UNIVERSITY PARK, PA-- Video games such as Quake III, Everquest, Diablo II, and Unreal Tournament have dominated the free time of many students at college campuses across the globe. Dr. Moocus proved that these video games have decreased the GPA’s of students who play them by at least 13%. The Penn State executive board made the decision on March 23rd to give a large grant, totaling at $750,000, to Dr. Timplesuks. He will be synthesizing a supplement to help wean these students away from this addiction.

A screenshot from the hugely popular, violent, and addictive first-person shooter game, Quake III Arena.

             hy do these students need such a severe action to do something that can be simply solved by just turning off the gaming system? The answer to that question can be found in what the infected students see in this spreading epidemic. Justin Dons (junior – computer science) explained his addiction by talking about how much money he makes off of Everquest, a massively multiplayer on-line role-playing game (MMRPG). “I could be playing and walking around some wilderness and then stumble upon an item that could get me $400 on eBay.” The promise of finding rare items in these MMRPG’s and then potentially selling them on eBay has been discovered to be one of the driving forces for students to play these games.

             Games like Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament are first person ‘war games’ where you as the player run around a given area with a gun or another sort of weapon, trying to kill other players in the game or trying to accomplish a goal such as capture the flag. The reasoning behind playing these games according to Tommy Jackson (sophomore – electrical engineering), “Running around in an arena trying to kill other students and trying to capture a flag makes us non-athletic people feel a little bit more adequate.” He then added, “If someone calls me a ‘dork’ I just tell them that I could beat them any day of the week in a game of Half-Life.”

A student attempts to defeat Mephisto, a boss in the computer game Diablo II, after dozens of hours that would have been better spent studying.

             Many addicted students have tried to stop playing these addicting games ‘cold turkey’ but with little success. The withdraw side effects consist of headaches, cold sweats, fatigue, and a hampered libido. Dr. Timplesuks anticipates that the supplement will be available in small easy to swallow pills. It will also be necessary for the students with a stronger addiction to take up to 5 times the normal dosage in order to appropriately supplement the video game’s effects on the brain.

             He also proposed that the drug would work as follows. When a person plays video games such as these, several different neurotransmitters are fired in the brain’s synapses that cause euphoria and relaxation in the temporal and parietal lobes. “In fact the brain waves of a person playing Diablo II are incredibly similar to those from a man that is dreaming of beautiful women having a lesbian orgy,” stated Larry Wolff (junior – pre-medicine). The drug will replace these neurotransmitters with it’s own chemicals that give the same euphoric feeling but do not have the same addictive side effect. The pills will be prescribed to students who have the courage to say that they need help. President Graham Spanier hopes that this large sum of money will conquer the addictions of the students, making their GPA’s go up, and in turn pushing Penn State into the pool of Universities that are considered to be ‘Ivy League.’