Like many addicts, Griffin Benger can't go long without a fix.

The 16-year-old Toronto teen shows all of the telltale signs of addiction and dependency: He spends hours per day feeding his insatiable habit and in the process has become rebellious, short-tempered, emotionally closed off and militant toward his family.

"We tried to control it but it took over his life, crowding out school and family," says Robin Benger, Griffin's frustrated father.

Cocaine, heroin, marijuana, alcohol and hallucinogens are the traditional addict's best friend, but it is not these chemical concoctions that Griffin lusts for.

Benger's addiction is one plaguing a new generation of teenagers weaned on the hypnotic throb and pixelated light show of the technological age. Griffin is hooked on video games.

That admission -- not from Griffin himself, who like many addicts says he doesn't have a problem -- might sound trivial compared to the druggies and junkies loitering downtown streets late at night. But the symptoms, the problems and the social impact all point to excessive video game use as a very real problem.

In fact, research shows that video games do not necessarily induce the same chemical reaction in the brain that drugs do. But there's not much medical research into the effects of excessive video gaming.

In a CTV documentary entitled "First Person Shooter" airing on Sept. 1, writer and director Robin Benger draws from his personal experience to delve into a disturbing world where game-hooked teens will do just about anything for their fix.

Benger also talks with experts who debate whether violent video games encourage violent behaviour, or just offer a healthy outlet for male aggression.

In Griffin's case, it all started innocently enough with a harmless looking duck-shooting game when he was an adolescent. Picking off the little mallards made a bright "ting!" noise and the shooter was rewarded with electronic praise and allowed to progress onto the next level.

But much like a marijuana user progressing to a harder drug, the ducks eventually wore thin and Griffin sought solace in tougher challenges.

Through friends and other school kids, Griffin's attention was eventually caught by a slick, action-packed video game.

The game is a so-called "first-person shooter." It's team-based, with one team playing the role of the terrorist and the other team playing the role of the counter-terrorist. Each side has access to different guns and equipment, as well as different abilities. Maps have different goals such as hostage rescue, assassination, bomb defusion, terrorist escape, etc.

The game became so intoxicating that Griffin retreated from his social life, started skipping school and alienated his family. Hunkered over the keyboard each night, all that mattered was the game and the thrill of the hunt.

"I went from concerned to panicked in about two months," says Robin, who at first brushed off the game as harmless fun. "The game became an escalating tug of war between us."

Griffin's mother Nicky Guadagni saw the changes, too.

"Anything that presented any difficulty, Griffin would play the computer game instead. He could avoid reality completely by going into virtual reality."

Faced with the disturbing possibility that they were losing their son to an addiction, Griffin's parents took evasive action and removed his computer.

But the allure was too strong to ignore so when his home supply ran out, Griffin hit the streets of downtown Toronto looking for a game fix. He ended up in the opium den of the 20th century -- the computer cafe where teams of youths play head-to-head to the virtual death.

Reeling their boy back home was no easy feat. Few professionals took their son's video game habit seriously.

"I'm tired of people saying that it's just a phase or teenage hood," says Nicky. "This is a very, very serious thing."

So serious, in fact, that U.S.-based activist David Grossman says some video games can cause not only problems with home life, but foster violent feelings, too. War-like video games, Grossman says, are literally teaching kids how to kill.

It's a topic Grossman knows something about. He spent 18 years in the U.S. military, served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and is a former member of the elite U.S. Army Rangers.

Now he spends much of this time travelling the North American lecture circuit warning parents of the dangers of excess video game use and the destructive impact violent games can have. Games like this, Grossman says, are the worst of the crop.

"These things are particularly effective combat simulators, or murder simulators if they are in the hands of kids," Grossman says, noting that the U.S. military and police forces use first-person shooters video games to train on.

The link between video games and violent behaviour is anything but proven. Many psychologists believe movies or music have more of a corrupting influence on teens than games. But consider this: Grossman says you need three things to kill a human being: a weapon, skill and the will to carry out the task.

"Video games provide two out of the three," Grossman says.

Some experts argue that today's generation of kids have grown up never knowing the brutal truth about war and death: No world wars, no conscription, no Hitler. To them, war has become a game or TV entertainment, leaving them physically and emotionally untouched by the real thing.

While Griffin never became violent, some of his fellow players have exhibited signs of aggression.

"It's been absolute hell. It's been really awful," says Susan Ives, a designer from Washington, D.C., whose video game-crazed son turned against her one day.

One night earlier this year, Ives tried desperately to get her son off the family computer where he was playing over the Internet. She asked nicely, she demanded firmly. Finally, she reached for the computer's power button and his game world came to an abrupt end. Enraged, he grabbed his mother's wrist and twisted it. He then picked up the coffee table and threw it across the room, smashing it against the wall.

Dr. Stephen Kline, a media analysis professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., has been studying the phenomenon of teens who excessively play video games for more than eight years.

Kline doesn't see it as an addiction, but rather a disorder related to technology. And Kline isn't a big supporter of the theory that video games cause violent behaviour, but he has raised several other alarming facts.

In a recent survey of 1,500 teenagers, 25 per cent showed compulsive behaviour around playing video games. It also found that 50 per cent of respondents used the word "addiction" to describe a friend's behaviour to games.

Dr. Maressa Hecht Orzack, an addiction specialist with Harvard Medical Center, says it is possible to become "addicted" to computer use, whether the user is playing games, surfing the Internet and other electronic habits.

She's even classified the condition, calling it computer addiction, Internet addictive disorder or cyberaddiction.

"It is a problem very similar to pathological gambling or compulsive shopping," Orzack says.

"Like other addictions, it affects other people -- family, friends, and co-workers. Like gamblers, they compulsively keep investing time and money."

The U.S. video game industry is worth about $6 billion US each year in game sales, not including the electronic hardware needed to play them.

The game industry proudly estimates that as teens grow into young adults with a pay cheque, the video game industry will grow an astounding 71 per cent in five years to more than $86 billion US.

For Griffin, though, it's all just a game.

"It's not an addictive substance like drugs are," he says. "Maybe there are some cases where it's so severe that it can be considered an addiction, but I don't think I have any sort of an addiction."