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Online gaming (Source - Twitter)
Playing games is common as they are made to be engaging, but the issue emerges when kids and teenagers begin to disregard other aspects of their lives in order to play video games, or when playing video games is the only way they can unwind. Over time, a youngster may start to use video games as a coping mechanism for challenging life situations.
A piece of news has come from China where a 13-year-old girl lost her family's resources by spending INR 52,19,809 on online gaming in just four months. An unidentified high school girl from the central Chinese province of Henan discovered her mother's debit card at home and exploited it to support her gaming habit.
The girl's teacher became concerned that the adolescent might be addicted to online pay-to-play games when she saw the youngster spending a lot of time on her phone in class. She forewarned the mother of the girl about the same, and when she checked her bank account, she made the startling discovery.
Gaming-addicted kids in China
The girl revealed that she used to spend the money on her classmates’ games and connected her smartphone to a debit card she found at home without any difficulty. Additionally, she recalled her mother advising her to use the card's password if she required cash when her parents weren't home.
The overwhelming number of demands from classmates to purchase games made the girl afraid, but she was too afraid to contact her professors for assistance. She worried that her parents would find out and would be upset. Her mother Wang was not aware of the issue because she wiped all the transaction data from her smartphone. Wang was unaware of the incident until the teacher told her about it.
According to a 2022 analysis from McGill University that examined smartphone addiction among 34,000 people aged 15 to 35 in 24 nations, including the US and Japan, China has the largest rate of addicts, followed by Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. A 14-year-old girl in northern China nearly passed away in February after using her smartphone for 81 hours straight. In another incident, a 13-year-old girl in southern China stabbed her mother with a knife in 2021 after the mother expressed worries about her daughter's smartphone addiction.