Video Game, as most teenagers nowadays would call, is the Lego of their generation. It is an undeniable fact that most kids today are hooked to video games. For most of us, it is just a recreation, but for some it becomes an alternate reality. Video-game-addiction may not garner as much concern compared to other epidemics but recent statistics are showing a very alarming trend.

In 2007, Xu Yan, a resident of Jinzhou province in China, died after persistently playing internet games for over two weeks. Later that year, another 30-year-old man reportedly died in Guangzhou province after playing video games continuously for three days. Violent video-games are also reportedly responsible for inducing the suicide a young Chinese boy in the Chinese municipality of Tianjin.

To counter these frightening figures, the Chinese government decided to setup Gaming Rehab Centers. The main objective of these centers is to treat video-game addicted youth through discipline and psychotherapy. Fernando Moleres, an award-winning photographer who documented the progress in some of these rehabilitation centers said "Education is a powerful rehabilitation tool. I believe in rehabilitation as a way to be reborn."

Not much is known about video-game addiction up until 2013 when the American Psychiatric Association considered it as a "new phenomenon" which leads to "clinically significant impairment or distress." Presently, more than 6.4 million of the world's youth are addicted to video games, and that number keeps on rising every time a new game is released on the market.

We might ask ourselves what we can do about this epidemic that is slowly eating up our younger generation. Perhaps the answer lies in the simple fact that there is a real and beautiful world that exists beyond the fantasies that those video-games offer and it is our responsibility to show it to our youth for them to appreciate the real beauty of the world we are living in.