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Tony Lewis, a then KU freshman, sits at his computer entranced in the video game “World of Warcraft.” With swift clicks of his mouse and precise strokes of his keyboard, he serves as virtual puppeteer for Surnek Nemaya, a virtual healing druid. Surnek casts healing spells on hunters and warriors as they fight hordes of enemies.

The phone rings, but the puppeteer doesn’t answer. When Lewis eventually listens to his voicemail, his boss’ voice asks why he missed his shift at the nearby Phillips 66. The boss tells Lewis not to worry about coming in. He’s fired.

Lewis is jobless, but his immediate concern is not how he’ll pay the bills, or that he hasn’t showered since the last time he showed up at work six days ago, or that he hasn’t talked to family or friends in a month.

Lewis is focused only on the game, a place where for hours on end he can heal anyone — except for himself.

Lewis is among a growing number of young men who have an obsession with video games, which some call an addiction. Gamers like Lewis have fallen into a daily rut and can’t quit playing — failing classes, losing social contact with friends and family, forgetting to bathe and one even committing suicide at his computer with the game still on the screen. Friends and family look for effective therapy while some gamers have found ways of quitting, with help or on their own.

Story of a dropout

Lewis says he enjoyed playing the online computer game “World of Warcraft” a bit too much when a friend introduced him to it in September of 2005, his first month at the University.

“He showed it to me and let me play around and I loved it,” Lewis said. “A few days later I bought the game and paid the subscription for it.”

Lewis said that he soon replaced class time with game time. He rarely left his dorm room. He socialized only when his roommate came into the room, or through a microphone when he played with friends he made through the game.

Lewis’ gaming ruined his relationship with his roommate, who complained about bright light and noise from computer gaming that kept him up into the morning hours. The roommate moved to another room the next semester.

Lewis quit attending class in early November, failed three of five courses, and the University placed him on academic probation. He didn’t even enroll for classes for spring semester.

“All the time I was on the computer playing WoW, and I couldn’t even take a few minutes to sign up for classes,” Lewis recalled.

The Department of Student Housing evicted him from McCollum in February after they discovered he wasn’t enrolled in classes, and he moved back to his mother’s house.

“Needless to say, she was pretty pissed,” he said.

After two months, his mother kicked him out of the house, and he moved into an apartment.

Lewis worked at a convenience store for a year. The minimum wage job provided him just enough money to pay for rent, bills, a little food, Internet and his $14.95 monthly subscription to World of Warcraft. Lewis said he cut costs by stealing food at work. He spent leftover money on enhancements to his gaming experience, including expansion packs to the game, a better video card and new speakers. Lewis said he went from playing 10 hours a day to 16. He started skipping work, then lost his job.

Lewis said that one weekend when friends came home from college and visited, they were shocked. He had gained 60 pounds and hadn’t bathed in a week. His friends made him leave his apartment for a day and hang out with them. That night, they told Lewis they were concerned he was throwing his life away for the game.

“It was a pretty sobering experience,” Lewis said. “It really hit me hard.”

Lewis started talking to his friends and mother more frequently. A few months later, his mother allowed him to move back into her house on one condition — he couldn’t bring the computer.

“I had to do it. I was out of money,” Lewis said. “It sucked, though. I didn’t know what to do with my day but go to work.”

Lewis returned to school in the fall as a part-time student at Coffeyville Community College, and a part-time employee at a cabinet factory. He still doesn’t own a computer. He gets his homework done either at school, a library or a friend’s house.

“I figure I better not get one, just to be safe,” Lewis said.

Lewis said he hadn’t played “World of Warcraft” in a year, and has lost 20 pounds since quitting.

However, Lewis doesn’t accept that he was addicted to the game.

“Some people would think that, I could see why,” Lewis said. “But really, had I given a crap about anything else, I could’ve quit. I proved that by quitting.”

Is gaming an addiction?

Addiction has both a dictionary definition and a medical definition. In common usage, people describe things that they like as something they’re addicted to.

“When they say video game addiction, they’re saying there’s kids who love using video games so much that they’re doing it much more than anything else in their lives,” said Dr. Stuart Gitlow, doctor of addiction psychiatry, and a member of the AMA Council of Science and Public Health. “But that’s really not the way the medical field looks at it.”

One psychology textbook calls addiction a condition that “occurs when a person has become physically or psychologically dependent on a substance following use over time.”

Doctors also recognize what they call addictive behaviors. Michael Brody, a child psychiatrist and professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, defined addictive behaviors as when a person needs more and more of a substance or behavior to keep him going, or when the person becomes irritable and miserable if he does not get more of the substance or behavior.

