Gaming Addiction


I am sure that many of us play computer games quite often, usually during weekends, school holidays, public holidays, and sometimes during weekdays (school days). But, have you ever heard of people playing computer games until they DIE? Many of us haven’t, so I will state three examples below:

Shawn Woolley was an avid gamer of the computer game “Everquest”, a game that was created by Sony. After playing for quite some time, he became hooked onto it. His mother started to realise that Shawn was becoming anti-social, withdrawn and depressed, and was totally different from the Shawn that she knew the previous year- the Shawn that had finally found a new job and bought his own apartment. But, after a few months after he was hooked onto ‘Everquest”, he quit his job in order to play continuously in his apartment with no one able to interrupt him from his virtual world. He was subsequently diagnosed with depression and schizoid personality disorder.

Then, on Thanksgiving Day in 2001, when his mother went to his house to visit him, she found the door locked. After a long time of ringing the doorbell, she knew something had gone wrong. She knocked down the door and was horrified to find that Shawn was sprawled on the computer table, with the computer showing the game going on. Blood stained the table and Shawn’s mother was shocked to find out that he had shot himself in the head! She knew that the reason of her son’s death was most likely over a virtual incident in the game.

Here’s is the second incident:

On the 3rd of august 2005, a South Korean man called Lee Seung Seop entered a cybercafé, where he played a computer game called “Starcraft” continuously for FIFTY HOURS! He also had been fired from his job after frequently skipping work just to play computer games.
And here is the last incident:

Ben Stein, a speechwriter turned comedian, has firsthand experiences with video gaming addiction. He says that video gaming almost destroyed his 15-year-old son, Timothy. Even Timothy agrees with his father.

Ben Stein said that his son stayed up late regularly just to play computer games. “It was as if there was a demon inside him,” he recalls.

Desperate, the Steins did the only possible method left- to send Timothy to a boarding school, where video gaming was strictly prohibited. Luckily, that strategy worked.

Scared already? Anyway, here are some facts about video gaming.

It has been demonstrated that game addiction has similar symptoms to that of gambling addiction, such as shaking and insomnia, which have been identified in people addicted to video gaming. But, the psychological symptoms of video gaming are the same as the symptoms of drug addiction.

If you are addicted to computer games or feel that you would soon be addicted, try to stop immediately. This is not impossible- if Timothy can stop, so can you! Surely you do not want to die of playing too much computer games, right?

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Hi guys, I'm a student in Singapore, and this are some thoughts and essays I have written over the years.