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Yep, we're having this discussion again. The National Health Service here in the UK (well, the English bit of it) have decided it's time to do something about all these pesky kids with their gaming addictions. Farewell, Fortnite. Catch you later, Call Of Duty. Through a new Centre for Internet and Gaming Disorders, young kids can now be referred for specialist treatment to curb their…
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Timed to coincide with tonight's release of World Of Warcraft's Cataclysm, BBC 1's Panorama tonight covered the topic of videogame addiction. I have always approached the subject of gaming addiction with great seriousness, because it's my belief that if gaming is inherently harmful, I want to know about it, and I want to warn others who game. And I want to approach the subject with…
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In response to tonight's episode of Panorama, and the accompanying discussion of the subject at the moment, I'm reprinting an article I wrote in 2007 about the subject of gaming addiction. Originally written for PC Gamer, my intention was to explore the subject from an investigative angle, rather than as an attempt to prove an agenda of either side. Sadly, I've yet to see another…
Rock, Paper, Shotgun's favourite rent-a-quote anti-gamer Steve Pope has reappeared in the news, this time to announce that professional football players are dangerously addicted to videogames. The "sports psychotherapist", so far unwilling to provide any evidence for his previous claims, informs the Daily Star (famously accurate on gaming related matters) that players from Manchester United, Chelsea, Spurs and Arsenal are all in trouble.
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An absolutely remarkable claim has been made by a UK therapist, Steve Pope, that playing videogames for two hours is the equivalent of doing a line of coke. I attempted to speak to him over the last 24 hours with little success, the results below. Edit: Mr. Pope has since texted me a statement, which I will add below. It's from an article in the…
Having spent many months a couple of years back researching gaming addiction, speaking to all the experts in the field (both self-appointed and those in academia), and finally producing this article, if there's one thing that's guaranteed to make my eyes roll and my head shake it's those who lazily throw around the term. So often we hear news outlets credulously repeating the unscientific and…
The debate over whether games are addictive has taken another interesting turn. Yesterday, Keith Bakker, founder of the Smith & Jones Centre in Holland, told the BBC that he had changed his mind regarding the addictive nature of gaming. The S&J Centre has always been at the middle of this discussion, grabbing the headlines by being the first clinic to take in-patients for gaming addiction…
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[This piece originally appeared in PC Gamer six months ago. It's the result of about four months of investigation into the connections between PC gaming and addiction. I interviewed some of those leading the field in treatment for what they believe to be gaming addiction (including Keith Bakker, head of the Smith And Jones Center in Holland, famous for being the first to offer treatment…
