If the following story was happening in the US, it is all but guaranteed any news reporting would begin with the line “Only in America”.
Alas, it is in Britain where rehab centre Broadway Lodge has expanded its repertoire of treating addictions to drink, drugs and gambling to include… computer gaming. No, really. “I would stick my neck out and say between five and ten percent of parents and partners would say they know of someone addicted to an online game,” Brian Dudley, the Chief Executive of the centre, told the Daily Telegraph. “Obviously, this is the very early stages of researching how many youngsters are being affected… You can’t simply say to a 23 year old male ‘you should never use the internet again’. It’s simply not practical. So we go through all the issues surrounding gaming use and ensure there are triggers through which an addict recognises their usage has become a problem.” Counselor Peter Smith added that, “It’s not unusual for people to get so obsessed with online gaming that they forget to eat and drift toward 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.”
Director General of the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, Michael Rawlinson, seemed as bemused as most by the decision. “We firmly believe in the positive impact playing games can have,” he noted, while one online gamer made the sage observation, “Is it only me that thinks modern people are going soft? Suddenly liking something too much becomes an ‘addiction’”, another agreeing that “Computer game addiction is not comparable to the physical addiction of something like heroin.”
Only in the UK, it seems.
