Confessions of a computer games addict
Children are falling asleep in the classroom after playing computer games all night, a concerned teacher warned this week. Recovered addict Tom Meltzer knows why they're hooked.
"I would say I was playing 15 hours a day at the peak," self-confessed gaming addict Daniel, now 24, says. "I kind of half block it out because I hated school so much but the worst year I can remember was when I was playing EverQuest. I was 16 and I was getting up at two in the morning and going downstairs to my mum's laptop to play. I was up until eight and then I'd get back into bed saying I was ill."
Daniel's story is not so different from my own; we were both miserable as teens and we both played truant in the fantasy world of games. Daniel's attendance fell from 100 per cent in his first year of secondary school to 45 per cent in his last. Mine was less extreme – I would miss, on average, a day a week. In both our cases, every day spent off school was a day spent playing video games.
