I have been wondering recently if my brother might be struggling with gaming addiction.

He sits up until around 3-4am every night playing Wii games such as CoD or PC games such as WoW and can’t drag himself out of bed in the morning. He even fell asleep whilst he was in a university lecture the other day! My brother also isn’t very sociable and doesn’t see much interaction other than those “friends” he’ll play games with online.

Not knowing the criteria for spotting an addiction to video games, I turned to the internet which pointed to 5 main behavioural traits to keep an eye out for…

1. Do you notice a significant different in your happiness levels between those time that you are video gaming and those time that you are not? Are you angry and upset when something interrupts your gaming session?
2. Do you spend significantly more time attached to your keyboard or gaming pad as opposed to seeing friends and family? Social interactions help to aid our mental happiness.
3. Do you think about or actually – play video games when you have other things that your should be focusing on like a job or course work? Do you fall behind on your responsibilities often?
4. Do you find yourself lying about how you spend your time? Are you secretly concerned that you have an issue?
5. Do you find it difficult to sleep at night? Too much excitement before bed can make it really very hard to settle down for a good night’s sleep.

From this, it is quite likely that my brother does indeed have an addiction to video games. My mum contends that it is just a habit and hobby of his and that he will grow out of it one day. Hopefully this is the case…

Would a gaming addiction to a motion controlled game like Kinect be considered an issue? If anything, surely it would just make the gamer in question extremely fit and tired?

Tags

Computer Games & Software