According to a national survey conducted by the Entertainment Software Association in 2005, the average gamer is a 30-year-old male, who averages between seven and eight hours of video game play a week.

In June 2007, the American Medical Association edited a report on the effects of video games on significant users over extended periods of time to describe the behavior as “video game overuse” instead of “video game addiction”.

“The only thing that we did was have the wording changed, so that it was no longer ‘video game addiction’, with video game addiction being a defined term that applies to certain physiological illnesses,” Gitlow said.

The AMA also decided against including video game addiction as a mental disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,or DSM, because it needed to see more research on the physiological effects on significant users.

The AMA’s report on video game overuse said that the pattern of behaviors was most similar to that of pathological gambling, which is recognized as a disorder in the DSM.

Tanya Camacho, an adult addiction counselor at the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery, said in a telephone interview that she thought gaming overuse was an addiction, and that the patients she helped were legitimately addicted to video games.

“It’s probably one of the most recent addictions to come to light, and as with alcoholism 50 some years ago, people aren’t believing it’s an addiction,” Camacho said.

Camacho said those addicted to video games were using them as a means of getting high.

“With the Internet and gaming addictions, as with all process addictions, the person can and does get high off of this addiction,” Camacho said. “The brain is chemically changed, so when a person is getting ready to get active in their addiction — say they’re getting out school and getting ready to go home and get on the Internet — their body and the chemicals in their brain release the same chemicals as the drug addict who is heading toward their dealer’s house and getting ready to shoot up.”

What hooks you to a game?

Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs, have the most addictive potential of any game because the game is never over. Users can constantly play the game to attain a higher level or to master their skills.

Online multiplayer first-person shooter games are also very popular, and potentially addictive. They put the user in control of a soldier with guns, grenades and other weapons with the goal of destroying enemy forces. Popular games in this genre include “Call of Duty 4”, “Halo 3” and “Counter Strike: Source”.

Camacho said the fantasy aspect of video games made them easy to get hooked on. She said that the most common game her patients obsessed over was World of Warcraft, with a community of more than 10 million users.

With MMORPGs, players are able to choose an avatar, or virtual character, that represents them, or who they wish they were. The avatar casts spells or attacks others at the user’s command.

In addition to fantasy elements, comparative achievements also play a big role on the potential of video games to hook players. Many games have a level or ranking system that rewards players for accomplishments completed during game play. Video game makers have also programmed in achievement points, which give users bragging rights over others in the gaming world. Some of the achievements are hidden and require great skill to accomplish. These are referred to as Easter eggs in the gaming world.

Josh Fry, KU alumnus and one-time producer for Gamer Nation, a television show about video games that used to air on TechTV said, “Game makers put Easter Eggs in there just to give users more of a ‘hey-I-found-this’ feel. Getting them is a test of your skills, so accomplishing it is bragging rights for them.”

One of the most famous Easter eggs in gaming is found in “Diablo II: Lord of Destruction.” After defeating the game’s final boss, players get the opportunity to play a bonus level against demonic cows wielding poleaxes.

Another attractive feature of multiplayer games is social networking. Most online video games offer a chat feature, which allows users to communicate with each other as they play. The online networks for X-Box and Playstation 3 allow gamers to talk with each other through headsets, and some computer games also have this feature.

Tragic Evidence

Video game addiction is real and personal to Liz Woolley, founder of Online Gamers Anonymous, or OLGA, an organization aimed at helping video gamer overusers by providing them with information and support to help them stop. Woolley’s son Shawn had an obsession with Everquest, a game he literally died playing.

“I am in AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], and he was acting just like every other addict I know,” Woolley said in a telephone interview from her new home in Tennessee.

Shawn began to play more and more, and eventually became socially withdrawn, Woolley said. He didn’t have social contact with anyone, not even family or friends. Woolley said Shawn even left in the middle of his brother’s wedding to go back home and play more “Everquest”. He also quit taking his prescription medicine for epileptic seizures.

Woolley took her son to therapists, but they did not treat his gaming as an addiction. One therapist told them that the problem was all in the mother’s head. She finally got Shawn into a group home with no computers, where she said he while he became more social and took his medicine. However, things took a turn for the worse when he left the group home and got a new apartment and computer.

“He got the computer and that’s the last I heard from him,” Woolley said. “He disconnected his phone, and he quit seeing the doctor.”

On Thanksgiving Day 2001, Woolley went to Shawn’s apartment and found him dead in front of the computer. With Everquest still on the computer screen, he had shot himself to death. He was 21.

