INTERNET INTERNMENT

BY C H A Rl l E C U ST E R (葛亞輝)

A look into the causes, costs, and consequences of internet addiction

中國的網(wǎng)癮少年需要的也許是更多的關(guān)注，而不是粗暴的治療

On July 22, 2013, police in Zaozhuang, Shandong Province, got an emergency call about an injured woman at a cosmetics store. When they arrived, they found a horrifying scene: a 24-year-old woman surnamed Zhao lying on the ground, virtually naked and covered in blood. She was alive when police arrived, but her injuries were so severe that she died shortly after paramedics rushed her to a local hospital.

It was a grisly murder, to be sure, but the case would not have made headlines across China were it not for the motivations of Zhao's killer, a 20-year-old man surnamed Sun. Sun lived at home with his parents, who insisted that he get a job to help support the family. But, Sun was also deeply addicted to playing online games, so each day he would leave home as if heading to a job but instead headed directly to an internet cafe to play games. At around quitting time, he would return home. For a time, his parents were none the wiser, but since Sun needed money coming in—both to support his gaming habit and to convince his parents that he really was working during the day—it couldn't last long. Actually getting a job would have cut into his gaming time, so instead, Sun tried to borrow from friends. When none would lend to him, he came up with another plan: robbery.

Looking for a place to target, Sun checked out Ms. Zhao's cosmetics store on the morning of July 22. Finding it to be relatively isolated and under-staffed (Zhao was the only one inside), he found a hoe, walked into the store, and started smashing Zhao in the head. When he fell, he removed some of her clothes in a baff l ingly misguided attempt to make the crime look like a rape (forensic evidence later proved it wasn't) and then ran off with the cash he found in the register: 450 RMB.

Police found Sun quickly—he appeared pacing outside the store the morning of the murder on several security cameras—and he is now in prison. But his case and dozens of others like it are touted in the Chinese press as grisly evidence of one of China's most serious problems: internet addiction.

ADDlCTlON BY THE NUMBERS

The story of Ms. Zhao's murder is extreme, to be sure, but the young man's desire to spend all day online playing games certainly isn't. Internet addiction is taken seriously in the Middle Kingdom; China was the fi rst country to label internet addiction a clinical medical disorder, and it has been a hot-button topic in the country for years. It's a problem that, unsurprisingly, primarily affects young people. But, you might be surprised to learn that, of China's approximately 40 million young internet users, some estimates suggest that as many as four million are addicted. And some go even higher. In 2007, China's Communist Youth League suggested it could be as high as 17 percent of China's young web users, or about seven million.

Those numbers are virtually impossible to verify, of course, but by all accounts the rates of internet addiction in China seem to be higherthan corresponding rates in the West.

Internet cafes are places children can go to get their online gaming fix free from parental supervision, something many suggest is at the heart of China's internet addiction problem in youngsters

The reasons for the discrepancy are diff i cult to be sure of, but there are several key differences between the way that Chinese and Western children consume online games and the web in general that may help to account for the differing addiction rates.

First, Chinese children tend to access the web and online games at internet cafes. Even today, many Chinese families do not have a desktop PC, laptop, or internet connection at home, so kids who want their gaming fi x need to go elsewhere. There are regulations that restrict minors' access to internet cafes, but they are rarely enforced, and in practice many children are able to spend as much time in internet cafes as they want or can afford. There they are surrounded by peers and older gamers engaging in marathon gaming sessions, with precious little supervision. Where an American child, for example, is likely going to be doing most of their gaming at home where the parents can keep an eye on their child's habits and limit online time if needed, many Chinese children play away from the prying eyes of their parents, who often think they're at school or studying with friends.

School may be another major reason China's youth seem to be more susceptible to internet addiction. China's high-pressure education system can saddle teenagers with a lot of stress, especially when they're a family's only child. Visiting the internet cafe to play games is a cheap and convenient way to blow off steam, and it's one of the only recreational outlets available to many Chinese kids around the clock. Western teens may blow off steam doing things like playing sports or playing in a band, but many Chinese kids don't have access to the facilities for those sorts of activities. When the academic pressure gets to be too much, internet cafes andonline games are a universally available and affordable release valve.

Internet addiction boot camps like the one pictured above in Beijing put young people through intense physical training, occasionally ending in injury and even death

Another signif i cant factor is the nature of the games themselves. There are, of course, thousands upon thousands of online games available in China, but the vast majority of them are free-to-play games. That means that instead of paying a lump sum upfront to “own” a game the way many Western gamers do, Chinese gamers pay nothing up front but are often enticed to make smaller in-game purchases like skins, weapons, and armor that fund the continued operation of the game. These free-to-play games, paradoxically, can be astronomically expensive when players look to collect everything that's available for sale: the prices of single items are often low, but they add up quickly.

The free-to-play monetization system gives Chinese gamers an easy gateway into the game they want, and it can also easily lead players toward a sort of psychological trap. Unlike pay-up-front games, where the amount you've spent on the game has no further bearing on your experience, money spent on free-to-play games can make them feel like an investment. The more you spend, the more you feel you ought to play the game to justify having spent so much. And in many Chinese games, how much you spend also affects how much fun you can have; the baseline game might be free, but if you want to compete with the game's top players, you'll need to sink hundreds of hours into the game, and hundreds of dollars into buying the right equipment.

Moreover, free-to-play games are painstakingly crafted by their developers to keep gamers coming back again and again. The more time players spend in a game, the more likely they are to spend money on it, and without players spending money on in-game items, a free-to-play game will collapse rather quickly, so games are carefully designed and tested to make sure that the in-game systems keep players hooked—and, by extension, spending.

