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, Ever Quest 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then happens is that kids become withdrawn, their schoolwork suffers because they are not doing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 1 Read the text and mark the following statements TRUE or FALSE
1. Players create characters so that they can fight on their own in battle.
2. Alexander likes working with others on a day-to-day basis in real life.
3. Alexander was not addicted to the game right from the beginning.
4. It is unanimously agreed that internet addiction really exists.
5. “Online Gamers Anonymous” offers help to compulsive players so that they can stop playing from one
day to the next.
6. David Smallwood suggests that parents fail to recognize that internet addiction is a problem.