Gaming is an enormous global industry and mainstream form of entertainment. The film hears from experts and the industry's governing body, the UKIE, which is calling for more research on the issue. "It's not true to say that scientific opinion has concluded that gaming addiction does not exist – a growing body of research is showing that a small but significant minority of computer gamers are playing them to excess and displaying signs of addiction. He rejected Pyro's suggestion that he had been unfairly portrayed, saying the contributor had "spent most of his time on camera explaining in detail why he thought his friend was addicted", and he challenged Lewis's assertion that the programme was unjustified. The film even ends by making this point." We make it clear that, for the vast majority of gamers, computer games play a positive part in their lives. "I don't understand how it could be considered to be an attack on gaming. On the Cadred website, the gaming journalist Richard Lewis described the Panorama programme as "a pointless, aggressive, inaccurate and imbalanced attack on a media format that they clearly didn't understand", adding that "the recurring flaw in the documentary was its willingness to apportion blame to the games themselves rather than look long and hard at the people who played them and the circumstances surrounding their lives".Įmeka Onono, producer of the Panorama programme, flatly contradicted the suggestion that the documentary had set out to demonise a popular leisure pursuit. He wrote: "It was obvious to me that much of what I had said was tactically cut as it did not support the theme of the piece." One contributor, Trent Pyro, wrote a long blog on, complaining at how he and his friend Joe Staley were portrayed in a programme that he alleged was a mix of "scaremongering, misinformation and tactical use of facts".
It also highlighted alarming cases from South Korea, where gaming culture is more advanced. The programme featured people obsessed with games such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, playing for 12-hour sessions and abandoning their studies. The Mail is rather addicted to health scare stories, such as "How computer games can make us eat too much" or "Easy does it – or that Wii could put you in hospital".īut the gaming sector became more concerned after the BBC's Panorama broadcast "Addicted to Games?" last month. The Daily Mail opted for another narcotic for its September headline "Can online games be as addictive as heroin?" The piece featured the case of a 33-year-old woman from Kent who left her children to fend for themselves and her dogs to starve to death while she devoted herself to a computer game, sleeping for only two hours a night.