(Photo: Joy of Tech)

If you spent the entire weekend slumped on your couch deep in the wilds of Reddit or mindlessly clicking the Stumbleupon button, here is some good news for your Monday morning: According to a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, Internet addiction is supported largely by anecdotal evidence, so "It's not a clear enough syndrome that you can say at this point it's clearly a disease." Huh.

Dr. Charles O'Brien chaired the working group that was responsible for determining whether or not Internet addiction should be classified as an official disorder. Ultimately, the group decided that more research needed to be conducted before your World of Warcraft obsession could officially be called a sickness. We think we know a few people who'd make some worth test subjects, though.

Even more curious than their reluctance to acknowledge our inability to unplug, is the way that some doctors are treating Internet and gaming addiction:

There we met with three young men who had been in some form of treatment for their obsession with video games -- everything from "talk therapy" with counselors to "virtual-reality" treatment, which is designed to create negative associations between the player and the game they can't stop playing.

Curing an addiction to virtual reality with virtual reality? *Insert Inception joke here*

The NYT's answer to the Kick Ass app

Oh, those New York Times Magazine folks--they're so edgy these days. In a think piece about the rise of "Angry Birds, Farmville and other hyperaddictive 'stupid games,'" the Times proves how truly addictive the Zynga canon is by embedding their own version of a "stupid" game as an illustrative complement to the story. The game allows you to destroy pieces of the website with your arrow keys and space bar--for example, we took the liberty of destroying the Style section, and automatically the Times became 10x less pretentious and assholey. If only every article offered this kind of catharsis.

It's hard to focus on the content of the article with a browser game embedded above it and cute illustrations of famous game characters to the left, but we're guessing that was their point.

"Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry," wrote author Sam Anderson. "Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games."

The Times game was designed by Jon Huang, a multimedia producer at the Times and former IBM developer. As Poynter notes, he's also a beekeeper, which is vaguely scary but also awesome.

The article itself is actually very interesting, in a "we're knowingly intellectualizing Angry Birds" kind of way. With the rise of big hits like Draw Something and the continued extension of Zynga's "With Friends" brand, it's hard to argue against the fact that we live in the age of distracting, artificial entertainment designed solely to keep our brains tied to our mobile devices.

Stupid games, wrote Mr. Anderson, "are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits."

Interesting point. We really only break out Draw Something when waiting for the bus, or during a TV commercial. But in our world of stupid games, who even cares what Mr. Anderson has to say? Back to destroying the Times!

Robot lyfe.

When it comes to focusing the internet's attention on a single page, Digg.com used to be king. But it's been about a year since Digg was upset by its smaller, more indie competitor: the highly-active forums of Conde Nast-owned Reddit, a generally happy place of kitten GIFs and funny memes and self-confessions and so on. But in the more divisive sub-forums, writes The Daily Dot, evil lurks. "Like any community, Reddit has its dark sides. It has neighborhoods rife with porn, racism, misogyny, and violence. And it’s also got gangs," The Daily Dot wrote ominously yesterday.

Gangs?! On Reddit?!

"Often referred to as downvote squads, these groups of users usually build up around shared ideologies. They launch attacks from their home subreddits—the topically themed sections of the social news site where they meet likeminded types and organize. Then they jump around the site and downvote en masse posts or comments with which they disagree."

The Daily Dot is referring specifically to threads like r/mensrights, r/feminisms, r/libertarian, and r/hockey. A post in r/mensrights last month received 10,023 up votes and 8,736 down votes. Evidence of a divisive issue? Or a gang conspiracy like the squads that once trolled Digg?

We haven't seen too many accusations of group downvoting on Reddit itself lately, so we were a bit surprised to see the Daily Dot raise the alarm. We did find one post that was a fake call-to-arms:

"Apparently our fellow redditors aren't that fond of us," writes user soupyhands in the Canucks hockey subreddit, in response to an accusation that the Canadians were forming downvote squads. "I guess Haters gonna Hate. I guess its too much for them that we have a team in the final and we are the largest hockey subreddit." Fighting words!