kick the habit

An excerpt from Virtual Addiction: The Dangers of Online gaming a blog by girly_girl09 describing game addiction:

“You wake up groggy. The clock next to your bed reads 7:04 am. You were only able to sleep 3 hours since you went to bed at 4 am. You’re scheduled to go in to work at 8:30. Since you have about an hour before going in, you rush over to your computer and start playing EverQuest. It’s now 8:01 am; you’re making so much progress, killing characters and gathering objects that you decide you really would rather game then go to work. You call your boss and tell him that you woke up very sick this morning. “Again?” he asks, “One more sick day from you, and I’m going to have to let you go!”. You go back to your computer and continue to play. A glance at the clock on your computer desk brings you back to reality. It is now 2:38 pm. Oops. What meant to be an hour or two of gaming has yet again turned into another binge”

Recent studies have qualified video gaming addiction as a disease, in the same way one can be addicted to alcohol or drugs. While the addiction causes no physical harm, it is claimed that the disease poses a threat to the mental health of gamers. Some are described in the above excerpt: grogginess, a lack of motivation and a loss of reality. But video game addiction is also claimed to cause more severe side effects such as depression and anxiety.

In Korea, video gaming addiction has become a large public health issue, due to the popularity of games such as Starcraft (in 2000, 1 in 45 Koreans owned a copy of the game). This pretty much answers the question asked in my last posy: NO. While in an online game one can create an alternate identity and live your life more confidently, due to anonymity, and in a deceivingly more interesting fashion, the side effects from gaming too much (social isolation, depression, anxiety, dependence etc) are obviously not healthy.

To further illustrate this point, there have been deaths that can be attributed to gaming addiction:

- In 2005 a Korean man went in to cardiac arrest and died in hospital after playing Starcraft for 50 hours straight

- In 2007 a Chinese man died after playing online games consistently for 15 days

These are just two of multiple examples.

To counter video game addiction, countries such as China have implemented video gaming rehabilitation camps, where patients are not allowed to game at all.

An example of one of these camps is in the below video