Following the news of a treatment center in the UK expanding its offerings to include treating game addiction, an Australian academic has called for a similar program to be launched down under.

Sydney University Psychiatric Professor Vladan Starcevic, also billed as a game addition expert, made the call for action to the Herald Sun citing his own recent research in which he polled 2,000 gamers. The results of the survey led him to believe that up to one in ten subjects showed signs of addictive behavior. Starcevic said that his study was undertaken due to more patients exhibiting signs of being addicted to games.

Of the UK’s Broadway Lodge treatment center, Starcevic noted, “I think it's good that someone has taken this seriously. I think it should be recognised that this is a problem for some people.”

Starcevic’s full study will be released in this month’s Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.

The latest in a wave of gaming addiction centers has opened its doors in the UK.

Established in 1974, and located in the English town of Weston-super-Mare, Broadway Lodge has expanded its treatment repertoire to include game addiction, employing a 12-step abstinence program to help patients kick the habit. Group therapy and “therapeutic” tasks such as cleaning and vacuuming are also used in treatment, but apparently baking cookies is not part of the mix.

The center’s Chief Executive Brian Dudley tells the Telegraph that he thinks game addiction is a widespread problem, “I would stick my neck out and say between five and ten per cent of parents or partners would say they know of someone addicted to an online game.”

Broadway Lodge Counselor Peter Smith added:

It's not unusual for people to get so obsessed with online gaming that they forget to eat and drift towards an anorexic and undernourished state. You have a relationship with characters in the game that give you an artificial feeling, created by your body's natural endorphins, when you have killed some monster or solved a problem.

A post on the ChristWire website argues that videogames, along with “nonstop dorm masturbation” and drugs, are among the reasons why our college kids are failing at life.

Author Stephenson Billings previously explored the topic “Is Video Gaming a Threat to America’s High School Jock Culture?,” but believes that the problem is even more widespread in college. Why? “Dorm rooms are like bacteria dishes where crueler and more virulent microorganisms are constantly introduced to breed in a frothy frenzy of poor judgment.”

He continued, “When video gaming is added to a culture of persistent sexual experimentation in a peer group of sex radicals fueled by vast amounts of mind-altering narcotics, reality is the big loser.”

Even more:

Sharp colors and quick movement like you find in Grand Theft Auto make these couch potatoes feel as if they’re really moving through life at a brisk pace while in reality growing obese. It makes them feel important, as if they’re achieving something, while their textbooks sit unopened on nearby desks. It sucks up hours upon hours when these children could be learning business or engineering. Instead of American history, they memorize the satanic rites of Resident Evil, thrill in emotional suffering with Silent Hill or train to be Columbine-style murderers with Dead Space Extraction.

Billings, who bills himself as “an Investigative Journalist, Motivational Children's Party Entertainer and Antique Soda Bottle Collector all in one special, blessed package!,” also tells parents that if their child really loves them, they will submit to regular drug testing.

He concludes his article with a special note to his “young readers”:

The foundation of modern morality so necessary for the next generation to lead is not something you children will get sucking on the end of a filthy bong while yanking a joystick around the streets of San Andreas, gunning down minorities and looking for “Hot Coffee” as some mysterious classmate from Art History oils your tensed-up pecs.* This might seem fun now, but it’s truly destroying your soul.

The site bills itself as offering “Conservative Values for an Unsaved World.”  Other articles include Parent Alert – World of Warcraft and Cosplay Will Destroy Your Child, Teens Use Facebook To Support World of Warcraft (WoW) and Denounce American Values and The Golden Girls: How One TV Show Turned A Generation Of American Boys Into Homosexuals.

GP: It’s like The Onion, except it’s not. Wow.

Kotaku editor Mike Fahey has written a wonderfully detailed and candid first-person account of his addiction to EverQuest.

Fahey begins his story in late 2000, noting that he had a job, a car and a girlfriend. Shortly after, following the breakup of his relationship, he was enticed to join the online world of EverQuest at the behest of his roommate. Falling completely for the game he soon found himself unemployed, his car towed and his wallet empty. While he rebounded for a time, he apparently committed the long rumored, rarely admitted geek-sin of turning down relations for a chance to hit level 40 with his character.

Mike again rebounded, turning his addiction into a job, which helped, as he states, “I've managed to turn a habit that once interrupted my work into something I actively have to do for work. It's no longer escapism if I am doing my job.”

Fahey also admitted that the fault was mostly, if not all, his own:

I hid. I ran from my problems, hiding away in a virtual fantasy world instead of confronting the issues that might have been easily resolved if I had addressed them directly. As far as I am concerned, the only thing Sony Online Entertainment is guilty of is creating a damn good hiding place.

Thanks Andrew

Can problems with video game addiction lead to other gaming addictions? According to a recent study looking at Australian youth, it can.

