Video Game addiction is a proposed form of psychological addiction and is composed of compulsive use of computer and video games. A poll conducted in April of 2007 found that 8% of youth gamers in the US could be classified as pathologically or clinically addicted to playing video games. Video Game addiction seems to be more of a problem in Asia, with a recent governmental survey in South Korea revelaing that 2.4% of the population of Sotuh Korea between the ages of 9 - 39 were clinically addicted playing video games.
MMORPGs (massivly multiplayer online role-playing games)
Mmorpgs are the most noticably addictive video games available and are related to the internet addiction order. It is estimated that over 40% of World of Warcraft's 8.5 million players were addicted, which makes it statistically more addictive that Heroin, but there is no real proof to support this estimate. It has been said that the reason that MMORPGs are statistically more addictive than other games is because of their built in rewards system. Gamers play obsessively on these games, often doing harm to themselves or others around them. There have even been a few cases where a player has died from playing the game too long.
- In South Korea Lee Seung Seop died in August 2005 after playing the MMORPG Starcraft for 50 hours until exhaustion, dehydration and heart failure caused him to go into cardiac arrest and he died later in hospital.
- In China, Xu Yan died after playing for over 15 days over the Lunar New Year Holiday.
- In June 2005 it was reported that a child died due to neglect from her world of warcraft addicted parents.
In China in 2005 the Chinese government introduced a new system called the anti-online gaming addiction sytem that caused diminishing of the player's in game character's levels and rewards after 3 hours of play, forcing the player to stop playing if he or she wanted to keep his character as it was. This was only implemented for players that are under 18, and reports indicate that players have found a way round it, so it is wholly unsuccessful.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=31536
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article553840.ece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/nottinghamshire/6193462.stm
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