Hooked on the virtual world [International Herald Tribune]
“An estimated one million South Korean gamers suffer symptoms of serious addiction, experts say. These people are so obsessed with online gaming that they neglect eating and bathing, skip school or quit jobs, playing the games for hours or days at a stretch – and in several cases a year, until they drop dead.”
“‘If other countries have drug and alcohol problems, we have online gaming addiction,’ said Kim Hyun Soo, a psychiatrist in Seoul whose clinic receives one new serious gaming addict a day.”
The problem outlined in the article is in fact not at all confined to South Korea. In another article the Herald Tribune covers the global nature of game addiction and writes about new treatment centres for obsessive gamers opening in the United States, the Netherlands, France and China.
