Dr. John Charlton of the UK's University of Bolton and Ian Danforth of Walla Walla, Washington-based Whitman College, also concluding that game addicts tended to also exhibit the following traits: “neuroticism, lack of extraversion and lack of agreeableness” – all three considered signs of Asperger's disorder, "a variety of high-functioning autism”, or so they say in their press release.

(Here's where I found it.)

As it turns out, that might not be entirely true: neuroticism and a “lack of agreeableness” aren’t typically linked to real life Asperger’s, as a few have already pointed out other places. Then again, I’m not an expert, and perhaps I’m just being defensive because of my own very real lack of agreeableness.

Especially first thing in the morning, before I’ve had my coffee, when reading a study that seems to suggest gaming enthusiasts might be a little mentally ill.

Right now I’m reading The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu, a book about the rise of comic books in post World War II America – an era just before the emergence of TV during which comic books were “the most popular form of American entertainment”.

I’m not far enough to give a final verdict, but I can at least say it’s worth taking a look at if it sounds even vaguely interesting to you. And if you’re a gamer, I think you’ll be struck by how… familiar it all sounds. Comics were seen as tawdry, inane, crass entertainment preoccupied with violence and sex, thus presented themselves as a broad, easy-to-hit target for parents, churches, of course politicians, and yes, even some wacky arms of the scientific community. A juicy paragraph:

“Comic books are definitely harmful to impressionable people, and most young people are impressionable,” said the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, author of the incendiary tract, Seduction of the Innocent, which indicted comics as a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.”

“The time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores.”

There are so many things ripe for drilling down through in the above, but the most surprising to me? I always thought absurd, hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler were native to generations that didn’t actually live through Hitler. I guess I was wrong; Wertham’s remark was only a few years post-war.

At what point will we wise up? At what point will we break this predictable, tiresome chain of fear and ignorance-driven rejection of youth popular culture?

How many examples will we need to start to see the pattern?

First masturbation led to mental illness… and then we finally deduced that couldn’t be quite right, since we weren’t surrounded by millions of raving shoe-gnawing lunatics.

Then comics were a problem, and they threw Congressional hearings. Then TV was going to melt our brains (in all fairness, maybe it has). Then Elvis shaking his hips was going to turn young women into lusty tramps (if only). Then John Lennon was going to make us stop going to church. Then Dungeons & Dragons would make us sociopaths, then rock & roll with subliminal messages was going to make us Satanists and/or commit suicide, then rap music was going to make us all cop killers.

Yet despite the fact we as a people have somehow survived all the above supposed Threats To Our Very Way Of Life, rarely do you hear a parent – when presented with the latest scourge of youth culture, video games – say “You know, I remember my parents thinking Simon & Garfunkel were going to turn me into a drug addict. Maybe we should all take a deep breath.”

Why don't we hear that voice? Is it because it's not out there?

Or is it because that voice isn’t motivated to clamber up onto a podium?