‘I didn’t eat, I stayed in my dark room and didn’t move for 32 hours’: inside a gaming addiction centre where people hooked on Fortnite and other games get help
AT his lowest point James Good remembers shutting himself in a dark room and gaming for 32 hours straight.
He didn’t eat as he was glued solidly to Dark Souls 1.
Things got so bad he split up from his girlfriend and ended up dropping out of university in a spiral of depression.
James had first been introduced to games on the Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64 as a five-year-old.
However his gaming hobby soon became an unhealthy obsession as he got hooked on games such as Call of Duty and FIFA in his teens.
It was when he moved to Swansea university his gaming started to take over his life.
He told the Sun Online: “It got pretty bad in my first year. I did all my work at 3am or 4am as I had been playing video games all evening.
“It got so bad that instead of completing an assignment over the weekend, I spent 32 hours straight finishing Dark Souls 1.
“I didn’t eat during this time. I stayed in my dark room, which luckily had an en-suite and I only got up to get water or go to the bathroom.
“My flatmates were worried…they were going to call security because they hadn’t seen me. I just said ‘I was playing a game for 32 hours’. I didn’t think anything of it. I was just trying to finish this really difficult game.
“There were no indications of how far through I was….you’ve just got to keep going until you finish the game. It was like a personal vendetta against the game. I really wanted to finish it.”
James said things then “took a turn for the worse” in his final year at university.
He said: “I broke up with my girlfriend, my grades suffered, I stopped turning up to lectures and I’d spend hours every day playing FIFA on my Xbox. I became detached from my friends, staying put in my room until I was forced to get out of bed. I hated everything.
“I’d forced myself into believing that nothing would ever work, regardless of how hard I tried.”
James quit university and went on a 90 day game-free detox.
He said: “There were some dark times during the detox. The cravings became so bad at some points that I had to force myself to not even look at the computer. I’d get out the house and just walk.”
After the 90 days were up he decided to try and game in moderation.
But within a week he had slipped back into his old habits.
He said: “I was gaming for 60+ hours a week and everything I’d worked hard towards over the last three months suddenly disappeared. I was back to square one.”
Almost a year ago he finally kicked his habit after going on a three-week expedition to the Canadian Yukon which he described as a “life-changing” experience.
‘GAMING ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED’
James, who now works with Game Quitters support organisation, told how a major difficultly faced by gaming addicts was that most people don’t view it as a serious problem “because they play games themselves or think it’s simple to stop”.
He also criticised the lack of warning about the dangers of binge gaming.
He told the Sun Online: “We have so many campaigns telling you the dangers of excessive drinking, smoking, gambling and doing drugs – but gaming is actively encouraged without people knowing the effects of excessive gaming. It doesn’t make sense to me.
“Gaming now fills so many of people’s needs, like creative, challenged, rewards, social…everything is getting bombarded in your brain by these games now. A lot of games are purposely designed to be addictive.
“We need to make sure those who are struggling with gaming addiction can get the support they need both through healthcare services and proper education on the subject.”
ESCAPISM
Gaming addiction is a real and growing problem.
It was officially recognised last week as a disease by the World Health Organisation.
Video games are enjoyed by billions of people around the world without any harmful effects.
But popular games such as Fortnite, League of Legends and World of Warcraft, which take players into a never-ending fantasy journey, mean more people than ever are getting hooked.
Scientists believe four per cent – or around 90 million people around the world – are now addicted to gaming.
The intense and interactive nature of modern-day games offer people an escape from their real world problems that can have disastrous consequences.
There have been horror stories of gamers’ marriages collapsing, people spending their entire life savings on games (sometimes in excess of £50k) and children wetting themselves because they refuse to get off their games, as well as throwing tantrums and threatening to kill themselves if parents try to take their games away from them.
‘URGES EVERY SINGLE DAY’
One former addict Matus Mikus told a parliamentary committee in March that his binges went anywhere from four hours to 12.
He said he realised things had spiralled out of control when his girlfriend split up with him due to excessive gaming.
“You go online, you’re doing well, you feel good, and then you go outside, it’s stressful,” he said, describing the addiction as “self-perpetuating”.
He said he lost control when he no longer had family to tell him to stop gaming.
“I had urges every single day,” he explained.
He said that to stop gaming, delete his games, change passwords and lock away his computer.
