Specialist: real combat and videogames are the same to a gamer’s brain

“These video games — gosh, they’ve gotten a lot more realistic over the years,” says Fox 26’s newscaster Ned Hibberd in the opening of a segment called Videogame Addiction on Houston’s Fox station.

In the segment, which can be found in their Videogames can be Explicit, Addictive story, they talk with neurotherapist Ron Swatzyna, who says that gamers’ “brains can not tell the difference between being in real combat and being in a game,” and continues to say that “the brain is going into a survival mode.”

This statement is followed by stock footage of fiery explosions while the newscaster likens this “survivial mode” to the posttraumatic stress disorder a soldier would get on the front lines of war.

Swatzyna also talks about videogame addiction, stating that he has “seen people who have stopped playing the game go into withdrawal-type symptoms – shakes and everything else.”

Finally, Ned Hibberd rounds the segment out by saying that “Parents who let their kids pour their youth into an online alterego might be creating a pixelated Peter Pan.”

You can watch this fine segment on MyFox Houston’s Web page. 

Tell me, Destructoid reader and avid gamer, how are you coping with your posttraumatic stress disorder and incessant shaking? 

[Thanks, TT]