An article on BASIS Online looks at the study, which examined the correlation between video game play over the past year with a screening instrument that looks at pathological gambling markers. Participants in the study, a total of 2,669, were 12-17 years old and pulled from four major metropolitan schools in South Australia.

Video game involvement "measures included frequency of play, number of hours played, and type of game played, including: TV games (e.g., Xbox, Nintendo, Playstation); phone-based games; hand-held games (e.g., Nintendo, Gameboy); PC games; and arcade games." Pathological Gambling (PG) was assessed using 12 yes/no questions that looked at past and present behavior. With the answers to these questions allowed researchers to put the student into three groups: Not At Risk, At-Risk and PG. The results of the PG were then correlated with frequency and type of video game play.

The conclusion:

The results indicated significant associations between various types of video-gaming and gambling-related problems. However, the effect sizes were very small; this suggests that frequent video-game playing accounts for only a small part of the relationship between video game playing and gambling-related problems among adolescents. The inconsistency within the results (e.g., PC games were protective of PG, but hand-held games did not show a difference between no risk and at risk) suggests that other factors might better explain the association between video games and gambling-related problems. Future research should consider exploring additional factors (e.g., social/family influences, personality, beliefs etc.) that extend beyond frequency of playing video games that may explain why some adolescents experience gambling-related problems.

The article mentioned several limitations on the study and provides a chart that breaks down gambling groups in relation to frequency of video game play in the past year.

Legitimate concern or grasping at straws? I'm honestly not sure.

A study conducted by Singapore’s National Institute of Education reveals that its youth rack up an average of 27 hours a week playing videogames.

The group has polled over 3,000 students during the course of the three-year study, which The Straits Times reports is still ongoing. Lui Tuck Yew, acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts was reportedly “quite surprised and a little bit shocked” at the number of hours spent gaming.

Lawrence Lee, a 16-year old World of Warcraft player, called four hours of gaming a day “nothing,” and compared the game to fledgling love:

It is the novelty, like getting a new girlfriend. You want to spend every minute with her.

Singapore has formed an inter-ministry committee to address “cyber-wellness” issues.

Read the entire scanned article at the Education Soon blog.

Another addiction study has been released, with this one focusing on Internet addiction in teens who are facing depression, ADHD or other emotional issues.

According to a story on CNN's Health.com site, researchers from Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital in Taiwan followed 2,293 seventh-grade students for two years and "found that ADHD and hostility were linked to Internet addiction in children in general. In girls, but not boys, depression and social phobia also predicted problems."

Boys were at a higher risk of Internet addiction than girls, and those who used the Internet for more than 20 hours a week, every day, or for online gaming, were at higher risk as well, the study said.

Michael Gilbert, a senior fellow at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, said the study is not surprising. From the article:

"The study's indication that children who are hyperactive or diagnosed ADHD are finding an outlet on the Web makes such perfect sense," he says, because those children crave the constant stimulation of fast-paced video games and interactive social networks. Kids with depression, anger issues, or social problems also turn to the Internet as therapy, adds Gilbert, who was not involved in the study. "They can take on an avatar or a different identity, and can contact other kids with the same problems and social inadequacies; they don't have to function in conventional social ways."

There are some interesting pros and cons in the article, which goes a bit beyond the study itself. An interesting read, but begs the question: Is the Internet an addiction when it is a main source of communication and information delivery in this technological age?

At least partly in response to a story on game addiction that ran on GP last week, author Neils Clark has written a piece that looks at fluff addiction stories.

Using his blog to examine the original article GP covered, a Green Pixels story on game addiction by Nicole Tanner, Clark offers up a nifty Top 10 list of gaming addiction issues brought up in Green Pixels’ original article.

The first issue Clark’s article—Big Trouble in Little Articles: Ten Game Addiction Fallacies—takes on is “Games Aren’t Drugs. While noting that drug analogies are inappropriate for videogames, Clark states:

While behavioral triggers don’t magically transfigure a game into an ingested substance, not all cravings, or even addictions, rely on ingested substances. So while straight drug analogies commit a logical fallacy, so also do presumptions that since games aren’t drugs, they cannot be the basis of an addiction.

Clark is the co-author of the book Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects.

83% of the U.S. population plays games, enough to eclipse their equals across the pond from a small selection of European countries.

GamesIndustry.com recently disclosed results from its Today’s Gamer series of surveys, which polled populations in the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium.

Runner-up to the U.S., in terms of the total percentage of the population playing games, was the U.K., with 73%, followed by the Dutch (70%), Belgium (67%), Germany (65%) and France (63%).

U.S. gamers also led the way in hours spent playing per week, averaging 10.5 hours, almost double that of the second place French, who averaged 5.5 hours a week gaming.

