OSUScoonie12
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Anyone see the article in the COlumbus Dispatch about the video game "disease"? What are your thoughts about this kind of stuff?
http://columbusdispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/07/05/20060705-A1-01.html
http://columbusdispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/07/05/20060705-A1-01.html
he world’s first detox clinic for video-game addicts opened this month in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Nobody is laughing.
"Video-game addiction among young persons is a clear problem today," said Columbus psychologist Daniel L. Davis, who counsels about six teenagers a month for excessive gaming.
The compulsion caught psychologist Marty Traver off guard when it first surfaced a few years ago in her Columbus practice.
"When clients started talking about gaming," Traver said, "I thought they meant gambling."
Davis and Traver are among mental-health professionals seeing an increasing number of teens and young adults whose gaming interferes with relationships, school or work.
They attribute the influx to the popularity of a new generation of games that thrusts youths with altered identities into a fantasyland filled with adventure and relationships.
The result often is detachment from the real world.
"Movies, books and TV do the same thing, but the difference is that these games are designed to keep players playing," said Davis, former clinical director at Buckeye Ranch, a treatment center for troubled youth.
With more than 6 million subscribers, World of Warcraft is king of the so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs.
Players sometimes refer to its addictive nature as "World of Warcrack."
A group of enthusiasts at Press Start Gaming store in Pickerington said each had a friend or relative whose playing is out of control.
"We sat down with one friend of mine and told him he was playing too much," said Chris Momeyer, 23, of Pickerington. "It was like an intervention."
"He was having financial problems because he just didn’t want to deal with life."
A Pickerington high-school student with a round-the-clock obsession reacted violently after his parents shut down his computer.
"He punched a hole" in a wall, said his younger brother, who did not want to be named. "He gets very upset when he is not allowed to play."
A part-time job enabled Daniel Cox, 20, of Canal Winchester, to invest 16 hours a day in World of Warcraft.
He recently cut back to four hours a day, to lose weight and while gaming.
"They were just games to him until he started playing Everquest (another MMORPG) and went into a full-blown addiction," Woolley said. "I tried to get help for him, and people just looked at me and said, ‘You should be glad he is not addicted to alcohol or drugs.’ "
She blamed his suicide on a relationship gone sour in his virtual world.
Players form emotional ties that can be broken by mean or rude behavior, she said.
"Hurtful stuff goes on in these games, and people take it for real."
Online Gamers Anonymous has more than 2,000 members and its number of hits has tripled in the past year to 300 a week, Woolley said.
The number of MMORPG subscribers has doubled every year since 1997 to nearly 13 million last month, according to Mmogchart.com, a Web site that tracks usage.
Nobody knows how many players are having problems, but half of 35,000 MMORPG users surveyed by Stanford University doctoral student Nick Yee since 1999 reported "take care of some things in my life."
The game, he said, "can destroy you emotionally and physically."
Traver counsels college students desperate for help.
"They just stop going to school," she said. "A lot of them are suicidal because they know their parents are going to find out."
Liz Woolley founded Online Gamers Anonymous and the Safe Haven halfway house in Harrisburg, Pa., after her 21-year-old son, Shawn Woolley, fatally shot himself that they were addicted.
The number does not surprise the gamers at Press Start.
Justin Meeks once played nearly nonstop with two friends for six days.
"We passed out for a couple of hours and started playing again," said Meeks, 20, of Reynoldsburg. "We each must have spent more than $100 on energy drinks. It’s easy to lose track of time."
Although not a clearly defined diagnosis, video-game addiction meets many of the criteria for addiction established by the American Psychiatric Association.
Young people with low selfesteem, poor social skills and diagnoses of depression or other mental-health disorders are especially vulnerable, clinicians said.
Proctor Hospital in Peoria, Ill., operates the nation’s only inpatient program for Internet addiction.
"We are definitely seeing more individuals for gaming," said therapist Coleen Moore, coordinator of resource development at the hospital.
One patient’s symptoms included bladder problems from refusing to go to the bathroom during long game sessions.
Treatment combines a sixmonth period of abstinence with psychotherapy, supportgroup meetings, relapse prevention and possibly medications for underlying causes such as depression or attention-deficit disorder, Moore said.
"We view this as a disease just like alcoholism."