Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects

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In November of 2007, an eleven-year-old Vietnamese boy strangled an elderly woman for the equivalent of five U.S. dollars, then buried her body under a thin layer of sand in front of his house. When questioned by police, he said that he needed the money to play online video games. Just a month later, an eight-year-old Norwegian boy saved his younger sister’s life by threatening an attacking moose and then feigning death - skills he later revealed to have learned while playing the online game World of Warcraft. As these two instances show, video game addiction can tremendously affect the minds, bodies, and lives of millions of gamers, negatively or positively. This book studies video game addiction from a cross-disciplinary approach, bridging the divide between liberal arts academics and clinical researchers. It approaches the topic of addiction from neither an anti-game nor a pro game stance, instead using accepted research in neuroscience, media studies, developmental psychology, and many other fields to reveal how today’s gamers interact with and become consumed by the virtual worlds of their video games.