Today’s episode of the Dr. Phil show, titled “Virtual Chaos”, addresses video game addiction, and it isn’t pretty. The featured guests spend 80 hours a week on average playing “the game” (which is on more than one occasion revealed to be World of Warcraft), abandoning their jobs, ignoring their wives, and neglecting their children.

One recovering video game addict in the audience described how he would secretly replace the guts of his PC when his wife went to work so that he could play more advanced games without her knowing about the expenses he was racking up. The camera panned to the current addict on stage as the audience member explained his secret upgrade process, and you could literally sense a light bulb going off in his head. Read more…

Mark Wahlberg, the actor slated to play Max Payne in the upcoming film based on the popular video game franchise, states that he has not played, and will not play the video game. Why? Because he says he has an addictive personality, and that, combined with his other adult responsibilities, simply won’t mesh well.

In an interview with People.com, Wahlberg says “I didn’t want to play because I have an addictive personality.” The actor then adds:

“I got more responsibility now than I’ve ever had with the kids and everything else. I don’t want to be spending 14 hours on the videogame and then eight hours on the set. It’s not going to work out.”

That’s strange. I seem to remember Mark Wahlberg posing for Calvin Klein in his underwear, grabbing his crotch, and belting out really bad rap songs about vibrations or something like that.

Guess it’s a good thing his addictive personality didn’t kick in back then, or we may have been treated to a Max Payne in boxer briefs, running around shooting people and asking “can you feel it baby?”.

Source: showbizspy.com

Dr. Jerald Block is a psychiatrist who specialises in helping people get over their addiction to a wide number of things, one of which is games. He argued recently in the American Journal of Psychiatry that “Internet Addiction” should become a professionally used term.
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