Cam Adair
loved video games. Fantasy games full of monsters and dwarves like World of Warcraft. The terrorists, bombs and rifle fire of Counter-Strike 1.6. He was bullied in middle school, and the games gave him the feeling of being in charge.
Alone, he would sit for hours in his bedroom at home in Calgary, immersed in fictional worlds and making online friends who treated him like a king.
And when he played he tuned out everything and everyone around him, including his family.
When Cam was in elementary school, his parents wanted to test how long Cam would game if unchecked, sitting at his desktop computer in the basement. He didn’t eat, he didn’t get up — except to use the bathroom.
It was hard for a parent to do without saying something, his mom recalls. Finally she told Cam to log out. He’d been gaming for 15 hours straight.
Even more astonishing was Cam’s reaction.
Oblivious, he protested: “I just got on.”
Cam Adair is one of a growing number of young people in North America and beyond, particularly boys, who are addicted to video games.
The proportion of Ontario students with symptoms of a video gaming problem in 2015 was 13 per cent, compared to 9 per cent in 2007, according to a health survey by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. (It defined symptoms as “preoccupation, tolerance, loss of control, withdrawal, escape, disregard for consequences, disruption to family/school.”)
And boys are four times more likely than females to exhibit problem gaming, CAMH says.
Concerns over excessive gaming have been around for decades — remember how addictive Tetris and hand-held Game Boys were in the 1980s?
But today, video games are more immersive, with worlds that feature eye-popping graphics and rapid action, and they can be played with others in real time.And many of these games have no endings. Add to that the affordability and accessibility of desktops and cellphones, and that means young gamers never have to leave that world.
Cam Adair’s family — Carrie, who was mostly a stay-at-home mom, dad Kevin, then an oil company executive, younger brother David and older sister Alyssa — lived a financially comfortable life in a three-storey home that backed onto a ravine. Each of the kids had a computer — assembled by their dad from used hardware — in their bedrooms. The desktops were for homework and research, and occasional video games in their free time.
David and Alyssa logged out whenever their parents asked. Not Cam.
Cam was a bubbly kid, says Carrie. Nicknamed Smiley, he could talk to anyone and was always go, go, go. But he hated school from Grade 1, when he had trouble focusing. He was at times bullied and humiliated: in Grade 8, Grade 9 boys would chase him at lunch and try to dump him in a garbage can.
His mother can’t remember a specific point when his gaming spun out of control. But Cam grew furious whenever his parents asked him to step away from his computer.
Cam remembers his addiction started at age 11. His older cousin was visiting at Christmas. They sipped eggnog and played Starcraft, a futuristic strategy game. Cam loved being immersed in the game, and for months he wanted to play constantly.
Cam, who was also a skilled hockey player — a defenceman on the highest level minor hockey teams — found parallels in gaming: “It was a similar kind of feeling where you’re on the ice during the game, and that’s the only thing you’re thinking about. Gaming was very similar to me in that aspect, and the competitive nature. I got to win, and I really liked that part of it.”
His addiction grew. “Just all of a sudden, it seemed to be a real problem,” says his mom.
Cam never wanted to go out. Alyssa gently tried, and failed, to prod him out of the house, saying, “What’s the big deal? Mom and Dad just want to take us out for pizza.”
His parents’ attempt at setting time limits didn’t succeed, so in Grade 6, they took away his electronics.
Two years later, after not spotting any red flags, they caved. Cam’s computer was returned to his room.
What amount of video game playing is problematic, or “pathological?”
A 2009 study, by Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University, concluded that “pathological gaming can be measured reliably.”
The study explored results from a survey of 1,178 Americans age 8 to 18 and found about 8.5 per cent of players exhibited pathological gamingpatterns. As a comparison, the study used criteria for pathological gambling from professional reference guide Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM), including irritability when cut off, persistent thoughts about the activity, repeated unsuccessful attempts to stop, lying about the amount of use, and loss of job or schooling.
The Canadian Pediatric Society discourages “screen-based activities” — TV, Internet, video games and gaming devices — for children under 2, and suggests a limit of one to two hours a day for older children.
Lisa Pont, a Toronto social worker and therapist with expertise in video game addiction, says she’s not sure how realistic that limit is, and adds it’s not just about how long young people are gaming but when, and its impact.
Pont’s clients are generally male, 16 to 25, and often a parent is first to raise the alarm.
She describes a typical situation. “Usually it’s Mom who is very worried about the amount of time her kid is gaming. She has seen it increase over time. It impacts the child’s sleep, because they’re gaming well into the night. They’re having trouble getting up in the morning, they’re late or missing school, their grades are declining, they’ve failed courses or they’re dropping out.