Meanwhile Jack Edwards, a YouTube vlogger, said the “endless possibilities” of gaming left people prey to “falling down rabbit holes”.
‘LOST EVERYTHING’
Another gamer, who wished to remain anonymous, told how his gaming “totally consumed” him.
He was hooked on first-person shooter games – and once spent a solid 48 hours in front of his computer.
He told the BBC: “It just consumed me. At my absolute worst, I was gaming all day, every day.
“My children were like an inconvenience because they wanted my time, and I wasn’t able to give them my time and my love.
“I remember shouting at my partner, telling the children to go away.”
He added: “I was being late into work, and it consumed my life to the point where I lost my job.
“And I lost my family, my home – everything.”
Earlier this year Prince Harry made a personal intervention, calling for a ban on Fortnite.
He said: “That game shouldn’t be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household?
“It’s created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It’s so irresponsible.
“It’s like waiting for the damage to be done and kids turning up on your doorsteps and families being broken down.”
TREATMENT FOR ADDICTS
As gaming addiction becomes an increasing problem, one centre providing treatment for addicts in the UK is the .
Resident manager Taner Hassan said a lot of problems were down to the new “intense” types of games available.
He told the Sun Online: “When you look at gaming now there are so many intense games out there now that tap into the fantasy world, meaning you can become anyone you want to be.
“Back in the day there used to be an ending to games, but now there isn’t, so they are an escape world with no ending.
“It’s like smoking a never ending joint in that sense. That doesn’t help if you’re the sort of person who can be attracted to that and hide into that. Then it can be really difficult to break.”
‘STRUGGLING WITH REALITY’
Mr Hassan explained how games like Fortnite and Minecraft also offer players a sense of purpose.
He said they’d had people coming into the centre who had been playing “for days, sometimes a week”.
He explained: “Some play in between work and play every spare minute they have…I think we will see more gaming addicts coming into treatment.
“We haven’t had any females…it’s all been young males. They have had very low self-esteem and self-worth.
“They were struggling with reality because they were so comfortable with the virtual reality of the game.”
He added: “The path is continuous with gaming. There’s only so much cocaine you can sniff, there’s only so much alcohol you can drink until you pass out…so unless you switch the power off that gaming can continue.
“It means that world will continue so that’s the constant pay-off and that’s having a profound effect on the brain.
“It’s an escapism and it increases the anxieties that being in the real world has.”
Mr Hassan said it was unrealistic to tell gaming addicts to turn off from gaming altogether.
He said: “We are an abstinence based treatment centre but we can’t say [to gaming addicts] you can never use technology again, that’s just not realistic so we need to look at coping strategies and other things like that.
“That also depends on the client as not everyone is the same.
“A full on gaming addict might play so many intense games and then on their phone they may have lighter games to tie them over when they’re not in that intense world.
“So we might want to say to a client, bring in an old school Nokia phone to help that – because we need to stop the behaviour first, then we can process the feelings and then we can challenge and change the cognitive.
“It doesn’t really matter what your poison is – that formula doesn’t really change.”
When it comes to spotting signs Mr Hassan said it’s when gamers begin to show symptoms of “withdrawal, anxiety, boredom, craving, agitation, lack of sleep and denial – which is the same as drug and alcohol addiction – that it becomes a real problem.”
MORE PEOPLE SEEKING TREATMENT
Matthew Preece, a senior therapist at the UK Addiction Treatment group, said he’d seen a “significant” rise in the number of people seeking treatment.
The group, which has traditionally helped people with alcohol, drug and gambling problems, said it had seen the number of people wanting help with gaming addiction increase year-on-year from four in 2014 to 22 last year.
Dr Cyrus Abbasian, consultant Psychiatrist and Addiction Specialist at Nightingale Hospital, told how online multi-player games are especially addictive.
He said he’d come across cases where people had gamed almost non-stop for years.
He told the Sun Online: “In these particular cases, we will always undertake a detailed risk assessment on those patients. Some of the main risks will include that of social decline in terms of loss of employment and education.
“This could lead to poverty, reduced self-care, over reliance on relatives, and total social withdrawal.
“It is also linked to other mental health conditions such as depression, that can lead to suicide.”
However the global games industry said: “Gaming disorder is not based on sufficiently robust evidence. Consequences could be far-reaching, unintended and to the detriment of those in need of genuine help.”
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368 . You can WhatsApp us on 07810 791 502. We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.