Of carts and horses.
Apparently a 28 year old man has died in South Korea after neglecting his nutritional requirements in favor of playing video games on-line. 
This, of course, has authorities worried about Internet addiction and will, I'm sure, add more fuel to the fire burning over the deleterious effects of video games.
I'm not convinced that the Internet or video games has any more addictive power than cocaine, meth, alcohol, sex or even ice cream. There may be tendencies toward addictive behavior in an individual, but it's my personal, uneducated belief that there is something deeper at work when it comes to addiction. Instead of demonizing video games—which I love to play, but will freely admit have little or no-redeeming social value and many are beyond tasteless—people should be asking why this man found life on-line preferable to reality. One could also ask why an individual prefers life in a bottle to reality. It seems to me that people tend to prefer to medicate than deal with pain, whether phyical or psychological. The Internet was simply this man's drug of choice.
No one started talking about the deleterious effects of employment by the United States Postal Service when one of its employees snapped and gunned down several of his co-workers, this despite the fact that "going postal" is now a part of the vernacular. For every Internet addict there are at least hundreds if not thousands of people who manage their time on-line in a healthy manner. For every alcholoic there hundreds if not thousands of people who drink responsibly. For every gamer who makes violence a part of his reality there are hundreds if not thousands of gamers who lead quiet, peaceful lives. Stop blaming the substance or object of addiction. Blaming video games or the Internet for this man's death seems to me like blaming the dead bolt for a person's OCD.