I watch a show called extra credits, it's made by 3 ppl in the gaming industry and talk about issues in the industry itself. last 2 weeks there was a double ep about gaming addiction or how they called it gaming compulsion.

the eps are here:
ep1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00SvIIualUw
ep2 part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05fxAOCVeWE
ep2 part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIi_XzAJEyg


since go is also a game, can we relate to this? i feel we can and i wonder if anyone here has this issue. Do we as go playing community suffer from go compulsion?

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

At times, yes. Though, generally, I find it to be a healthy distraction.

I haven't watched these, but I award you and the creators interwebs points for describing it as a "compulsion" rather than "addiction."

Just for reference, here are two threads on the topic:

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewto ... f=10&t=272

http://www.godiscussions.com/forum/show ... hp?t=11137

While "compulsion" and "obsession" less unpleasant words (one of them even made a career as a perfume name), I don't think it's incorrect to talk about addiction.

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Patience, grasshopper.

It is.

Amusingly, I'm reading a novel right now, from the 1920s, by Nabokov, about a chessmaster driven mad by his obsession with chess. The English title was either The Defence, The Defense, or The Luzhin Defence, depending on which edition you've got, with the latter being closer to the original Russian title. There was also a movie under the last name, IIRC.

There's a Japanese version of Rip Van Winkle where a guy gets involved in a game of Go with a supernatural opponent and realises after the game has concluded that years have passed while they were playing.

With those amusing asides noted, however, I'm inclined to agree with others that labelling this sort of thing "addiction" does a disservice to the whole of addiction research. Maybe the problem is linguistic. If we only ever used the word "dependency" (for example) to describe things like alcoholism and narcotic addiction, and only ever used the word "addiction" to describe compulsions towards things like gambling, tanning, shopping, or chess, we might not be having this discussion right now.

'Addiction' properly refers to dependence on psychoactive substances, and while used casually to refer to behaviours which are unrelated to these substances, but outwardly similar to those that are, properly those behaviours are called compulsions.

Which is not to say they're less serious, just different.

If a go stone is the substance you're abusing, then so be it. It's probably not worth splitting hairs on what to call it. Dictionaries as well as doctors disagree on the subject. Obviously, many of us spend lots of our time thinking about the best spot to put a stone. The important question whether the urge to do so causes problems or not. Does it get in the way of your job, your relationships etc. If it does, then it's a problem that needs to be addressed. If not, it's still interesting to ask what it is about go that makes us so willing to portion off so much time for it.

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Patience, grasshopper.