I would say I was playing 15 hours a day at the peak," says self-confessed gaming addict Daniel, now 24. "I kind of half block it out because I hated school so much but the worst year I can remember was when I was playing EverQuest. I was 16, and I was getting up at two in the morning and going downstairs on to my mum's laptop to play. I was up until eight, and then I'd get back into bed saying I was ill."
Daniel's story is not so different from my own; we were both miserable as teens, and we both played truant in the fantasy world of games. Daniel's attendance fell from 100% in his first year of secondary school to 45% in his last. Mine was less extreme – I would miss, on average, a day a week. In both our cases, every day spent off school was a day spent playing video games.
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At Widey Court primary school in Plymouth, teacher Richard Gribble made headlines this week after conducting a survey of the gaming habits of his class. Of the 26 children aged 10 or 11, he found that over three quarters were playing video games every night, and over a third were playing in the mornings as well. Some were staying up until 4am to play, others waking up at 5am before school. They were, he said, so tired they couldn't concentrate at all. A few were falling asleep in the classroom. Gribble wrote to his pupils' unaware parents urging them to curb their children's gaming time.
To non-gamers and parents, I realise, such stories may sound inexplicably extreme. The very notion of a video-games addiction may seem odd, or even laughable. Drugs sure, drink sure, but games? Well, yes. Games are addictive in much the same way that a brilliant novel is impossible to put down, and a well-made thriller has us on tenterhooks from the first scene to the moment the credits roll. An addictive game, in short, is a good game.
The figures speak for themselves: since 2008, sales of video games in the UK have outstripped sales of films and music. In 2009, first-person-shooter Modern Warfare 2 was the biggest-selling item on Amazon, outperforming blockbuster films such as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Even now, though, there is a stigma to being a gamer. As comedian Dara Ó Briain put it on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo: "You're not supposed to like video games. It's the largest entertainment industry in the world and we're supposed to not enjoy it."
Part of what makes games, and online games in particular, so much more appealing than other media is the fact they are potentially infinite time sinks. Once enthralled by a game we may stay that way for weeks, months, or even years. An online world is a real-life never-ending story, with the player as the protagonist. There is no happily ever after. The only real time limit is the need for the player to eat and sleep, and, in the most extreme cases, even those are ignored. Last month, a 30-year-old Chinese man collapsed and died after a three-day gaming spree. He had eaten almost nothing, and hadn't slept at all.
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Not for nothing is Daniel's game of choice, EverQuest, known by the nickname EverCrack. It is what's known as an MMO, a massively multiplayer online game, taking place in a virtual world peopled by thousands of fellow gamers. MMOs are widely regarded as the most addictive games of all. "You can't play for a little bit with these games," he explains. "You have to play for a lot or not at all."
Estimates of the rate of addiction among gamers have varied wildly. Figures of 8% and higher have done the rounds, but the true number is likely to be far lower. Professor Mark Griffiths, director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, estimates the real level of addiction at less than half a percent.
"I've got very strict criteria that I use for video-game addiction: it has to be the most important thing in that person's life. They have to use it as a way of consistently and reliably shifting their mood." An addict, he says, is unable to stop playing even when they know they ought to, with knock-on effects on their work and their relationships. "If you're unemployed with no partner and no kids and from the moment you wake up you play video games, and you play all day, that's not an addiction. Addiction has nothing to do with the amount of time you spend on something. If an addict is unable to play they'll get withdrawal symptoms."
Looked at this way, intense gaming – for days, weeks, even months – may well be nothing much to worry about. Simply playing games whenever you have free time doesn't make you an addict, and some people, teenagers for example, have as much as 14 hours of free time a day. So long as you can stop when you have to for school, work, meals, friends and family, intense game playing is just like any other hobby. For a few, though, Griffiths is keen to emphasise, gaming addiction is a real problem. "In the future," he predicts, "it will be medically recognised, and there will be a formal diagnosis."
Dr John Charlton is a researcher in the psychology of online games addiction at the University of Bolton. "There are studies," he says, "showing that the physiological bases of these types of addiction are similar to alcohol and drug addictions. The same part of the brain that appears active when people ingest chemical substances are active when people are playing these games."
Despite such evidence, the American Medical Association has deemed the condition too new and unknown to be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the world standard in the diagnosis of psychiatric problems. In the UK, doctors are often reluctant to treat computer-gaming addiction as a condition in itself, on a par with alcohol, drug and gambling addictions. Instead, it is often considered a symptom of some deeper problem.
"If people have problems with self-esteem or with their relationships with their parents they can use these massively multiplayer online games as a form of escape, just as some people use alcohol or drugs," says Charlton.
