He plays World of Warcraft. He started about four months ago. He was never really into online gaming before. We'd say: "Hey, try this game." Or: "Try this one." But he always got bored really quickly.

But then I stopped seeing him around. He wasn't chatting online. When I did run into him online I asked him what happened. "I can't stop," he said. "I don't feel like chatting anymore or anything else. I just want to play Warcraft."

I'm not using my real name for this article - just my nickname, 'Long Long'. If you're going to write an article that discusses internet addiction, that talks about World of Warcraft, then you shouldn't tell people on the internet who you are. You leave yourself too open to attacks.

It's one thing if people like what you write. They'll put your article up on posts and you might even get a fan base. But if what you say goes against what most people feel, people will leave nasty messages about you all over the internet. Afterwards, anytime you write anything your website will be flooded with hate-mail, people posting really insulting things. Nothing bad will happen in real life, but the internet is treacherous.

I have lots of friends that play games online, but World of Warcraft is the worst. Out of 100 friends that play it, 80 of them are addicted. I might be underestimating.

A foreign company recently started selling point cards that give you time in the game. I heard that the company has made 300 million yuan this year. [Almost 20 million pounds.] I've never bought a point card, I had to ask my friends for the specifics, but a 35 yuan card gives you about 90 hours in the game. People just chew through these cards. They buy one then another. Lots of people can't go a day without getting in the game. To find prizes in the game you have to battle through dungeons. Clearing out a dungeon takes at least three or four hours, so it's easy to see how they spend so much time playing.

My friends love it because the whole world is on Warcraft. To survive in the dungeons you need to be with a group of other players. Sometimes people get together groups of 40 or more people. There are players from all over the world, and they end up forming bigger and bigger groups. They make associations, guilds, clans.

These aren't any kind of bad societies. No underground criminal organizations or anything like that. I don't want people to get the wrong idea. Lots of people who don't understand, people who don't use the internet, think everyone's creating groups to undermine society here. But these aren't the Mafia or the Triads. These are just normal, natural groups.

Even QQ has clans now. You all know what QQ is, don't you? It's an instant messaging program. If you don't have QQ in your country, then you must have some other program - everyone needs it, otherwise, how would you chat?! How would you communicate with your friends? I guess you could just send emails, but everyone in China has QQ, that's how we all talk to our friends, we don't use email anymore.

I don't really like online games. I think killing little monsters is repetitive. I spend almost all my time online on QQ, chatting. I work here, in the internet cafe, from 8 in the morning till 8 at night. I can go online after I get off work. All my friends are online. I have over 100 people on my QQ account, but they're all people I know. I'm not the kind of person who just goes around randomly adding people to his account. Some of my friends are in different parts of the country, so it's be hard for us to meet up. Plus we're all busy.

Usually I get chat until 11pm or so. Nobody watches us and makes sure we go to bed at a certain time or anything. We can control ourselves.

But there are customers who come in and don't leave the internet cafe for an entire month. All day long they just go around killing things, playing games. We order food for them. When they want to rest for a while, they pay their bill, lean back, and pass out. We don't charge them for the time they sleep. When they want to play some more they start up another tab.

I have heard about the special psychiatric clinics set up in China where they treat people who are addicted to the internet; people who have tossed away their school lives or their work and just holed themselves up on their computer. These clinics aren't normal hospitals. Addiction to the internet is a disease of the mind, it has nothing to do with your body, so you can't just go to a normal hospital. You need psychiatric help.

I'm not really sure what they do in these clinics. I haven't thought much about them. My friend who works in a research institute says that these clinics are for research. The problem is not that there are more people addicted in China than in the rest of the world. That's not why we need the clinics. Just like we're still researching SARS, trying to figure out how to treat it faster and more effectively, these clinics are analyzing internet addiction. They're studying internet addiction so that we'll be able to treat it better in the future when it becomes a bigger problem.

Lots of people say China is real backward, that we have no culture and no learning, but everywhere there are people with no culture, people who say stupid things. We're just trying to become developed like everyone else. Every country in the world is pursuing development, even Iraq. You can't find me a country that isn't. These clinics are part of China's push towards a better and more developed society.

Long long ("That's what everyone calls me.") is 21. He is a technical assistant in an internet cafe in Beijing. He was talking to Sweeble's Beijing correspondent Michael Armstrong.

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