Sometimes gaming goes mad

AFP , WAHSINGTON
Tuesday, May 31, 2005, Page 16

Members of the video-game team War Machine compete via the Internet against another team as they play Guild Wars this month at the Electronic Entertainment Exposition in Los Angeles. The members of War Machine are top Guild Wars players and are from Korea. PHOTO: AP

Aneglected cries alone. Crazed by lack of sleep, a young boy threatens suicide. A marriage crumbles over a lone obsession.

Yet another grim tale of 21st-century social breakdown? No, these are the victims of America's newest social scourge: video- game addiction.

Psychologists psychiatrists estimate that even before the new wave of gaming consoles hits the stores in the form of PlayStation 3 and XBox next year, one in eight players already suffers from some kind of video-game dependency.

There are few long-term scientific studies on video-game addiction.

But the reach of the video obsession is borne out by the popularity of one online game Halo 2. Earlier this year, 1 million players had staggeringly clocked up nearly 100 million hours on the game, according to industry figures.

Video who take their obsession too far show symptoms similar to alcohol or drug addicts, says psychologist David Walsh, founder of the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"Online games are the most addictive because of the tremendous peer pressure not to stop," Walsh said.

"Very often, the rest of the group will threaten to kick you out of the team," he said, nominating the fantasy role-playing game EverQuest as one of the most addictive releases.

Walsh a minority of gamers exhibit extreme symptoms: "A young woman admitted she neglects her baby. She lets her baby cry in the next room for hours. She told me how guilty she felt," he said.

"A young woman divorced her husband because all he would do was play games. A man lost two jobs because of video games," he said.

Walsh children's lives can be overtaken by gaming, some of them putting in a horrifying 70 hours a week. One 12-year-old boy played all night until falling asleep at four or five in the morning.

"The mother said he threatens to kill her or himself if the parents make him stop. The psychiatrist told the mother not to make him stop," he said.

As casualties mount from the video-game wars, self-help organizations are springing up like "On-Line Gamers Anonymous" -- inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous.

Liz Woolley founded On-Line Gamers Anonymous in 2002 after her son lost a battle with depression and committed suicide. The boy was an enthusiast of EverQuest, one of the most popular games, as well as the joyriding fantasy Grand Theft Auto and the war game Socom.

Experts adolescents are partly attracted to video games because they become players thrust to the center of the action, allowing them to overcome a lack of confidence that people in this age group often feel.

"The feeling of mastery and control are additional elements likely to affect teenagers," Walsh said.

What are the classic warning signs pointing to addiction?

Typically, victims will spend most of their time at home, in their room, only coming out for meals or bathroom breaks, according to the Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence Web site.

Like everywhere, the first problem for video gamers is admitting they have a problem -- most game players, when challenged, insist they could stop at any time.

But it's not just addiction that is a problem. There has long been concern for the impact on young people from the steady diet of often extreme violence flashing across the screen.

In a survey of 81 video games analyzed last year by a team of researchers at Harvard University and Children's Hospital Boston, 98 percent contained violence, which amounted to 36 percent of game time.

Violent were recorded among characters in 77 percent of games, at a rate of 122 deaths per hour. Ninety percent of games required players to kill or maim to score points, and researchers sat through 11,499 screen "deaths" in 95 hours of play.