Tag: ADDICTION

Earlier today, a British hacker was sentenced to two years in prison for five counts of hacking and theft. Ashley Mitchell, 29, hacked into Zynga (the game giant behind 'FarmVille' and 'Texas HoldEm Poker'), stole more than $11 million in credits, and laundered a third of them through Facebook. There are some potentially interesting ramifications to this case. The court ignored the defense's ...

It was a world I could fully understand and control, in marked contrast to the chaos of being a teenager, with a home life ripe with conflicts I could neither escape nor resolve. In the case of my teenage self, and, I suspect, in the cases of many addicts, the world of the game was a private and unassailable refuge from a seemingly hostile world. The Guardian's own Tom Meltzer reflects on his ...

In April of last year, South Korea instituted a ban on teenagers' late-night gaming in an effort to combat the growing problem of video game addiction. But that country's six-hour blackout periods pale in comparison to the 10-hour blockage that will go into effect in Vietnam on March 3rd. On that day, ISPs in the Southeast Asian country will begin disconnecting gamers every night at 10 p.m., ...

Video games may detract from your child's physical activity and social life, but can they also drive your kid mental? According to a controversial new study, they can. Recently published in Pediatrics Journal, said study examined 3,000 children in Singapore over the course of two years. Researchers found that about one out of every ten children ultimately became addicted to video games, and ...

Most video game addicts would do just about anything to get their hands on a free copy of their favorite game. But few would go as far as to pull off a bank robbery-style heist of their local retailer. Why? Because it's illegal, it's stupid, and, in the age of rampant online piracy, it's not even slightly necessary. Steven Archer, however, apparently thought it was worth a shot. The 33-year-old ...

Share Do you open your laptop as soon as you wake up? Do you sneak out of the office to tweet from your smartphone? Do you get the shakes if you go several hours without visiting Switched? If so, you're not alone, because, according to a new study, we're all physically addicted to the meth of new media. The study, titled 'Unplugged,' was undertaken by the University of Maryland's International ...

Addiction researchers at UCLA have designed a virtual meth house in 'Second Life' as part of a study looking at the triggers of addictive response. In studies like these, real addicts are often shown images or videos of drug paraphernalia or other people using, so that doctors can measure their physical and emotional responses to those cues. Second Life was chosen because it's ostensibly more ...

A Hawaiian man wants NCsoft, a South Korean video game developer, to pay up for neglecting to warn against the addictive nature of its popular MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), 'Lineage II.' According to Wired, Craig Smallwood claims he is "unable to function independently in usual daily activities" because of his addiction to the online role-playing game. Smallwood claims to ...

In a radical new study, South Korean psychiatrists at Chung Ang University, College of Medicine, claim to have reduced participants' desire to spend hours online playing 'Starcraft' by dosing them with antidepressants. According to Wired UK, 11 participants in the study took doses of Bupropion, which also reduces the desire to smoke, over a six-week period. These participants were chosen because ...

A young professional athlete isn't the first image that pops into our heads when we think of video game addicts. But, according to the Seattle Seahawks official website, defensive tackle Quinn Pitcock left his former team, the Indianapolis Colts, because he was depressed and addicted to video games. Pitcock was so depressed that he felt like he couldn't face another year in the NFL, so he quit in ...

We already knew that hardcore Internet use could make us all feel lonely, depressed and pathetic. According to a new study out of China, though, teenage Web-addicts may be particularly susceptible to a nasty case of the blues. The study, which was authored by researchers Lawrence Lam and Zi-wen Peng, involved 1,041 teenagers who were identified as being free of depression at the beginning of ...

The Chinese version of the Internet may be watered down and heavily censored, but, for many of that nation's youth, it holds the same kind of allure that keeps the rest of us glued to our laptops all day. For some, though, allure soon turns into outright addiction, and, in response, many Chinese parents are now sending their kids to digital "rehab" clinics to cure them. The effectiveness of these ...

In the grand scheme of things, 2,200 hours might not seem like a lot. After all, what's 91 days compared to millions of years of human history? But if you had to spend every waking second of that trimester doing the same, repetitive task, 2,200 hours would suddenly seem like a veritable eon. For one iron-willed competitor, though, three months of human life was but a small price to pay for gaming ...

A study recently conducted at the University of Maryland asked 200 students to give up social media -- we're talking Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, instant messages, text messages and so on -- for one entire day and to blog about the experience (ironic, we know). That doesn't sound like too much to ask, but judging by the results, reports the Huffington Post, the experiment was akin to solitary ...

And here we thought it was just another case of the wintertime blues that had us laying in bed and staring blankly at the ceiling for hours. Turns out, though, it may just be a simple case of Internet addiction that's been getting us down. According to researchers at the University of Leeds, spending too much time online can unleash a "dark side of the soul," and can even lead to legitimate ...