Tag Archives: addiction

According to a recently-released study, one in ten children in Singapore are addicted to videogames.

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Britain now has a games rehab clinic. The Telegraph has the story. Apparently, “Suffers [sic] spend days at a time glued to their computer screens – going without food, sleep, or any social interaction.”

Broadway Lodge is a residential unit in Weston-super-Mare, and treats around 400 addicts a year for a range of issues including, drink, drugs, gambling… and computer gaming addiction.

Hit the link for some vaguely-veiled fascistic scaremongering.

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Addicted to World of Warcraft? Have $14,000? Live in America, or have access to an aircraft that can get you to America? Son, your boat’s come in.

Something called ReSTART’s been launched in the US, offering a 45-day, $14,000 program that employs a “cold-turkey” approach to help people wean themselves from “pathological computer use,” which can include obsessive use of video games.

“We’ve been doing this for years on an outpatient basis,” said Hilarie Cash, one of the center’s bosses.

“Up until now, we had no place to send them.”

WoW addiction has a home. Hit the link for more.

ESA boss Mike Gallagher has challenged an Iowa State University study that claimed up to 8.5 percent of game-playing American youths aged 8-18 show multiple signs of behavioral addiction.

“As you are likely aware, such a sample is not truly representative of a national population group,” Gallagher said in a letter to Psychological Science’s Dr Robert Kail, who’s publication is to run the study’s findings in an upcoming issue.

“Thus the results cannot be projected onto the broader population of children in this country. And the sampling error of plus or minus 3% that Dr. Gentile cited in the study is also meaningless.”

Gallagher’s letter also notes that Dr Gentile, the scientist behind the paper, later conceded in press interviews that he was unaware his study sampling was not based on a random probability sampling.

“We accept Dr. Gentile’s admission of error at face value, although it is hard to understand how a researcher would base a scientific study upon an assumption about the nature of the group he was studying,” said Gallagher.

You tell ‘em, Mike. Lots more words on Gamasutra.

Whoops. An Iowa State University study has found that 8.5 percent of game-playing American youths aged 8-18 show multiple signs of behavioral addiction.

From this Washington Post piece:

The study found that 88 percent of the nation’s children ages 8 to 18 play video games. With 45 million children of that age in the country, the study would suggest that more than 3 million are addicted “or at least have problems of the magnitude” that call for help, Gentile said.

“It’s not that the games are bad,” said Gentile, who is also director of research at the nonprofit National Institute on Media and the Family. “It’s not that the games are addictive. It’s that some kids use them in a way that is out of balance and harms various other areas of their lives.”

Full thing through there. Scary reading.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter’s called MMO players “addicts” in an interview with Reuters.

“I don’t think (online multiplayer games) get impacted at all, because people who play them are addicts,” he said.

“Losing their jobs makes them more likely to play because they have more time to play.”

There are some raw nerves in gaming, Michael, and this one’s inflamed and throbbing. Good luck.

Thanks, GamePolitics.

Very interesting article here, in which MIT professor Henry Jenkins argues that China’s concern over the impact of games centres on addiction as opposed to the western political obsession with morality and violence.

“The Chinese had little interest in the argument that games violence causing real world violence,” he said, speaking from the International Games and Learning Forum in Shanghai. “Rather, the incident was read in terms of concerns about the breakdown of traditional community life and the loss of the moral influence of the extended family in Chinese culture, both of which were seen as a consequence of rapid cultural, technological, and economic changes. The incident was also read partially in relation to a focus on ‘games and internet addiction.’”

Jenkins further argues that the authorities are using the argument that gaming and web “addiction” are damaging traditional life in China as an excuse to censor internet access among the young.

“To some degree, the Chinese government is using a rhetoric of addiction to rationalize their periodic crackdowns on young people’s digital access, knowing that concern about media effects is more likely to be accepted by western governments,” he says. “In that sense, addiction rhetoric does some of the same work that the Firewall does in terms of restricting youth participation in the online world.”

Nice brain fodder for a Sunday afternoon.