Tried to make you go to rehab...

Britain’s first residential rehabilitation centre for games addicts has opened its doors, and patients already queuing up to get in.

Broadway Lodge, in Weston-super-Mare, treats around 400 clients a year who are usually dependent on more everyday temptations such as drink, drugs and gambling. However, clinicians at the centre have noted that the rising popularity of immersive fantasy games has been accompanied by an increase in addiction among adults and, more worrying, children.

Symptoms reportedly include eating disorders, aggressive behaviour, relationship breakdowns, irregular sleeping patterns and postural problems – the latter as a direct result of sitting hunched in front of the computer for hours on end, lost in the boundless realms of the World of Warcraft or others of its ilk, no doubt.

Broadway Lodge’s chief executive, Brian Dudley, cites the case of a 23 year-old male patient who was gaming for up to eight hours a day and was brought in by his mum and dad:

''We developed a treatment for him which followed the 12-step (abstinence) approach, but you can't tell someone never to use the internet again," he says.

''He had eating issues, he wasn't eating properly. He did very well. He has the mechanisms now to cope with it."

And those coping mechanisms will probably include a newfound passion for housework, since part of the 12-step recovery program includes such therapeutic tasks as vacuuming and doing the washing up.

But it’s early days in the development of therapies for games addiction. Likewise the scale of the problem is still being uncovered, although Dudley estimates that 5 to 10% of the nation’s parents or partners know somebody who is addicted to online games. So that could be as many as 1 in 10 of you reading this article right now!

However Michael Rawlinson, director general of the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), sees no reason to panic:

''Playing video games is becoming increasingly mainstream in the UK and we firmly believe in the positive impact playing games can have.''

So video games, and particularly online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, Second Life et al: Are they a real cause for concern or just another harmless facet of your everyday entertainment mix? Just how much time do you, your partner or your offspring spend playing games each day anyway - and how much is too much? In short, are you an addict...?