Ben Alexander always struggled to fit in. Teased at primary school and beaten up in senior school, he turned to the internet, where he found a whole new world of friends. Subscribing to the hugely popular online game World of Warcraft, he joined 12 million other people — including the actor Vin Diesel, the presenter Jonathan Ross and his wife Jane Goldman — in a quest reminiscent of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In the game, players create avatars in whose guise they spend hours joining guilds of other players to fight battles. “There’s lots of working together,” says Alexander. “That’s what made it so attractive, because the social thing was something I always had trouble with. It was a lot easier to socialise and make friends online than it was in real life.”
The 19-year-old’s interest in the game soon developed into an obsession. He began skipping his biology lectures at university and spending up to 17 hours a day online. Eventually he had depression diagnosed and was put on medication. He was also treated for internet addiction. Alexander admits that he needed help: “I don’t think I would have been able to get out of it myself.”
Although the medical world is divided as to whether internet addiction actually exists, Online Gamers Anonymous offers a 12-step programme to help compulsive players to wean themselves off games such as World of Warcraft, EverQuest and Final Fantasy. David Smallwood, the addiction treatment progamme manager at The Priory in London, believes that such games are particularly addictive for young men.
The better they get at playing the game, Smallwood says, the more they can “progress to being someone more important”, which they are unable to do in real life. To continue enjoying this elevated status they must get better and better at the game, playing for increasingly long periods of time. “What then happens is that kids become withdrawn, their schoolwork suffers because they are not doing homework and they may develop an addiction to skunk because they are locked in a room. Plus there’s the problem of not eating, as they have no time to eat in the middle of a battle.”
Three years ago, an article in the journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment posited that a “substantial minority” of the 46.6 million web users in Britain — some experts reckon 5-10 per cent — may be addicts. In 2006, a report from Stanford Medical School in the US estimated that almost 14 per cent of the 180 million Americans with internet access found it difficult to stop using the web for more than a few days.
Smallwood says that ten years ago he had never met anyone with an internet addiction, but in the past five years he has come across ten cases, which he believes is just “scraping the surface” of a much bigger problem. He suggests that parents often fail to tackle the addiction because they think that “if little Johnny is sitting in his bedroom playing on the internet, he’s not outside with all the dangers of drugs or alcohol; he’s not out there with all those rough kids”.

Task. Read the text and mark the following statements TRUE or FALSE

1. Alexander turned to internet games because he was bullied throughout primary and secondary school.
True False [1]

2. Players create characters so that they can fight on their own in battle.

True False [1]

3. Alexander likes working with others on a day-to-day basis in real life.

True False [1]

4. Alexander was not addicted to the game right from the beginning.

True False [1]

5. It is unanimously agreed that internet addiction really exists.

True False [1]

6. “Online Gamers Anonymous” offers help to compulsive players so that they can stop playing from one day to the next.
True False [1]

7. David Smallwood suggests that parents fail to recognize that internet addiction is a problem.

True False [1]

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