According to an article in last month's fun-sounding CyberPsychology and Behavior journal there is some evidence for people becoming ‘addicted’ to videogames.

The article was written by the authors of the even-more-fun-sounding book Excessive Computer Game Playing: Evidence for Addiction and Aggression? which is a very balanced looking title for a study.

The researchers, based at Charité-University Medicine Berlin and Nottingham Trent University, surveyed over 7,000 online gamers, 94% of them men (with an average age of 21.11 years) using online questionnaires.

The results show that 11.9% of them "fulfilled diagnostic criteria of addiction concerning their gaming behaviour". Let's look at that again, 11.9%, SPOnG's good at games but crap at maths, however, doesn't this mean that 88.1% didn't fulfil the criteria?

However, the study also also concluded that there was only "weak evidence" for a link between "excessive gaming" and aggression. Probably because most of them are too whacked-out by monster 24-hour-straight World of Warcraft sessions...

We'd like to know if anybody has done a study of "excessive gardening" or "excessive knitting"; just who decides how much is excessive? Answers to the Forum please.