Two years back, a rehab center in Amsterdam made news headlines because they started a treatment program for video game addicts. They saw gaming problems as analogous to substance abuse and used similar treatment techniques.
But today, the founder of the program has come out and said that they no longer think that gaming problems are an addiction and they are changing how they help these gamers. Some choice quotes from the founder:
"But the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers - this is a social problem."
"This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today," Mr Bakker told BBC News. "Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated."
"In most cases of compulsive gaming, it is not addiction and in that case, the solution lies elsewhere."
It's good to hear other people saying this too. As I noted in Daedalus also two years back, taking away the game doesn't solve the problem because gaming problems are not fundamentally rooted in the technology. Calling it a "gaming addiction" distracts us from the real problems.
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