“There’s also a disengagement from family life. Kids won’t come for dinner, won’t do anything, and they’re not interested in anything. There’s a constant power struggle to get them off technology, so the parents are in conflict with their kids about it — and worried.
The nature of games makes them very hard to give up, Pont says.
“The worlds in these games are so real, the graphics so amazing. The pace of the games is usually quite fast,” she adds. “And the social and competitive component creates a level of immersion that is quite compelling,” so much so that it’s easy to lose track of time and sleep.
By Grade 8, Cam was back gaming and soon fixated on Counter-Strike 1.6. The online game involves multiple players who are “first-person shooters.” Players, who may be in different countries, use headsets to communicate in real time.
Cam played all through his middle and high school years, studying game film and practising for hours with teammates. The social side was huge, and he felt a connection with his online friends who were usually a lot older.
They rarely met face to face. Sometimes they exchanged photos, but Cam usually preferred not to know what they looked like.
By grades 11 and 12 he had hockey practice every morning before school. At lunch there was physical training, and after school he went home to game — from about 4:30 or 5 p.m. until midnight.
“I can’t remember a time I did my homework, ever,” he says. His grades were in the 50s and 60s and he dropped out a few times.
In summer, with no school or hockey, he would binge on video games. He always had to get to the next level of the game, his mom recalls; stopping in the middle meant letting down his online friends.
“A lot of fights happened with my family around housework because my dad would say he needed help with chores, but there was absolutely no way I was doing that and breaking away from the game,” Cam says.
When his parents threatened to or actually did take away his games, Cam would get back at them with “a vengeance,” as he describes it.
“There was so much anger in the house,” Carrie says.
During one of his many horrible tirades, Cam told his parents he’d made plans with an older “friend” he met online who was coming that night to pick him up at the house. The arrangement was for Cam to go to the man’s home, to game endlessly, free from parents.
“Where is this friend from?” Cam’s parents asked him, worried about online predators.
Cam told them it was someone he often gamed with. Carrie can’t recall Cam’s exact age — but young enough that she and Kevin were terrified.
Cam’s father sat on the floor outside his son’s bedroom that entire night, afraid Cam was going to sneak out.
“That was one of our scariest moments as parents,” Carrie says.
No one showed up that night.
Amid the turmoil, Cam continued to do well in hockey. He got into an elite hockey academy in Penticton, B.C., for 18 months until the spring of Grade 12, when he retired, largely due to injuries. He quit school the same year. Now there was no structure to his life.
Cam lived away from home briefly but returned after a bad breakup with a girlfriend. Depressed over the split, he played World of Warcraft non-stop.
His parents told him to find a job. He worked at Walmart a few days, then quit. Two weeks at Booster Juice.
He devised a ruse: he’d pretend to have a job, freeing him to game while his parents worked. He applied to a restaurant as a prep cook, got the job and an apron, but never showed up.
He gamed all night, then showered and dressed when it was time for his dad to drive him to “work” for 6 a.m. His father dropped him at a McDonald’s across the street from the job. When his dad drove away, Cam ate a fast-food breakfast and caught a bus home. He snuck in through his window — “my mom might still be home getting ready for work” — and crawled into bed.
When his mom returned around 3 p.m., Cam woke up. He would say he came home for a nap after his morning shift. All went well until his parents asked where his paycheque was — at which point he told them he quit.
He again faked a job, at an Internet café. When he told his parents he quit there, they were at a loss.
Cam’s video addiction intensified. His father recalls a vicious circle: the more sedentary he remained, the worse his moods. Out of school, out of hockey, and with no girlfriend, Cam’s outlook darkened.
One evening in September 2007 he hit rock bottom. Depressed and gaming non-stop, the 19-year-old sat at his computer and typed a suicide note to his parents, brother and sister, and a few friends. One thing he mentioned was wanting his father to stop being so angry about video games.
Unaware, his mom was upstairs in the kitchen making her much-loved Swiss chard soup for dinner. Cam brought the bowl to his room, sat down, stared at his unsent note on the screen, and sobbed.
Researchers have debated the impact excessive video gaming has on the brain, and whether addiction to gaming is an official psychiatric disorder.
The American Psychiatric Association says experts disagree on the neurological impact of video games. As a result, the DSM calls “Internet gaming disorder” a condition requiring further clinical research before it can be included as a formal disorder in the manual.
A number of studies have consistently shown that individuals addicted to gaming show a “comorbidity” — one or more additional conditions — such as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and MDD (major depression).
A 2015 study published in Addiction Biology, which had input from psychiatric experts in South Korea and experts from the Brain Institute at the University of Utah, suggests gaming addicts’ brainsmay indicate a higher likelihood of serious mental health problems.
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Kom graun, oso na graun op. Kom folau, oso na gyon op.
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