I just read yet another lame article that addresses the ‘problem’ of video game addiction. I don’t want to make light of another human being’s struggle but….
Oh scratch that. Of course I want to make light of it. 
According to the article I found via the Dallas Morning News (online version), a young lad named Daniel Folmer used to play video games for up to “12 hours each night”. It seems his gaming fixation was so great, he couldn’t even make time to hug his girlfriend (gasp!).
At one point he “looked in the mirror and didn’t like who he was becoming”. Cue dramatic music here…
But no worries. Ol’ Daniel is now a rehabilitation studies major who wants to become an addiction counselor.
Well good to see the young man is finally getting his life together after those dreadful years of rock bottom, late night gaming. He’s lucky he lived through it, huh?
Skipping ahead in the same article, Hyke van der Heijden blamed the fact that he flunked out of college on his ‘gaming addiction’. He claims that video games were his “only reality”.
It’s interesting to point out that van der Heijden also said he smoked pot on a dialy basis during the time frame in which he was actively addicted to video games.
Hmmm….
Could it be that he was just an ordinary pot head, and that all this ‘video game addiction’ talk is just a bunch of Hoopla?
Video games are to the current drama-starved media what heavy metal music was to the newswires of the 1980’s… an easy target for hollow speculations and a basis for scare-tactic ratings optimization.
Is it possible to spend way too much time in front of the X-box? You bet.
But I’m not sure if such a flaw would qualify you as an addict. I mean, I doubt seriously there are heavy physical withdrawal symptoms to overcome should you decide to spend some of your free time doing things other than gaming.
Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in gaming marathon mode. Personally I can’t handle more than a couple of hours in one sitting, but there have been times when I logged a nearly obsessive amount of time at the controller.
How did I cope with it?
Medication? Counseling? Intensive treatment programs?
Nah, I just shook it off, shut the console down, and found some other stuff to do for a while. I wonder if I could get a job as an addiction counselor now?
