When stars need to wean their bodies off an excess of alcohol or drugs, they waft off to the Betty Ford Center or the Priory in London.
Now those who have allowed gaming or the Web to take over their lives have their own place of salvation in the United States.
Heavensfield Retreat Center in the kindly named Fall City, near Seattle, claims to have the first Internet addiction detox program in the States. Called ReStart, it essentially offers a 45-day detox from the need to socially network and game until your mind and fingers are more numb than a Jonas Brothers fan after a concert.
For $14,500, you can be saved from yourself and your virtual world. However, the criteria that the center uses to define Internet addiction make for interesting reading.
The first, for example, is: "Have a strong desire or impulse to use the Internet." I would have thought that, if this were the most important element, we should all be checking in now. And who among us could resist blogging about it afterward?
Here's criterion No. 4: "Use of Internet in spite of its harmful effects; despite knowledge of harmful effects, Internet use is hard to stop."
Do we really know just how much the Web is harming us? Isn't it supposed to be enlightening us, bringing us closer together, and turning us into the human informational machines of the Singularity Age?
Still, the center's last criterion, No. 9, does come some way toward defining the serious and painful nature of Internet addiction: "Everyday life and social function is impaired (e.g., in social, academic, and workability.)"
King 5 News reported on the program's first patient, 19-year-old Ben Alexander of Iowa City, who became addicted to World of Warcraft.
"I would play until I fell asleep at my keyboard," he said.
His schoolwork began to suffer, and his parents checked him into the center. Now he looks after the goats and chickens, and goes cross-country running. He said he knows that the Web will still be a part of his life but that he feels the center has given him a new balance.
Indeed, there is much concern generally about gamers' health and whether, for example, a lack of light is contributing to their alleged ill-being. Are those who become overweight or depressed already inclined to do so, or does gaming have some influence?
As has been shown over the decades, sometimes rehab works, and sometimes it doesn't.
So perhaps the most valuable information to come from the center in the long run is whether, as with other addictions, there are certain psychological predispositions to Web addiction and whether there really ever can be a cure for something that has become so central to the way we live.
In case any of you were wondering, the ReStart program is not covered by health insurance. Yet.
You know you want to. You've wanted to do it for some time now. No, not tell Pink and Sandra Bullock they have terrible taste in men, but slap a Wall Street ignoramus.
AddictingGames, the site that brought you the ecology sniper game evocatively entitled "Shoot The Bastards," now brings you "Trillion Dollar Bailout."
It's a simple affair. You have a New York skyline, against which various chaps in suits stand, asking for cash. The Stank of Bummera, for example. Or Crysalot Motors. With one slap, you can send them to a dark hole in which, you hope, a hungry Hannibal Lecter awaits with the dining table already laid.
However, this game is not merely about releasing your feelings about the pickle with a slap. No, you can also help those innocent, gullible homeowners who really did believe that they could afford a $500,000 house on a $40,000 salary.
Beneath the Wall Street skyline is a row of houses, not unlike those you see along your cab route from JFK into the city. From these houses emerge ordinary folks who are asking for a mere fraction of the amount begged for by, for example, Sitty Group or the charmingly named RNC Financial. With one click on the moneybag icon, you can deliver them salvation.
However, because this game stems from a sense of change you can believe in, you can give these people a backhander of the more physical kind. The kind that burns like cystitis and says: "What were you thinking, BlagoBrain?"
I am touched that the people at AddictingGames.com have bothered to understand that, when it comes to video games, there are certain kinds of violence that can only enhance societal well-being.
I have also heard rumors, as yet unsubstantiated, that the company intends to produce a new game in which you can slap a Facebook lawyer.
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