Technology

by Ramiro Suárez

Game addicted now have an excuse

Since videogame was created in 1972 many children and teenagers have spent a lot of hours in front of a television trying to reach the next level of the game,and since then was crated an new type of addicteds and the number is growing with no stopping. First beacause of the price which is deacresing year after year, second because you can interpret video game as a story that you can interact and you are the one that makes the end of this story.

In the early 90's when the number of video game addicteds reached millions of people, the first sickness appeared: mental disturb, blindness, convulsion,dizzness epiletics attacks. Some children in Japan even died.What happened was that the gamers were playing too many hours and very near the television set. After some scientifc tests, it was proved that it's not healthy to play more than 1 hour and it is necessary to maintain a distance of 4 meters. Later, every cart of video game was obliged to advise " it's recommended not to play more than 1 hour without breaks of 15 minutes"; "it's not recommended for people with epiletics attacks" To help the gamers, the producers started to give the option to save the game. However even with that information the number of addicts never deacresed and in Setember of 2002 two more people died while playing. Both were from South Korea. Those players died after playing more than 36 hours with no break

But recent news can help those players to justify why they are addicted! This year, an experiment done in the University of Brunel (England), proved that video game players can get into an alpha state of mind. A state that people believed that only the Budists could reach. Alpha is a state when we can reach extreme peace and satisfaction. For proving that, the university invited 50 addicted gamers and made a test while they were playing virtua fighter, a very popular fight game. To get into alpha the sensation is similar to when you are playing: you forget everything that happens around the world and you feel that hours are minutes and minutes are seconds.To reach that you have to normaly play with more than one person because the interaction with another human is more chalenging then playing with a machine. Also, you have to be in a confortable place like home.

Now it will be more difficult to take players from the TV, since they have such a good excuse!

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