‘Spiritual opium': could gaming addiction ruin a generation?

It will surely never happen again – but every parent must have been nodding in agreement with the Chinese state media yesterday. That’s because it declared online games were “spiritual opium… that has grown into an industry worth hundreds of billions… No industry, no sport, can be allowed to develop in a way that will destroy a generation.”

It’s hard to disagree. In the past decade or so, online games have become ubiquitous around the world in a way that may be best described as careless.

From hailing the education potential of the internet, schools are now warning that classroom iPads and online textbooks are normalising the use of screens in a way which is potentially harmful to teenage brains. MRI scans have found the part of the brain which controls compulsive behaviour and decision-making tend to be less developed in teenagers who game for more than 10 hours a day.

Video games first emerged in the Fifties and Sixtiess, quickly shrinking in size to handheld consoles; the Nineties saw the Nintendo Gameboy challenging the Sega Game Gear for market dominance. Families began to share their TVs and homes with the Sega Mega Drive and Sony PlayStation – still sold as a fun, joint experience.

Yet, by the turn of the 21st century, as equipment became more sophisticated, graphics and storyboard quality improved with Hollywood actors lending their names and voices, another shift took place as young people got their own laptops or mobile phones and internet access exploded in range. Broadband – allowing telephone and computers to work at the same time – emerged. Initially download speeds were slow but in 10 years they escalated by a factor of 40 from 1.4mbps in 2012, according to Curry’s, to 54.2mbps. Suddenly, games could be played – no more buffering – anywhere and anytime. So they were. And we parents enabled it.

A survey by the charity ChildWise revealed schoolchildren now spend an average of six hours a day in front of screens, while a separate report suggested the figure for teenagers is closer to 10 hours, with 43 per cent having internet access in their bedrooms.

It’s a situation that worries novelist Abi Silver. When Covid hit and schools closed in March 2020, she had more reason than most for concern: her son Aron, now 17, had only just beaten a severe gaming addiction which had turned her family upside down for two years; now the computer would be his lifeline. “His only contact with his friends was online and I wasn’t going to deprive him of that,” says Silver, who is also a lawyer with her own consulting business.

The mother of two other sons, aged 19 and 21, Silver still wonders whether she could have done more to prevent him gaming. Together with her husband, Daniel, also a lawyer, she fought to keep technology out of the home. “I didn’t want them even to have mobile phones too early,” Silver says. “But then it got to the stage in 2017 when they were saying: ‘If we don’t have a PlayStation, Mum, nobody is going to come to our house.’”

Aron, the youngest, was 13 at the time – bright, inquisitive, football-mad and a guitar player, but also shy. Silver, worrying about his social life, bowed to pressure. “I didn’t want him to feel excluded, so suddenly we had a PlayStation.”

The next thing she knew was their son had vanished into a room at the top of the house with his headphones on, was refusing to join family meals and shouting and arguing with his parents. “There was a lot of resentment and accusations,” says Silver, “I felt desperate.”

She adds: “We tried to put limits on how much he could play but we ended up arguing with him. He needed a computer for homework so it was hard to know what he was doing.”

Then, in 2018, Aron discovered Fortnite, which a year on from production had amassed 80 million players, netting an annual profit of £5.5 billion for its manufacturer, Epic. Aron seemed obsessed with the addictive, dopamine-releasing game.

He was not alone. Parents everywhere were getting emails from their heads of schools warning of concerns over the game being highly addictive, opening up the potential to talk to strangers and encouraging children to run up large bills on their parents’ bank accounts.

“Aron’s head wanted us parents to talk to our children about it,” says Silver. “I was shocked, and indignant, that there was something out there, unregulated and freely available to our kids, which was considered highly dangerous but nobody was doing anything about it. It was like someone was coming into my son’s bedroom at night and injecting him with an addictive drug.”

Silver delved deeper, luckily able to turn for help to her elder sister, Naomi Fineman, professor of psychiatry at the University of Hertfordshire. For the past three years, Prof Fineman has chaired a global action group comprising scientists, doctors, psychologists and teachers researching Problematic Use of the Internet (PUI), including gambling, pornography, cyberbullying, social media and gaming.

Gaming addiction then became the subject of Silver’s fifth book, The Midas Game, which sees two lawyers team up to defend a local gamer and YouTube celebrity who has been accused of killing an eminent anti-gaming psychiatrist. The subtext examines the responsibility of game manufacturers and the glamorising of gaming role models competing in high stakes e-sport leagues; last year, a 16-year-old gamer called Bugha won $3 million at the Fortnite World Cup.

Silver is appalled the industry is still unregulated, even though in 2018, the World Health Organisation classified “gaming disorder” as an illness with, by their conservative estimate, some 86 million victims.

Post-lockdown, numbers are growing. “The problem is that although a significant bank of research links high levels of online gaming with depression, social anxiety, suicidal tendencies and difficulties in holding down relationships, they are not joined up and rarely supported by public health initiatives,” explains Silver. There should be, she says, “a public health response and for this to be seen as a public health crisis.”

She is disappointed by the failure of the recently published House of Commons Online Safety bill to regulate manufacturers. “It’s been lauded by the British Government as ground-breaking because Ofcom will regulate online content for the first time, but it only focuses on user-generated content. So it’s great, for instance, for preventing the kind of online racial abuse which took place in the aftermath of the Euros, but there is nothing about regulating games manufacturers who need to be accountable just as the tobacco and gambling companies are.”

Silver is realistic that gaming is here to stay. “I don’t want to be a killjoy and we can’t put the genie back in the lamp, especially after lockdown when it fulfilled a social need and parents found it harder to impose limits – but I was lucky.

“Aron has stopped gaming. It wasn’t as a result of anything I did – although I tried.

“It happened in the past year or so as he went into sixth form. In spite of all the uncertainties of lockdown, something made him decide to focus more on his work and spend less time in the virtual world, but many others will not be as fortunate,” says Silver.

She is not wrong. It’s time all of us woke up to the “opioid” possibility of gaming, before teenage screen addiction becomes another global pandemic.

The Midas Game by Abi Silver (Lightning Books) is out on Thursday 5 August. Order now for £8.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514