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.

The recovering addict interestingly described the in-game “friendships” as performance based, adding that if you performed well in a particular game (raid), everyone would love you, but if you performed poorly, the opposite was true. Advocates could argue that he just had a bad group of in-game friends.

Overall, the show’s tone was serious and down right depressing at times, but I laughed out loud when Dr. Phil asked the current addict what he did in “the game.” The addict described upgrading his gear and collecting various mounts, conveniently forgetting to mention his in-game profession, likely due to his lack of a real world counterpart. Dr. Phil then asked to see some of his gear, adding “Where is your mount? Is it tied up outside?”

The conversation continued with the addict describing his in-game character as being a female Elemental Shaman. Dr. Phil asked why he chose to play a female, and the addict responded, “because the male characters are dumb.” Oh the irony in that statement.

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.

In a recent interview with The Boston Globe he talks about the shame a lot of gamers have when they come to him for help. He cites the socially unacceptability which games, such as World of Warcraft, have as being reasons why people find it hard to talk about.

Some people come in for trouble with Internet porn. But the computer gamers tend to be harder to treat. People feel a lot of shame around computer games. Whereas, it’s socially acceptable to have a porn problem.

He goes on to elaborate on the difference between videogames and porn.

As a society we understand that porn is something people do, and you can see a psychiatrist and get treated for it. But gaming is hard to describe to anyone else. So these people can’t explain their situation to friends.

Block also talks about how, even though the average age of gamers is around 30, most studies on gamers are carried out on adolescents, in part due to the more secretive approach a lot of adults take to their gaming.

It’s an interesting thought about WoW being more shameful than porn and how it’s mostly adults who think about it this way. But I can’t seem to shake the mental image of a mother walking into her son’s room, to see the son spin round on his chair whilst covering the screen shouting “It’s not what it looks like! It’s porn!”

Source: The Boston Globe