Pleasure from Games is Not the Only Form of Happiness

Pleasure from Games is Not the Only Form of Happiness

Milano Kao

National Central University

 

Abstract

Technology is always on a move. Thanks to its huge strikes on development, commoditization became a natural outcome of vehement competition and steady advancement. Nowadays, in order to watch the lates movie, to dine in a first-class restaurant or to make a reservation for the coming vacation, lining up in a queue is no longer the necessary condition. Instead, a phone call beforehand or even few clicks on the internet will certainly do so. However, such commoditization brings along problems one following the other. It creates a connectional isolation of our self and that of others. While it became doubly common for people to own a smart phone, getting online turned out not only to be more and more easy, but also possible at any time or anywhere.

People start to build up forges of their own world throughout all sorts of attractions rampanting in the Internet. Playing online games, chatting on social networks, skimming through entertaining information and so on. At first, such behavior will appear as a form of habit. Every hour or so, you will get on line and check if there is any message left for you. Later on, the time will then be limited into thirty minute, and then fifteen then five. Eventually, you will have to force yourself hard not to connect the internet, since you could not take your hands off the smart phones any more.

With a smart phone in hand, life did indeed become more convenient to us, comparing to the old days, in some way. Sending message to someone by Line and gets their response with in a second, checking for the destination on Google map while getting in a new environment, searching for things you are interested in right away on Wikipedia, etc. But, with these convenience, we spaced out the distance among others. That had become extremely ironic when the MRT was packed with passenger, like a can of Sardine, yet what matters to the passengers were not thing happen right beside them. Most of them have their eyes closely focused on their phones, either displaying high concentration of the News Feed on Facebook or indulging themselves fully into the virtual reality of online games.  

Figure 1

While this picture above shows the idea pretty well. “Life is what happens to you while you’re looking at your smart phones.” I wonder how things changed. Life back then seemed to be so simple comparing to now. Dad said that when he was little, the happiest thing is to eat a red egg on birthday. Such trivial matter was what happiness meant to them. But now, the present generation were lost in the temptation given by sensational news broadcast by mass media or the entertainment and excitements gain by online games. They mistook this information as the happiness of life. Therefore, I want to discover how people create such misunderstanding by the example of game addiction.

Game addicted happiness

According to the article written by Eliana Dockterman, which appears on the technology and media section of TIME Magazine, it analyzed players' addiction behavior within mainly two aspects of discussion.

From the interview with Tommy Palm, who is one of the game designers, Dockterman get to know what tactics King (the creator company of Candy Crush) used. Dockterman also called on a few psychology experts and players to understand the back-story on why those tactics worked so well and made the game irresistible.

"Perhaps the most genius element of Candy Crush is its ability to make you long for it.(Dockterman,2013)” Since you can only get five chances, or say, lives at a time. Thus, whenever you run out of lives, you will have to wait for another thirty-minute increment to continue the play. Owning to the fact that the game actually constrains its players from getting more lives, it urges them even more to yearn after it. That effortless constraint tests the humanity of human beings, for people tend to have a stronger desire for things they are not able to get in reach.

Another reason that deals with humanity is the fact that human is suckers for sweet talks. Most of the time, though we all know “Good advice jars on the ear.” still, we incline to be hoodwink by the flattering speech. For example, in the game, once you made more than one matches of the candy role in one move, words will pop up on your screen accompanied by a voice that says, "Sweet" or either "Delicious", considering how many combos you complete. Dr. Kimberly Young, a pioneering expert on internet and gaming addiction, called this a "Positive reward". In addition, she believed that it is an essential feedback for player immersion, for that people will feel better about himself or herself.

Beside for the humanity test, there is also psychology factors King tied to deals with in their tactics. Many people might questioned," Why choosing candy instead of other symbols. Like biscuit, fruit, or even cute animals?" or questions like, "While there are so many similar games available, why Candy Crush?" Palm gave a direct response to those questions, "Many people have had a very positive feeling about Candy since they were kids. (2013)" Thanks to the happy memories with candy during childhood, players coincidentally tied the positive association and pleasures derive from eating into the game. It leads out their inner children. Palm continued, "And it (candy) makes for a real nice visual game board with a lot of color and interesting shapes." For the homepage seemed like a traditional Candy Land Board, and with the game pieces designed as candies, players incline to believe they are transported into an entire Candy Land experience, which is far away from reality.  

Behavioral Addiction

By observing different stages of players involved in games, Mark Griffith put forward a list to define such behavior. The six stages are salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, conflicts and relapse. In the story mentioned below of my mother, I will explain the function of each stage with more detail.

My mother brought herself an IPhone during the summer vacation, and that is when she started to gain the habits of playing app games such as candy crush. This behavior has become the important activity in her daily life (salience). She spends thirty minutes to an hour on playing games after having breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes, even before going to sleep, as if following a prescription given by the doctor. Nevertheless, the most interesting part during the observation of mom is that it is easy to predict whether she is winning or losing the game. The behavior of playing game changes her mood by providing either a rush of excitement or sense of calm or even, a shout of remorse may happen (mood modification). While the difficulties of the game advanced eventually level by level, it become harder to go on to the next level when meanwhile, you have the limitation of life chance. So mom began to purchase “life “in the online store, and that represents the stage when more and more behavior is needed to get the mood boost (tolerance). However, what happens when she fail to pass the level even with the purchase of extra lives? Well, mom would be depressed and put down her phone to take a break, but after finishing all of the housework, she would return once again back to her wonderland, and that is how the behavior returns after being given up (relapse)

There are still two aspect I had not talked about, which are withdrawal symptoms – a person feels lousy or irritable when unable to engage in the behavior, and conflict – the behavior causes conflicts with other people, interferes with other activities, or causes a person to feel a loss of control. Since I regard addiction as something formed out of our daily habits, this list might then provide us a way to think about whether a certain habit is making it harder to live a life that reflects our value and contributes to our long-term happiness.

