Are You Addicted?

Are Americans addicted to everything? Even playing games? Now we can play games all day from our phone and on social media sites like Facebook too. You don’t need to buy expensive gaming machines and those endless cassettes to feed into them for finger fun. It is so easy now that we have another kind of addiction to add to all our other problematic addictions. Because you can also interact with perfect strangers and play a game with them, gaming addictions is a global problem. A popular event is the World Championships for particular video games are held everywhere. The prize for the winners in the competition of best gamer in places like Vancouver to play games like BoBoKa or BurNing is $25 million dollars.

Gaming is huge business. It is also becoming a public health issue. Recently the World Health Organization made Gaming Disorder an Official Disease. Why hasn’t America done that too? Is it because America doesn’t want to cover another addiction by health insurance? People are doing so many things to their bodies that they just don’t have to do like opioids, booze and now too much playing games all day long. We know how to treat those other self- imposed addictions but how do you treat a gaming addiction? There is the first gaming rehab in America called restart. It has already treated over 300 gaming addicts since it started and the place has a waiting list to get in.

Serious addicts will play games for 13 hours straight, not take showers, not clean house, not eat properly and go into a demise of various health issues including lack of exercise. They eventually don’t care about anything else in their lives. The additions are real and just like alcoholism or drug addiction you just can’t stop. It takes a lot of time and work. In rehab the gamer has NO access to social media. They do household chores and literally clean themselves up. There are no TV’s or video screens and they undergo a 8 week detox from video of any kind. The brain of a gaming addict has a lit up brain just like a cocaine addict has.

Gaming companies like it that way. The companies even hire people to do what they call “Persuasive Design” to get us hocked on a game. Psychologists say it is unethical. So should addictive games be a crime? Aren’t they all addictive? The videogame developers are making it even harder to stop playing. Some studies have shown that gaming can cause structural changes to your brain. The fancy words are found through the reward system of judgement. The ventral striatum, ventral pallidum. And midbrain dopaminergic neurons. All that damage to my brain just for constantly trying to eat everything in sight on Pac Man for years and years? YES!

Most gaming addicts are men between the ages of 18 and 30. They come from nice families. But at a cost of about $30,000 dollars for a 8 week rehab, most middle class families can’t afford it. Again, should insurance pay for the gaming rehab? For $7,000 a month there are hallway houses for gamers to live and they are not allowed to have anything other than a flip phone and must get a job. Can anyone stop being impulsive? The Entertainment Software Association does NOT want to even discuss the problem and neither does health insurance companies yet cigarettes have warnings and restricted places to smoke. Booze is not advertised everywhere and has a age limit restriction. Selling drugs is illegal without a prescription to have yet gaming is encouraged. It is an issue we need to look at especially when we look at the people we love always on a device playing games all the time.