ey would be on an actual set of drums and my friend should have… well… not have, instinctively, seen a man in a green shirt as a terrorist or a bird as a fire bat from Zelda. In this way interactive media seems to be almost worse than the output-only media of the past. Interactive media as a replacement for real life is not only an experience to be watched on the screen, it is something to be created and manipulated by the user in ways that our real existence is only in our dreams. Is this an addiction? Certainly. I see in a child I tutor an anxiety when we are working at his homework, and the second we are done he runs up the stairs to the computer to play Diablo 2 without even saying goodbye. He talks about the computer game constantly throughout our sessions, telling me of the new item he found or his latest slaying of a monster. It has also been shown that video games stimulate parts of the brain in ways that are only seen elsewhere in narcotics such as heroin and nicotine. Are such dependencies purely a mental alternative from the ‘real world’ or is there a chemical aspect involved in the addiction? I know there is certainly is that aspect for I have on more than one occasion experienced a state of euphoria from playing videogames. I would also like to mention another strange effect a computer game has had on me: I was playing a game called “Sims”. In this game you are to control the actions, environment, and lives of simulated people in a neighborhood that you build. This game has a feature, which you can use to speed up the action. I was playing on the top speed for about an hour – no mean feat, I assure you—and when I stopped I found myself doing everything at a highly increased pace. I read seventy-nine pages of my novel in a very short time before trying to go to bed. In bed I found my heart was going too fast for me to possibly be able to get to sleep so I got up an...