In every country surveyed, at least 60% of the population over the age of eight played games. More graphs are available for viewing here. Specific reports for each European country are also available.

In an apparent bid to drive enrollment, a Huntsville, Alabama school for struggling teens has issued a press release warning of rising teen gaming addiction in the U.S.

Citing data from a study released earlier this year by the National Institute on Media & the Family, The Pinnacle Schools lists a series of warning signs for gaming addiction, which it notes are “the same as those for alcohol and drug addictions.” Signs include lying, eating meals at the computer while gaming and defiance.

Pinnacle has programs for treating obesity, mood difficulties, lack of motivation, depression, drug & alcohol abuse and online gaming addiction. The school’s physician, Dr. Charles Lee, offered that:

Video/online games stimulate the brain’s “reward centers” which gives the same high drug addicts feel.

More details on exactly how a new facility treats Internet addiction have emerged via an article on the ShanghaiDaily website.

The reStart Internet Addiction Recovery Program, which opened its doors earlier this year in the state of Washington, takes a cold turkey approach to treating Internet addicts and attempts to fill their days with a mix of counseling and daily chores, such as baking cookies.

The program has its first patient, 19-year old Ben Alexander, who said his World of Warcraft addiction caused him to flunk out of the University of Iowa. The center can handle up to six patients at a time, but draws the line at accepting Internet sex addicts, as the retreat’s owner, Psychotherapist Cosette Dawna Rae, lives in the facility with her family.

This story claims the 45-day program costs $14,000, differing from earlier reports that pegged the figure at $45,000.

A Swedish youth advocate, who earlier this year likened World of Warcraft addictiveness to crack cocaine, is the recipient of a profile piece in an online news site in which he claims game addiction is a problem of “pandemic proportions.”

The article goes on to note that, in light of its WOW/cocaine correlation, the Youth Care Foundation and Sven Rollenhagen have been “flooded with inquires from across the globe looking for more information about how to address the problem.” The requests prompted the group to translate their materials into English and to create the Centre of Computer Game Addiction.

Rollenhagen added:

These are smart guys, highly intelligent, capable of being anything – doctors, engineers, whatever. But they find themselves tempted by computer games and end up just wasting time in front of a screen.

Whether your Internet addiction involves online games or plain old web surfing, there's a new treatment option for you.

The Puget Sound Business Journal reports that the reStart Internet Addiction Recovery Program, which opened recently in Fall City, Washington - not too far from Microsoft HQ - is the first facility of its kind in the United States.

How do you know if you have a problem? Take this quiz. reStart's 45-day treatment program will set you - or your healthcare insurer - back about $45,000.

Vietnamese legislators openly criticized a government minister for failing to act to regulate online games, reports the Thanh Nien News.

Minister of Information and Communications Le Doan Hop (left) addressed the National Assembly last week to discuss plans to manage online gaming. However, representative Nguyen Ngoc Dao claimed that online games caused "moral and mental erosion" and argued that Hop's strategy was insufficient.

Hop told legislators that online games could not be banned and began to speak of their advantages and disadvantages. Those comments were cut short by another representative, Nguyen Van Thuan, who wanted to hear more about enforcement of regulations directed at online games:

The representatives were not asking about the pros and cons of online games but they wanted to know if the ministry was responsible for the current situation.

Management is supposed to include the issuing of regulations and the enforcement of them but the minister hasn’t talked about enforcement.

The Center for Disease Control reports that the average adult computer game addict is 35 years old.

According to The Telegraph, the CDC partnered with researchers from Emory and Andrews Universities on the study of more than 500 adults in the Seattle-Tacoma area. The results are not encouraging for gamers, with investigators finding correlations between video game play and health risks:

• Female gamers reported greater depression and poorer health than non-gamers
• Male gamers reported higher BMI (body mass index) than non-gamers
• Gamers of both genders reported a higher than normal reliance on the Internet for social support

The CDC's Dr. James Weaver III commented on the data:

As hypothesized, health-risk factors specifically, a higher BMI and a greater number of poor mental-health days differentiated adult video-game players from non-players.

Video-game players also reported lower extraversion, consistent with research on adolescents that linked video game playing to a sedentary lifestyle and overweight status, and to mental-health concerns.

Internet community support and time spent online distinguished adult video-game players from non-players, a finding consistent with prior research pointing to the willingness of adult video-game enthusiasts to sacrifice real-world social activities to play video games.

The data illustrate the need for further research among adults to clarify how to use digital opportunities more effectively to promote health and prevent disease.

The research will be published in the October, 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, reports Medical News Today.

Last week GamePolitics reported on the tragic death of 16-year-old Deng Senshan (left). The Chinese teen was beaten to death by employees at a camp for Internet addicts.

