It's a pity there wasn't a lot more enjoyable educational games that are at least more beneficial for people that are addicted to video games, most educational games are however often boring, massively inferior and they usually feel like a chore, rather than something that is truly enjoyable.
If you wanted to learn Japanese there's the following:
Learn Japanese To Survive! Hiragana Battle on Steam
Learn Japanese To Survive! Katakana War on Steam
The graphics still aren't up to AAA standard and are rather dated, but at least they've made an effort to make a fairly interesting RPG story where you need to remember Japanese to defeat the enemies. Why can't there be a lot more games like this or even better that really are actually enjoyable to play, especially for children? Imagine games with graphics as good as the latest Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto that are also truly educational, but unfortunately they don't see it as feasible for such a huge budget and only a few smaller developers will attempt such titles. Governments should at least give tax perks for software companies that produce truly educational titles.
Yes, it’s a real addiction and they are thinking of adding it to a future DSM. Video game addiction is very rampant around the world. There was even a documented case in South Korea, where a young couple let their real life baby starve to death, while they went to the video game parlor for 14 hours per day over several months. The kicker is that they were playing a game where you keep a tiny baby and grow it up! Truth is stranger than fiction.
Young adults in several documented cases have been found dead of aneurisms (blood clots) due to sitting in a chair for 3 days straight playing videos.
It’s as big an addiction as gambling, drugs, or any other, and it is affecting young teens. I am always shocked to see parents give their infants cell phones to quiet them when in restaurants. The parents sit on their own cell phones, and don’t pay any attention to the baby, who is transfixed by the weird sounds coming out of the game apps. Instant gratification, and instant “friend.” It’s starting the potential addiction from day one.
I agree that video games can be a huge addiction and that is can become detrimental, but there's still a massive difference between drug abuse and video game addiction. The example you gave was an extreme case, but there's many thousands of drug abusers who are unfit parents and abuse them by not caring for them properly, many children are sadly taken in care which is often not much better in my opinion, but many are also still left with parents who will always put their drug habit above anything including their children.
I believe that video games in moderation don't cause any harm, it's not something that should be demonised as totally bad so children or adults are denied from playing them, but all drug misuse is in my opinion harmful and more often leads onto a much more serious addiction. People addicted to video games are not always unhappy, many don't mind and enjoy playing them, it is a problem when other things suffer in their life, but there's rarely an agonising downside like with drug misuse. People addicted to drugs however are only "happy" during the highs and there's a lot more downsides, especially in the long run, plus they can be addictive to the extent where an average person would do virtually anything to obtain them out of total utter desperation because the withdrawal is literally agonising both physically and/or psychologically, for this reason drug abuse causes a very high proportion of serious crime in order to pay for expensive drug habits, where video game addiction doesn't (apart from maybe piracy). People's bodies get used to drugs and eventually drug abusers end up taking them just to feel normal, when it gets to that stage there's no real upside. A person can die from taking a drug overdose or even a bad hit, this definitely isn't the case when you decide to play a computer game. I write from experience of both video game addiction and past hard drug misuse (I've been clean over 15 years), if I had the choice of being addicted to computer games or hard drugs, I wouldn't even need to think about it, I still play computer games far too much now, but it doesn't even bother me and I enjoy them.
With any addiction however it's almost impossible to help a person that doesn't want to be helped, since many people addicted to computer games don't see any problem with it and are often even content with it, it makes helping them much more difficult and denying them from their addiction will only cause severe bad feeling and issues. Remember however that computer game addiction is only really an issue if it becomes detrimental to other things in life, enjoying them a few hours a day doesn't really hurt a person if they still do everything else expected of them so people also shouldn't overreact, in many cases it's no worse in my opinion than sitting watching TV which lots of people have done for many hours a week even before video games even existed. A large proportion of drug abusers however understand the misery of it when it's too late and they wish they were strong enough to come off them, this opens the door to possibly helping them.