“I said, ‘it has to do with the game. Otherwise why would he do it like this?’ ” she said.

Woolley said she planned to talk to the American Psychiatric Association this year and encourage them to recognize video game addiction as a disorder and problem, and push to have it recognized in the next edition of the DSM.

“When they find out what it’s doing to people, they’re going to be shocked,” Woolley said.

She also hopes to pressure game producers to make their products less addictive.

“It’s just becoming child’s play to see how many people they can get to become addicted because the more people they get addicted, the more money goes in their pockets,” Woolley said.

One game company that has shown some concern for the impact of excessive gaming on users is Nintendo, which has loading screens in some of its games that remind users to pause the game, take a break and go outside. ArenaNet also reminds “Guild Wars” players to take a break with a reminder that shows up on a user’s screen during every hour of game play after the user has played for two consecutive hours.

Getting help

After Shawn’s death, Woolley filed a lawsuit against Sony Online, creators of Everquest.

“The only way I could get anyone to listen to me was to threaten with a lawsuit,” she said.

Soon news outlets were contacting her to talk about Shawn’s story and the lawsuit.

Woolley said when she saw thousands of families going through the same struggles she went through with Shawn, she responded by starting OLGA at www.olganonboard.org. Woolley and a volunteer staff each day field daily requests for help from gamers, some of whom suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts.

“Almost every gamer I’ve talked to has said they’ve thought about it,” Woolley said.

Breaking the habit

Although many gamers have come to OLGA’s Web site or professionals like Camacho for help, others have kicked the habit on their own. Josh Decker, Uniontown junior, said he has reduced his hours of play significantly since his freshman year.

“I was up pretty late into the night a lot of the time playing games with friends,” Decker said. “It was more of a social thing for me, though. I wasn’t playing if I wasn’t with friends.”

Decker said his friends would play “Halo 2” against each other on the X-Box from 7 p.m. to midnight at least once a week.

He said he got low grades in classes his freshman year when he spent his time playing video games with friends instead of working on homework.

He started playing less during his sophomore year, he said, and his hours of game play have gone down even more this year.

“I know that school comes before games,” Decker said.

Decker said when he would feel that he might slip back into the habit of gaming too much, he would set an alarm on his cell phone to remind him that it was time to quit playing.

“The alarm goes off, and I find a stopping point, and work on my homework or go to sleep,” Decker said.

David Smith, Leawood senior, said his friends helped him quit playing games excessively. He admitted he had gaming stints that lasted as long as 12 hours, but he always knew that schoolwork came first. Smith said that he left his video games at a friend’s apartment when he needed to avoid playing them.

John Stockemer, Wichita senior, said he considered himself an “average” gamer, playing video games for three or four hours every day. However, he said he had a few marathon binges last semester.

Stockemer and friends bought “Halo 3” at midnight the night it came out and played it until 6 a.m. He skipped all of his classes the next day, and missed more classes than usual that semester. His grades reflected the gaming trend. In the fall, Stockemer, who said he typically received B’s in classes, received two D’s and a C, dropping his grade point average from 3.4 to 3.25. He said his time spent shooting virtual aliens played a significant role in shooting himself in the foot in the academic world.

“I was up pretty late —until three or four sometimes — playing with my roommates or friends from back home,” Stockemer said. “On top of my job, that didn’t leave me much time for studying or homework.”

Stockemer said he’s strengthened his commitment to academics. He now finishes his homework before he starts playing video games. Now in his last semester, he hopes to finish his college career with a semester of mostly B’s. He said he’s likely to meet that goal and achieve a victory more important than prevailing in any video game —a B.S. in psychology.

“I’ve got my priorities straight again,” Stockemer said. “I want to graduate.”

Improved focus

Tony Lewis, whose video game obsession ended his KU career, now knows his priorities. Gaming is no longer a problem. As he enters his last week of classes at Coffeyville Community College, he is in a good position to pass all his courses.

“I’ve got another year to finish up my juco degree, and then I want to go into music education,” Lewis said. He plans to attend Emporia State University.

His daily routine is now to return home from work and sit at his wobbly wooden desk. The missing computer opens a convenient spot for doing homework. It’s 6:30 p.m. He opens up a book and highlights important lines in it. He finishes reading 80 pages for tomorrow’s classes, watches sports on ESPN and goes to bed at 11:30. His first class is at 8 the next morning.

When the alarm sounds at 6:30, he gets up, turns off the alarm and takes a shower. The former puppeteer of a healer druid in World of Warcraft, who at one time would still be playing as the sun came up, gets in his car and drives to class. Game over.

—Edited by Rachel Bock

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