The video shows a teenager basically entering dementia after playing COD 6 for 17 hours straight with no sleep. Although its quite amusing to watch, it does give insight into a growing trend of obsession. My friend recently purchased COD 6 the morning of its release and has already logged an impressive amount of playing hours. Much of his playing time though is done after homework and before bed. Today I was talking to him about it and he said that he has much trouble sleeping after this, and that even when he does sleep, his dreams are adrenaline pumping recounts of him playing, which cause him to wake up constantly in the middle of the night. At first I laughed at his problem, but then I did some research:

A 2007 study done at the German Sport University Cologne showed that after playing video games before bed, teenagers took longer to fall asleep, spent less time in slow-wave sleep — the type that helps a person form factual memories – and spent more time in stage 2 non-REM sleep – the stage of sleep first crops up right after the initial, “drifting-off” phase of sleep, and precedes deep, slow-wave sleep.

A study that was presented this week at SLEEP 2009 in Seattle, Wash., reported that excessive video-game playing can interfere with your sleep.

It would be interesting to see if there was some kind of scientific parallel between coffee drinking and video game playing before bed… Thankfully I stopped playing my ps2 three years ago

Bunyan