by Owen Bowcott

• Obsessed players may forget to eat or sleep
• Patient, 23, treated with 12-step abstinence course

Addiction to online games is becoming more widespread among vulnerable young people, according to a treatment centre that has begun running abstinence courses in Britain.

As games become more visually enticing and the recession leaves people at home in front of computer screens, therapists are encountering more cases of people obsessed with being online. In extreme circumstances game players can, they warn, become detached from normal existence and forget to eat or sleep as they interact with screen characters such as wizards and monsters. Youngsters can also develop posture problems.

Broadway Lodge, a residential rehabilitation centre in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, that normally deals with alcoholics and drug addicts, has recently treated a 23-year-old for his obsession with online games.

Brian Dudley, the centre’s chief executive, said: “He was staying online for seven or eight hours at a time. We developed a treatment for him which followed the 12-step [abstinence] approach, but you can’t tell someone never to use the internet again. He had eating issues, he wasn’t eating properly. He did very well. He has … the mechanisms now to cope with it.

“The problem is not just restricted to young kids. We know parents who are hooked on these things. It’s only a small percentage of people who get addicted but it’s also only a small percentage of people who gamble too much. I don’t know anybody else who is treating [such cases] in this country. There’s no helpline.”

Peter Smith, another counsellor at Broadway Lodge, said: “It’s not unusual for people to get so obsessed with online gaming that they forget to eat and drift towards an anorexic and undernourished state. You can play online with people around the world, so it can be at odd times of the day – when it’s 5pm in Chicago or evening in Japan. You have a relationship with characters in the game that give you an artificial feeling, created by your body’s natural endorphins, when you have killed some monster or solved a problem.”

“Addiction” is a loaded term among psychiatrists and psychologists, with many disputing whether the dependency exhibited by a few constitutes the same type of physical craving triggered by opiates such as heroin.

Online Gamers Anonymous, a US website, classifies “massively multiplayer online roleplaying games” as the most addictive. “Success in these games is highly dependent on the amount of time you put into them. Playing the game casually will leave you trailing behind others who put in more time, possibly making you feel as if you aren’t as good or are falling behind.”

Online role-playing games, the site adds, “encourages interaction amongst other people and development of groups, allowing people to flourish socially online, providing an escape for their struggling social life”; however the games could also ruin a “successful social life”.

ELSPA The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association denied that playing online games could lead to addiction. Its director general, Michael Rawlinson, said: “Playing video games is becoming increasingly mainstream in the UK and we firmly believe in the positive impact playing games can have.”