4/19/2018
Digital addiction has always been a common social problem since the popularity of computers and smartphones. So far, there are already many cases of indulging in video games that have seriously affected people’s normal life and even caused many deaths. Another more common phenomenon of digital addiction today is that there are a lot of people who are not able to leave their mobile phones even only for a moment. Based on a report written by Lee Rainie and Katheyn Zickuhr (2015) from Pew Research Center, 89% of people would use mobile phones in social situations. This report also shows that the use of mobile phones would affect people’s social life in actual reality by distracting them from what is happening in the real world and hindering the interaction and communication between other people. With the rapid development of Virtual Reality (VR) technology and the public’s decreasing rejection of the technology, people now have to start facing a similar problem with digital addiction — VR addiction.
In an interview which is conducted by Skarredghost (2017), psychologist Vito De Giuseppe states that VR itself is not addictive, and people would only be addicted to one thing, no matter their choice is gambling, alcohol, or VR when they have psychological problems themselves. However, VR addiction should be far more complicated than what he said. People are now facing the challenge of the huge temptation brought by VR technology, especially when using VR, people can almost completely block their connection with the real world and immerse themselves in the fantastic virtual world. This article will explore the question of how VR may be addictive and what impact it will have.
There are many factors that can make people be addicted to VR. First of all, human brains will generate some kinds of pleasant neurochemistry during VR experiences which would also be produced when people play video games and make the player be addicted to them. According to Steven Kotler (2014), video games are addictive because they put the player in a low-grade flow state. Flow is described by Steve as the peak state of human consciousness. He explains that when people are in the flow state, their brains will produce a lot of neurochemistry, such as norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, and serotonin, which can bring people a kind of addictive pleasure as strong as the one which could be caused by drugs such as heroin, ecstasy, marijuana, and cocaine. Kotler also pointed out that many studies have shown that “the deep embodiment,” that is a state in which all the senses of a person are synchronized and completely immersed within the information, is one of the most powerful triggers of flow. Therefore, VR, along with its high-immersion feature, is now regarded as the medium that can bring people into a much higher flow state. Having a higher degree of flow in virtual reality means that the virtual world can make people much more enjoyable and meaningful than real life. Then, it is not hard to understand why people would prefer to stay in a VR fantasy all the time.
Second, dissatisfaction with the actual world is likely to also be a reason for VR addiction. Many sci-fi films and television episodes released recently have already been describing the possible future when VR has been popularized in people’s daily lives. For example, in the USS Callister (2017) of Black Mirror, after the protagonist is not respected by his co-workers in the real world, he dives into the virtual world of the game Infinity day by day and gains pleasure by abusing the digital copies of his colleagues. Moreover, in Ready Player One (2018), the reasons why people are so immersed in the virtual world is even more realistic. people were plagued by the energy crisis, pollution, poverty, and population explosions of the physical world and have no idea how to change the situation. In this way, most people choose to escape to OASIS, a massively multiplayer online VR game, instead of solving real-world problems. The virtual world has become an easy refuge that saves people from the extremely harsh real world. And any real-life issues might cause people to be unwilling to come out of the virtual world.
In addition, VR porn will undoubtedly become an inducement of VR addiction. Porn has always been a synonym for addiction. Nick Olejniczak (2014) stated that according to a study from the University of Cambridge, pornography may trigger sex addiction, just as how drugs may trigger drug addiction. At the same time, he also writes about that sex addiction will make people’s brains produce the same reaction to drug addiction. Specifically, ventral striatum, dorsal anterior cingulate, and amygdalae are the three parts of the brain that would get the same excitement under both sex addiction and drug addiction situations.
Every year, the porn industry can gain great profits from the market. Based on the data released by ABC News (2003), the porn industry had become a $10 billion industry in 2003. The statistics of Brainstatistics (2016) show that in 2016, the annual revenue has even reached $13 billion. Furthermore, Pornhub (2017), the world’s largest pornographic website, claims that in 2016, their website had a total of 23 billion visits, with an average of 44K visits per minute. Also in that year, people totally spent 4,599,000,000 hours watching pornographic videos, which is 524,641 years. By 2017, the number of annual visits has reached 28.5 billion. On the other hand, nowadays, the VR porn industry has already obtained a huge market. VR porn videos were one of the fastest-growing video categories on Pornhub in the year of 2017. The number of 360-degree erotic videos on the site has also changed from 30 in the spring of 2016 to over 2,600 by May 2017 (Pornhub, 2017). Dan Sung (2015) stated in his article that porn executives expect that the VR porn industry will occupy a large portion of the VR market after 2020. Andy Jones (2015) also mentions that Leonor La Plaza, the relations manager of Virtual Real Porn, thinks that a lot of people will be willing to buy VR devices specifically to watch VR Porn videos due to the immersive and intensive experiences VR porn offers. As today’s technology getting more and more capable of accurately simulating human perception, people even have more reasons to spend time immersed in a low-cost, low-risk virtual world, rather than spend time dealing with interpersonal relationships in the real world.
VR porn addiction may also change the way people communicate and interact in the real world. Andy Jones (2015) mentioned in her article that Robert Weiss, who is the senior vice president of Clinical Development at Elements Behavioural Health and author of Always Turned On: Sex Addiction in the Digital Age, said that as sexology is progressively making the virtual reality close to the physical reality, using ‘teledildonics’ devices to simulate sex with other will become the new norm. For instance, Jones (2015) mentioned that there is a Miami-based firm called FriXion which already developed a remote-control device that can remotely operate multiple sex toys at the same time. Its developer Seth also claims that this device can simulate real sex to a high degree. Jones also cited Wise’s belief in her essay that humans having sex and/or falling in love with robots will become real in the near future. This kind of sign actually can already be seen today. For instance, there are already many VR boyfriend/girlfriend simulation games in the Japanese game market. Even as early as many years ago, there was news about a Japanese man who married a virtual character and asked for law benefits for the marriage (Alex Tisdale, 2016). It is not difficult to guess that what VR will bring such phenomena to the general society in the future.
The public should be aware of the possible dangers of VR which are accompanied by the convenience and pleasure it brings to humans. And of course, what VR may bring to the addiction issue is not necessarily all harmful or negative. Specifically, there are many pieces of evidence show that VR sometimes can replace opioid addiction. In his article, Jo Marchant (2017) introduces several research experiments in which researchers found that immersing patients with long-term pain into virtual environments can effectively reduce their pain even more effectively than painkillers. For example, the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITLab) at the University of Washington in Seattle, founded by Tom Furness, successfully developed SnowWorld, a VR experience that can be used to effectively relieve the pain of severe burn patients. Generally, burn patients would suffer from long-term pain during regular treatment and care, so many of them will rely on high-dose analgesics to reduce the pain. SnowWorld, on the other hand, can relieve and divert the level of pain by allowing patients to fly and play in virtual ice canyons. The statistical results they got show that most burn patients reported a 50% reduction in pain after experiencing SnowWorld, far more effective than other distracting methods such as reading or watching TV. The developers said that in this pain relief process, the immersion feature of VR technology undoubtedly plays a vital role. In addition, in some of their other clinical trials, it has also been shown that the VR experience sometimes can be more effective than analgesics to reduce pain (Jo Marchant, 2017). All in all, there is no right and wrong of VR technology itself, but people should carefully consider the results before they decide how they will use it.
References
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