Video Games Information & Articles

Ever since the early 1980s when the video game boom began, the occasional game player would react as did the first and third unfortunate teenagers described above. The typical victim of what is now called Video Game Epilepsy is a 13-year-old male (4), but the age range is wide, and girls, women and men can all be affected. It is fairly common for victims to be unusually tired or stressed when they have such seizures. Seizures can be triggered both when one is playing a game and when one is watching someone else play (5).

For most people who have epilepsy and suffer from the disorienting and often terrifying seizures that characterize the disease, video game playing is not a risky activity. But for 5% of epileptics, the flashing patterns of certain games trigger epileptic seizures just as do flashing strobe lights, sunlight flickering through trees, light glancing off water, and even striped lines like the slats of a venetian blind.

In the United States, there are close to one million people with epilepsy. (About 1 in 200 people around the world has epilepsy.) Often, people sense that something is about to happen to them right before a seizure. This feeling, called an "aura," makes them restless, irritable, or just vaguely uncomfortable.

During seizures, abnormal signals travel through the brain. These signals cause different physical effects depending on which parts of the brain are involved and how far the signals fan out. Some people have violent seizures that knock them to the floor unconscious and twitching. Others experience less severe seizures that may only blank them out for a few seconds or more. Some mild seizures pass so quickly that it seems the person is just daydreaming. But, when these "absences" happen hundreds of times a day, they can be debilitating.

Video game seizures appear to be similar to television-induced seizures (the second example above), which have been documented for a longer time. Television triggers seizures in susceptible people when they are sitting too close to the set (1/2 to 2 meters away) or are watching in the dark or are watching on a television that flickers at 50 Hertz. Televisions flickering at 100 Hertz don't induce seizures (1).

Video game seizures and television-induced seizures occur in people who have heightened sensitivity to pulsing light (6). It is not uncommon for this so-called photosensitivity to run in families. Some drugs, like valproate, are helpful in reducing photosensitivity and preventing these seizures. Some people simply outgrow epilepsy or are able to evade seizures by avoiding the stimuli that provoke them.

Seizures are the worst but not the only problems for video game fanatics. A condition called nintendinitis was described in 1990 by a physician whose houseguest--a 35-year-old woman--took over the children's new nintendo game (5). The houseguest, who had not previously played nintendo, remained riveted to the set for 5 straight hours, pressing a button with her thumb over and over again. When, the next day, she experienced excruciating pain and tenderness in her thumb, she turned the control button back to the kids.