Video Game OCD

In today’s society, it is now known that video games can cause serious problems for players that go beyond poor time management skills. One of those problems that have been addressed recently is video game addiction, which this week’s reading has compared to drug addiction. This problem could be taken a step further with a related and overlooked issue, which is video game obsessive compulsive disorder. Organizations such as Behavioral Associates (behavioralassociates.com) have recognized it as a legitimate problem that is one of the symptoms of video game addiction, and offer help through its services. One game that is said to have caused video game OCD in children growing up in the 1980s is a game called Q*Bert.

Q*Bert is a game released in 1982 that has its title character hop on cubes in a pyramid pattern to change their colors, while avoiding objects and other characters (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9182). The gameplay becomes increasingly harder as the player progresses, requiring him or her to hop on the squares repeatedly and if they hit it too many times, they must go back and touch it again to return it to the proper color. A study done at the Philadelphia Research Center of Mental Illness has connected the 80s game to the disorder, stating that the game’s character “has the obsession of symmetric, color-based uniformity, and acts out on them with the compulsion to change geometric blocks into the same color” (http://bloggledoggle.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/video-game-causes-obsessive-compulsive-disorder-in-kids-of-the-80s/). The researcher, Martin Clemens believes that Q*Bert himself has an obsessive-compulsive habit that the player must help him act upon to win the level.

Clemens states that Q*Bert has had long-term effects where adults who had played the game showed obsessive behavior with using elevators, staking blocks, as well as symmetry and color uniformity. He blames the game for its supposed methodology that there are “good” colors and “bad” colors, and all the “bad” colors must be changed to the “good” colors. Clemens recommends his OCD patients to play other video games that are not so compulsive, like many of the Nintendo games in the 1990s based on movies, TV shows and athletes.

While Clemens statements may seem outlandish, I have seen firsthand how video games can be obsessive-compulsive. Many of these games have other quests, in addition to accomplishing the main objective, such as collecting stars, coins, and various other mini-games. It is easy for a person to be sucked into a game, trying to “complete it all” so the unfinished business does not bother them anymore, or so they think, until the next game comes along. It is because of this that many of the statements of the time management reading make sense. Video game OCD, if left untreated, can have a severe effect on academics and, while it may not decrease SAT scores, can lower the GPA over time.