Now controversially spans all sorts of behaviours

“ The worse life 
got, the more 
I would 
retreat into 
that online
world”
>
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14 September 2019 | New Scientist | 
43
HOOKED ON 
video games
Half-Life 
was the game-
changer for Ian*. He had played 
video games since he was a 
child, but he had always been 
able to stop until he was in his 
20s. That was when he went to 
a colleague’s house after work 
and first tried 
Half-Life
, a 
first-person shooter game, 
played online against other 
people. “I felt an instant 
attraction to it, and I fell in 
love with these sorts of 
games,” he says.
He started playing for a 
few hours at home every night 
after work, staying up later 
and later. Within the month, 
he was playing 7 hours every 
evening during the week, and 
through the night on 
weekends. “It started 
interfering with my family life. I 
had a child, another one on the 
way and I wasn’t spending any 
time with my partner,” he says. 
“It must have been horrible for 
my son to see me sitting in 
front of the PC not moving. But 
when I was in the zone, in the 
game, I didn’t think about it.”
As a result of his gaming, 
he started turning up late for 
work or not at all, and was 
eventually fired. After that, 
he says, “I just played pretty