Video Game Addiction?

A Mysterious Midget brought this to my attention. So some bitch from Texas thinks video games should be considered a serious addiction just because of her own failure as a parent. Now this is really unfair: they’re only talking about online games here but are trying to apply it to all video games. I’ll admit: some people can get very addicted to online games (personally, I find them boring). But is it the nature of the game that does it? Perhaps, but unlikely. Is it the game producer’s fault? Hell no. If someone has locked themselves in a room to delve into a fantasy land that screams that there is a much more serious underlying problem. Ever think that maybe these people are just, I dunno, depressed?

But of course no one takes personal responsibility anymore. We’re apparently just easily manipulated by outside sources, so much so that the slightest influence of one of these devious forms of entertainment can control us completely. It can’t possibly be that you’re a weak-minded idiot or that you’re a bad mother.

Joyce Protopapas of Frisco, Texas, said her 17-year-old son, Michael, was a video addict. Over nearly two years, video and Internet games transformed him from an outgoing, academically gifted teen into a reclusive manipulator who flunked two 10th grade classes and spent several hours day and night playing a popular online video game called World of Warcraft.

“My father was an alcoholic … and I saw exactly the same thing” in Michael, Protopapas said. “We battled him until October of last year,” she said. “We went to therapists, we tried taking the game away.

“He would threaten us physically. He would curse and call us every name imaginable,” she said. “It was as if he was possessed.”

When she suggested to therapists that Michael had a video game addiction, “nobody was familiar with it,” she said. “They all pooh-poohed it.”

Last fall, the family found a therapist who “told us he was addicted, period.” They sent Michael to a therapeutic boarding school, where he has spent the past six months — at a cost of $5,000 monthly that insurance won’t cover, his mother said.

So, let me get this straight: Your son, in High School, one of the roughest periods in anyone’s life, for some reason withdrew into gaming. And this is the game’s fault? You don’t think maybe he wasn’t worried about the future? About what he’d do after High School? Was under so much pressure he just withdrew from the world into one more comforting where he could have grand, supernatural adventures? Did you ever TALK to your damn kid about what his problem might be?

You tried to take it away, but he threatened you, so you just sat back and did nothing instead. Yeah, kids are terrors, I know, I a bit of was a terror when I was a teen too but my parents didn’t pussy out.

So then, instead of taking charge as a parent, you took him to therapy, got ONE IDEA stubbornly in your head and insisted it to the therapist, even when the therapist told you “no you’re wrong, lady, let’s find the real problem”. And so you dragged your kid from therapist to therapist until you found one that would agree with you. THAT’S NOT HOW THERAPY WORKS!

And now you’re on a mission to stamp out video game addiction, right? Because you sent your kid to boarding school so you didn’t have to deal with him and your insurance won’t pay for it because video game addiction isn’t real. Go to hell, lady.

How does one cure video game addiction anyway? Besides, you know, self-discipline. Should we send people into 12 step programs that don’t work? Put them on some kind of pill? How about you, Ms. Protopapas (which is a retarded name, by the way), take responsibility for your own fucking kid and worry more about why he withdrew into fantasy worlds more than the fact he’s done it.

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