Long-term Happiness

All of our lives we are searching for the long-term happiness. In the beginning of Nicomachean Ethic’S Book I, Aristotle wrote, ”Every art and inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” That was his definition toward happiness. He believed that everything should all aim at some good, even pointed out that many aims are merely intermediate aims, and are desired only because they make the achievement of higher aims possible.

 “If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake…, and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else…, clearly this must be the good and the chief good.” While discussing the chief good in our life, Aristotle proposed one and highest aim we should seek for throughout our whole life should have the qualities same as politics, since “though it is worthwhile to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-state.”

To do so, is by policy. Yet, “what is it that we say political science aims at and what is the highest of all good achievable by action?” Since for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and further on identify living well and doing well with being happy. However, when regard to what happiness is, they differ either from one another. At some stages of life, they even differ from oneself By identifying happiness with happiness with health when he is ill, and with wealth when he is poor. Overall, they consider happiness as some plain and obvious thing like pleasure, wealth or honor.

With the definition most people made for happiness, we can see the three distinct way of life which different people associate with happiness. First of all, the slavish way of pleasure; second, the refined and active way of politics that aims at honor, and the third, the way of contemplation life which ultimately aims at wisdom. However, why is pleasure ranking in the first place among the other two?

The Desire Theory

Three theories of well-being mentioned in the article of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are successively the Hedonism, the Desire Theory, and the Objective List Theory. But in this paragraph I will merely talk about hedonism and the Desire Theory.

 Jeremy Bentham is one of the most well-known of the more recent hedonist. In his writing An Introduction to the Principle of Moral and Legislation he wrote, “Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do.” (Bentham, 1) Hedonism gave their answer to the phenomenon of human beings always acts in pursuit of what they believe will give them the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. They think it is simply the pleasantness of pleasure and the painfulness of pain. Yet, how are we to measure the value of the two experiences? For the reason that there does not appear to be a single common strand of pleasantness running through all the different experience people enjoy.” To be more practical is to ask one-self, how is it possible to compare the pleasure one get from eating a great meal with their families in a restaurant to reading Shakespeare alone in a quiet corner of the library. There is obvious different aspect of pleasure one can gain from these two incidents. Therefore, scholars argued that Bentham seems to be placing all pleasure on a par, and further ignores the distinctions between.

What about other theories, can it be more precise in defining well-being to human beings? By the suppose of experience machine, it successfully explains how Desire Theory works in individual behavior. By planning a lifetime of experience before hand, one can later on plug in and live out their life in a virtual reality machine. In such case, one can go through whatever experience they think might possibly bring out the most enjoyment and pleasantness. However, Is it the experience that people seeks for or the result of it people look forward to?

“Desire is consequent on opinion, rather than opinion on desire.” (Miceli, 11)To simplify this contention an example might be well enough. That is, for instinct, nowadays teenagers seem to be pursuit eagerly of fame and wealth. However, do they ever consider the difficulties they had to encounter through the pursuance? To reach their satisfaction of desire, they skipped over tough process and dreamed of the outcome impracticable. By doing so, they be satisfied by the desire of fame and wealth, for they think of fame and wealth as independently goods beforehand. However, since the pursuance of life should be about happiness, fame and wealth might just happen to be a camouflage that confused our attention, like those various sort of pleasure we get from the internet.

It is not to blame that people might want to run away from reality by internet. But once we get used to that, we might turned out getting stuck in the virtual reality. We lost the truth of happiness through all these temptation, through online games, through the commoditization technology had brought to us. Through all these occupancy, we mislead our self into the pursuit of slavish pleasure and later on took it as happiness.  

Results

“many changes occur in life, and all manner of changes and the most prosperous may fail into great misfortunes in old age, as in told of Priam in the Trojan Cycle.”(Tenenbaum, 236) Happiness must be consider over a whole life time, and a truly happy person in life is he who will bear what misfortune brings most beautifully and in complete harmony in every instance, because even in this circumstances, something beautiful shine through..

Reference

Aristotle. "The Internet Classics Archive | Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle." The Internet Classics Archive | Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle. N.p., 1994. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

Bentham, Jeremy. "Chapter I." An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 1. Print.

Crisp, Roger. "Well-Being." Stanford University. Stanford University, 06 Nov. 2001. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

Dockterman, Eliana. "The Science Behind the Candy Crush Addiction." Business Money Candy Crush Saga The Science Behind Our Addiction Comments. TIME Magazine15, 15 Nov. 2013. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

Miceli, Maria, and Cristiano Castelfranchi. "2.2.2." Expectancy and Emotion. Corby: Oxford UP, 2014. 11. Web.

Tenenbaum, Sergio. "9." Moral Psychology. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 236. Print.

Rubin, Gretchen. "Are You "Addicted" to Something?" Gretchen Rubin. N.p., 20 Aug. 2014. Web. 09 Jan. 2015.