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His words struck a chord with me, and would likely do so with Daniel as well. For both of us, when our gaming was at its worst, we were deeply unhappy with our school life. My unhappiness was, at least in part, the product of low self-esteem. Gaming was a place where I could be anyone, do anything – save worlds, win wars, score a goal in the World Cup final; in short, be a hero, instead of a lonely and unpopular teenager.
More than that, the world of games was safe – a place where nothing and no one could harm me, where I could die only to be reborn a second later, and I was always able, given time, to triumph over my enemies. It was a world I could fully understand and control, in marked contrast to the chaos of being a teenager, with a home life ripe with conflicts I could neither escape nor resolve. In the case of my teenage self, and, I suspect, in the cases of many addicts, the world of the game was a private and unassailable refuge from a seemingly hostile world.
Perhaps then we shouldn't be surprised that addicts themselves are rarely the ones who seek help. Though Charlton is an academic and not a psychiatrist, he is often approached for advice and guidance. "It's not really the people who are addicted that tend to phone up, it's the people around them. I say: 'Have you tried your GP?', and they say: 'My GP doesn't want to know.'"
"There's no one we can go to with it," says mother-of-two Tina White (not her real name). Her 16-year-old son has been a gamer since the age of six, but in the last year – since he started playing Modern Warfare 2 online with his friends – his obsession has become a serious problem. "We have episodes of violence. He threatened to push me down the stairs, which is very unlike him. He's probably the nicest lad you could meet when he's not playing the game."
When not at school he now plays games for up to 12 hours a day. "He really has just become paralysed," says White. "You can't even have a conversation with him if it's not about the game." In her quest for help, she approached social services, doctors and even the police. She was rebuffed at every turn. "It's quite an isolated world, without the help. This is an addiction. And any addiction can break up a family."
One of the people White approached was Peter Smith, director of development at Broadway Lodge, a not-for-profit residential addiction care centre in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. Two years ago, Broadway Lodge became the first UK clinic to offer treatment specifically for computer-gaming addicts. "Currently," he says, "we are getting one or two calls a week about gaming."
The number of gamers who end up at the centre is fewer still. Part of the reason is that residential treatment costs money; whereas drug and alcohol addicts are often granted assistance with their care costs, there is no statutory funding for those with gaming problems.
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In some ways this makes sense. Drug, alcohol and gambling problems can leave addicts bankrupt, but most gaming addictions are remarkably cost-effective; after splashing out for the console and the game, the monthly costs, if any, are usually just a few pounds. It is far harder to see and understand the damage wrought by an addiction that consumes only time. It is nonetheless important that we do, and that, having acknowledged it, we look for ways to treat victims, rather than simply pouring scorn on gamers and game-makers.
The blame game is of little interest to Peter Smith. Video-game designers are, after all, just trying to make good entertainment. "There's no point," he says, "producing a game that somebody doesn't get grabbed by. It's a big, big industry and it's about getting people hooked into it."
Families, he says, must accept some of the responsibility. "The problem is at least partly of our own doing. Children upstairs in their bedrooms playing on the computer has been manna from heaven for parents. What we haven't realised until it's too late is that actually they have been playing on these things to the detriment of their homework, of their socialising and of their health."
Early exposure is a common factor among sufferers. Daniel started aged seven. "The first console I got was an Atari Jaguar," he says. "Ever since then I've played games a lot. Before that I don't even remember what I did, probably a lot of drawing and Lego." I remember as a six-year-old begging and yelling for my mum to buy us a Sega Megadrive, spending hours fighting knife-wielding punks in Streets of Rage, and saving up for months to upgrade to a PlayStation three years later. I can remember very few times I spent pocket money on anything other than games.
It was this exposure that gave later games such a powerful hold on me; experience had made me good at them, and being good made them reliable sources of self-esteem. Games were the one place as a weedy, nervous teenager that I could, as I would have said then, kick ass. It is hardly surprising that non-gamers and dabblers rarely see the appeal. I was never addicted to hearing the words: "You lose." As a teenager I kept going back because, unlike how I felt in life, in the world of games I was a winner.
Now I go back to games for altogether simpler reasons. I play them because they're brilliant — exhilarating, rewarding, gripping – and just about the most fun you can have on your own. The proportion of gamers who become addicts may stay roughly constant but as games get better and better, and more and more people discover them, the quantity of addicts in this country is sure to rise.
"This problem is going to get bigger and bigger," says Smith, and, as it does, more money will be needed to deal with it. He is sceptical about the government's ability to find such funding in straitened economic circumstances. Leadership on this issue will need to come from the industry. "We would like them to come and talk to us. We are not saying that gaming is not a good thing, we are not saying there's anything wrong with gaming, but there is a very, very small percentage of people who are getting into problems, and would value some help." In other words: don't hate the game, help the player.