Story by Davis McKinney
Photos by Brenna Elmore
Isabel Marrero doesn’t consider herself a gamer, but she did grow up playing Super Mario Bros. and The Sims.
Now in her senior year at UNC-Chapel Hill, she has developed a different relationship with video games. After graduating next month, she is starting her own company that aims to provide a certification system that would inform gamers whether a video game has been deemed addictive.
Last year, the World Health Organization added gaming disorder to their International Classification of Diseases. The organization defined the disorder as “a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control over gaming,” which causes the affected to give video games priority over other daily activities.
According to data from a 2015 Pew Research Center report, more than 70 percent of teenagers play video games on a cell phone, console or computer. Additionally, about 35 percent of teenage males said they played online games every day. The new classification could be consequential for swaths of young people, given the sheer number of gamers in the country.
“I want to create a company that regulates against what the video game companies are trying to do and gives information to any players and parents buying games,” Marrero said.
She first got the idea for her company, tentatively named Safeplay, after seeing a news report that said video game companies are hiring neuroscientists to advise designers how to create ways to keep players coming back to a certain game.
Will Partin, a graduate student in UNC Department of Communication, said this method of designing games is only about 10 years old.
“The things that have become really important in the last few years have been things like micro transactions and downloadable content,” said. “And these are things that only work if you have people engaging with the game over several years.”
Partin said the most streamed games are those that fall within the esports category, meaning the ones with massive followings of gamers who compete professionally at tournaments around the world. This month, the most popular games on Twitch were almost all esports, including League of Legends, Hearthstone and Overwatch.
But, just as in another sport, honing one’s skills to compete at the professional level takes practice and lots of time. But Partin said just because a person spends lots of time playing a game, doesn’t mean they are addicted.
“No one’s ever going to say that you’re addicted to practicing trombone, even if you’re doing it eight hours a day,” he said. “So there’s this sense that addiction is just how much time you spend doing something and that may or may not be the most relevant with games.”
Marrero sees the distinction as more clearly-cut.
“Obviously not all video games are addictive, and I want to stress that not all video games are bad,” she said. “But when something is preventing you from living a normal daily life, we classify that as addiction.”
The idea of a normal daily life may look a bit different for those who love video games. Anne Chao, a junior computer science major at UNC-Chapel Hill from Raleigh, said she plays video games every single day.
“Unless I’m super busy, I always squeeze in at least one game of League (of Legends) or a couple rounds of Smite,” she said.
Chao is a member of the UNC-Chapel Hill esports Club, and had been for three years. She said she has been playing video games for as long as she can remember. When she was younger, she used video games as a way to fit in with friends who were older than her.
“Even now I have a group of friends who I only know them through video games and they’re all older than me,” she said. “It kind of feels like they’re all just my older brothers because we don’t talk just about video games when we’re playing.”
Chao has friends outside of the virtual world as well. The esports club she’s a part of has nearly 300 active members, all sharing a common love for games. Shane Steele-Pardue, a junior computer science major from Corapeake, N.C., and co-president of the esports club, said this is the main mission of the organization: to create a welcoming environment for gamers.
Video games usually conjure up thoughts of lonely, dejected souls staring mindlessly at glowing screens, but Partin says that stereotype is incorrect.
“Gaming has always been more social than we’ve given it credit for,” he said. “Even going back to things like arcades, there was this culture of going with your friends, playing with your friends, challenging each other and trying to beat each other’s scores.”
Partin said the social aspect of games has likely increased, given the industry’s focus on multiplayer games.
“Games are now being designed with the intention of creating communities that will keep coming back to the game,” he said.
To achieve this goal, Partin said new games have drawn on techniques pioneered in video gambling, which target users’ neural reward loops. The loot box has now replaced the roulette wheel.
These new techniques are precisely the ones Marrero hopes to shed light on with her company. Her proposed certification system would grant a label to games which have proven themselves to be non-addictive.
Regulations aside, Shane Nam, a sophomore mathematics and economics major from Cary and secretary of the esports club, sees video games as a way to enhance and preserve real-life friendships.
“The only friends I still keep in touch with from high school, it’s because we play video games together now,” he said.
