“Ninety per cent of the young people who seek treatment for compulsive computer gaming are not addicted.”
To say that people can become addicted to video games is absolutely ludicrous. This article brought to us by the BBC states that there are kids out there being treated for addiction to video games such as World of Warcraft.
“But Mr. Bakker believes that this kind of cross-addiction affects only 10% of gamers. For the other 90% who may spend four hours a day or more playing games such as World of Warcraft, he no longer thinks addiction counseling is the way to treat these people.
“These kids come in showing some kind of symptoms that are similar to other addictions and chemical dependencies,” he says.
“But the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers – this is a social problem.”
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again— we have to blame the parents. Video games are a large part of our society today and to make excuses for children and adolescents’ stupidity in playing video games too much is ridiculous. It’s a parent’s obligation to teach their children responsibility; responsibility involves spending too much time playing video games. When parents are unable to regulate what their children do, how their children act, then they are failures. It’s completely unfortunate the amount of horrendous parents there are in the world.
The article discusses a clinic for gamers who are addicted to video games. Although I don’t agree that addiction is the outcome of too many video games, I agree in what this clinic is trying to do. Because, as the article shows, a boy called ‘George’ [not his real name] stated that he “felt accepted for the first time” in his life playing Call of Duty 4 for over 10 hours a day. He goes on to say that he “was never helped by his parents or his school,” and that through the clinic he was able to feel “accepted and come out of [him]self.” This clinic seems not to be for addicted gamers but for lost children. It’s not only a great thing that this clinic exists to help these kids who “feel” they are “addicted” to video games, but that those in charge of this clinic understand and have the wherewithal to state that these kids aren’t addicted to video games but are seeking video games in order to fill a void in their life.
