by Emily Hall

Created on: February 08, 2009

A gaming addiction is an ephemeral thing that is difficult to quantify or even admit to. It isn't a physical addiction. The only word to use for a gaming addiction is psychosomatic, yet that implies choice, and there is no choice involved. By the time you are so deep into a game it has become an addiction, you have eroded your own ability to choose to the extent that it feels like you have no will power left at all. It affects children and adults alike. You can have a gaming addiction alone, or you can have it as a group of people - a group of contemporaries, a group of people you've never met in real life, or even as parent and child.

It doesn't matter what the game is. You can become addicted to any game at all. I was adddicted to an early computer game called Spin Doctor in which you spin a wand around a series of dots and cling to one or the other in order to get across the screen in the quickest possible way. It wasn't high tech, it wasn't even especially fun, but I was entirely addicted to it and my symptoms manifested themselves as though I were physically addicted. In retrospect, I see things about that game that I didn't notice at the time.

The game was very ordered, and very straightforward. I spent my life learning, being asked questions that I didn't know the answers to. In that game I knew all the answers. The best - or worst - thing about it was that it had no last level. There was no cut off point - you could just go on designing courses for yourself, in increasing difficulty and speed. You could get better and better and you would never have to stop. You could be the world's expert, but no-one would tell you that because you played alone. There was no-one to compete against except yourself, and as I found, you can always beat yourself, sooner or later.

Over the course of my growing addiction to that game I lost half a stone in weight. I stopped taking any interest in my friends. I suffered having them over, but always wanted to be on the computer playing that game - and they could play too, of course, but they never got anywhere near my high score, because unless you put in the amount of time I did every day, it would have been impossible. I even began to neglect music. I nurtured my obsession by saying that it was creative, and it trained my brain in logic and practical problem solving. I thought up every excuse and every cod-intellectual force of reasoning I could to try to get my parents to increase my ration of gameplay time per day. I was

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