by Neal Banks

Created on: August 28, 2008

To answer such a question, you must first ask yourself what addiction is (and is not).

Addiction has more than one definition. Within the medical community, the term most often is used to refer to a chemical dependency of some kind: the cessation of which causes physical harm. Within the psychological community, by contrast, the term addiction is used to refer to an activity that has become habit-forming to the point of interfering with a person's health, mental state or social life (in some cases, all three).

Can a game be classified as an addiction, and be that harmful?

I Googled the term "game addiction." I read articles about people who emptied their savings accounts of thousands of dollars and put their families into life-long financial debt because they simply could not stop gambling. I read about teenagers secluding themselves into roleplaying and online games to such an extreme that suicide and murder resulted. I read about video game and video game console sales reaching an all-time high last Christmas season. I read about how untold millions now have virtually unlimited access to the World Wide Web, and a majority of them use it for leisure activity like games (most of which is interactive). I read about how couples are getting divorced, families are pulling apart and children are slipping through the cracks because they spend more time staring at game consoles or computer screens (or card tables or roulette wheels) than they do with each other. I read about how the prevalence of games with violent and anti-social content is numbing the collective conscience of our youth and is already resulting in higher levels of delinquency and violent crimes. I read about how two brothers had a fight over a video game and one stabbed the other to death with a knife.

Must we seriously ask ourselves if this is a problem?

I suppose we could, if we chose to bury our heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. The fact that it even merits entry into medical journals alongside chemical addictions like heroine might lend it some validity. These cases and statistics are not isolated incidents, or small groups of select individuals. It is not a problem that we can relegate or segregate to one social, ethnic or age group. Game addiction is not simply the result of a particular personality type, not a case of "that only happens to people like them, not to me."

It did happen to me.

I was a Dungeon Master for a quarter century. I had invested not only thousands of dollars into

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