Finally, China's game preferences themselves seem more likely to lead to addiction. Where Western gamers spend money on fi rst-person shooters and sports games—games that focus on relatively short bursts of intense action—massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are more popular in China. These games require hundreds or even thousands of hours to complete (if they can be completed at all), and have progression systems that make them relatively slow. Players are always grinding towards the next level, the next item, or the next skill unlock, but actually getting there could take hours, days, or even weeks. And of course, as soon as one such goal is achieved, a new goal presents itself.

In other words, China's gamers may be more addicted than gamers in the West, but that's mostly because the deck is rigged against them. They're playing more games designed to get them addicted, and they're playing them in places where adults can't supervise and intervene when they see a problem developing.

TREATlNG lNTERNET ADDlCTlON

Clinical internet addiction is a serious problem. Parents may be primarily concerned with how games keep kids from studying as hard as they should, but internet addiction can affect a patient'sthought patterns and moods, cause physical withdrawal symptoms, and—as Ms. Zhao's murder gruesomely demonstrates—lead to conf l icts between the addict and those around them.

But for all the violent and gruesome stories in the Chinese press about game addiction gone wrong, there are also stories about treatment gone horribly awry. Earlier this year in Shenzhen, for example, a Chinese father was arrested for beating his 14-year-old son with a stick, covering him with wounds and nearly breaking his arm, all because the child was playing too many games and his grades were suffering. A mother in Guiyang literally chained her son to his desk for several hours a day to prevent him from sneaking off to the internet cafe to play games. It didn't work, by the way. Her son escaped on April 18th and hasn't been seen since; it is now considered a missing persons case.

But the real headline-grabbers have always been the anti-addiction “boot camps”, self-styled therapy centers where parents can leave their internet-addicted children and (ideally) come back a few months later to pick up their newly-cured son or daughter.

Things don't always work out so perfectly, though. Earlier this year, for example, parents dropped off their 19-year-old daughter Ling Ling at the Zhengzhou Boqiang New Conceptual Life Training School, an anti-addiction boot camp in Henan Province. Soon thereafter, she was dead. The Zhengzhou school, like many of China's anti-addiction schools, mixes therapy with military-style physical training, and, in Ling Ling's case, things went too far.

Ling Ling and another girl were being punished with physical fi tness drills and, according to a surviving classmate, the school's teachers repeatedly picked Ling Ling up by her arms and legs and then dropped her to the ground. When she became unable to get up and began vomiting blood, the teachers apparently thought she was faking and continued to beat her. It's not clear at what point exactly Ling Ling was killed, but at the end of the night, both girls were in the hospital and Ling Ling had been declared dead. Her autopsy showed that her death had been caused by blunt force trauma to the head. The impact from the object caused fatal skull and brain damage.

This might sound like an atypical case, but it's not as unusual as you might think. An investigative report in Chinese newspaperThe Mirrorfound 12 similar cases of abuse at anti-addiction schools in the last four years, and nearly all of them involved corporal punishment. Seven of them ended in death. One child, 15-year-old Deng Senshan, went to a Nanning anti-addiction school and was dead within eight hours. A 13-year-old student at a Liaoning anti-addiction school found himself in the hospital with a fractured clavicle just two hours after being dropped off for treatment.

The problem seems to be that, while China is fairly unif i ed in agreement that internet addiction is a real and serious problem, there is far less agreement when it comes to how it ought to be treated and, more importantly, how that treatment ought to be regulated. There are an estimated 300 anti-addiction schools and camps around China, but regulations, standards, and oversight are lacking. Some of the schools that killed children were operating illegally. Others were off i cially registered as nonprof i ts, and a few were registered under other auspices. Moreover, several of the schools whose treatments resulted in student deaths continue to operate.

There's also not much evidence that these schools or their methods actually work. In the abuse cases investigated byThe Mirrorthat didn't result in deaths, all but one set of parents said their child's addiction had actually gotten worse since completing the program. A recentNew York Timesdocumentary about another such facility shows students reminiscing fondly about gaming while sitting in their dormitory and denying that they're genuinely addicted to gaming.

THE FUTURE OF ONllNE ADDlCTlON

If 10 percent of China's young online internet users really are addicted to games, then the problem could be about to get a lot worse. China's internet user numbers are skyrocketing, from less than 100 million a decade ago to more than 600 million today. The saving grace may be that many of these new users are focused on the mobile web, where games tend to be more of a temporary diversion than an addicting time-sink. But with millions of new young people coming online each year, China's internet addiction problem is still probably going to get worse before it gets better.

That's good news for the people who run the anti-addiction schools. Many of them claim to be nonprof i t but charge hefty tuition fees—Ling Ling's school cost 5,500 RMB per month, more than the average Chinese worker's salary. In an atmosphere with little oversight or accountability at present, the number of schools like the one that killed Ling Ling is likely to grow.

In the near future, China's government will probably need to take a close look at treatment standards for clinical internet addiction, as well as operating standards for boot camps and “schools”like the one Ling Ling attended. Public awareness of internet addiction—and more importantly how to treat it—will also be an important hurdle. But the biggest problem may be that, at present, there is no clear consensus on what the most effective way to treat internetaddicted Chinese teens is. Boot-camp schools work sometimes, but other times they don't, and their mortality rates are terrifyingly high.

The problem of internet addiction is large and getting larger. Acknowledging the issue was an important fi rst step. But to move further forward, China will probably have to fi nd a better way of treating it.