IDG is now reporting that 13 people have been rounded up by Chinese investigators. The facility itself, the Qihang Salvation Training Camp, has been shut down after authorities found that it was unlicensed. 122 students receiving "treatment" there were sent home to their families. From the IDG report:

Conservative [Chinese] officials blame hugely popular online games like World of Warcraft for getting teens hooked on the Web, harming their grades in school and dividing them from their parents. Some of the camps have used shock treatment on students, but China banned the practice last month.

UPDATE: More at Slashdot...

It's unclear from reports whether or not Deng Senshan (left) was a gamer. It seems likely, however, given his age and the fact that many of those confined to Chinese Internet addiction camps are there for alleged obsessive play of online games.

Tragically, the Global Times reports that the 16-year-old was beaten to death by three camp teachers on Sunday for failing to run fast enough. His bereaved father, Deng Fei, spoke of his son's death:

My son was very healthy and was not a criminal. He just had an Internet addiction when I left him at the camp. The police informed us that our child had died on Monday morning. We can’t believe our only son was beaten to death.

The teachers promised me that they would not use any physical punishment on my son when I dropped him off... We’re planning to sit before the local government for a protest tomorrow. If they don’t give us justice, we will go to the camp to confront them.

Deng Fei paid 7,000 yuan - US$1,024 - for his son to spend one month at the camp.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese netizens are outraged by Deng Senshan's murder:

Many [Netizens] questioned the fairly new diagnosis of “Internet addiction” as a mental disorder.

“Internet addiction? It’s a term made up by some so-called ‘experts’, how come these parents believe what they’ve said?” said one commente... “[It] should be the parents’ problem. Why do they always exaggerate their kids’ hobbies, turning them into addictions or problems?” said another...

One netizen called for greater tolerance of Web habits: “I am sure only China has such a term: Internet addiction…. Why can’t its people accept new ideas and new things with an open mind?”

GamePolitics readers may recall that China recently outlawed electric shock therapy as a means of treating teenage video game addicts.

Via: Gizmodo

Let’s say you’re hopelessly addicted to World of Warcraft.

You play for 16 hours a day. You’ve lost your job, your friends, and you hardly eat or bathe anymore. Obviously, you need help but you’re unwilling to tear yourself away from your PC and see a counselor.

Well, if you’re not going to them, maybe they can come to you - in Azeroth.

Dr. Richard Graham, a consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock Centre in London, would like therapists to join the game in order to treat addicted gamers right where they’re spending all their time.

[Addicted gamers] don’t exhibit the same outward warning signs as most teenage anti-social behaviour issues do because they’re in their bedrooms most of the time, seemingly out of trouble. Because of this we can’t get through to them in the traditional educational environment or intrude on their actual bedrooms, we need to turn to the internet itself to tackle these problems.

Graham admits that many psychiatrists may not be very good at playing video games and suggests existing players can be recruited to act as “peer mentors” for users identified as problematic.

The project is scheduled to be launched by year’s end by which time Graham hopes to convince Blizzard to waive or at least discount the game’s subscription fee for psychiatrists.

AE:  An interesting idea but, as a practical matter, one wonders how an addicted gamer would react to another player "counseling" him or her to take a break.

Via: Telegraph

-Reporting from San Diego, GamePolitics Correspondent Andrew Eisen…

Concerned about game addiction among the young, Culture Ministry officials in Thailand have proposed a revised curfew for online game shops.

The Bangkok Post reports that, under the new guidelines, youth under 15 could only remain in gaming establishments until 8pm. Those from 15-18 could stay until 10pm. Shops which allow minors to remain past the curfew could have their operating license suspended or revoked.

Some, however, believe that even more stringent measures are needed. Anya-orn Panitpuengrat, who heads Thailand's Family Network, called for a three-hour time limit on gaming for children.

The Thai cabinet will consider the proposed curfew change next week.

Recent news that the government of Ontario plans to grant $263 million to assist video game publishing giant Ubisoft in the creation of a game development studio in Toronto has generated a good bit of controversy.

Supporters maintain that Ontario is investing in job creation while critics see a government handout to a company that is profitable, foreign and in the business of creating violent games.

But Brad D. of ExGamer.net looks at the deal from the game addiction perspective. In last week's podcast, Brad comments on the new marriage between Ubisoft game makers and Ontario bureaucrats:

The government of Ontario has just made a massive investment in the firm Ubisoft... When we see massive infusion of cash, let's say in... casinos, we always see that matched with public education programs around the potential dangers of excessive gambling...

 

When I see a quarter-billion dollars being invested by the government in the video game industry, it raises a couple of eyebrows. While I'm thrilled to see jobs in any industry that will be high-paid and lasting, I am concerned that the government is not matching that with some kind of investment in education on the risks of excessive [video game] usage.