CYBERADDICT, SHARE MY CURE

By Charles Krauthammer

A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, COLUMNIST RICHARD COHEN of the Washington Post publicly confessed his addiction to Solitaire, the computer version of the onanistic card game. Free with every copy of Windows, it has enslaved a goodly portion of the American population. Cohen's admission may have lacked the wattage of Oprah's confession to past cocaine abuse but not the poignancy: responsible, respected writer shamefully neglects most everything-family, work, leisure-in endless pursuit of the perfectly useless perfect hand. Heartbreaking.

Cohen was writing to warn others of the dangers, but it came too late for the state of Virginia, where addiction to Solitaire (and other computer games) among state workers had reached epidemic proportions. Finding his bureaucrats sorting aces and kings when they should have been processing hunting licenses and some such, the Governor ordered these amusements expunged from all government computers to save the state from massive waste, if not total collapse.

Now, inspired by columnist Cohen and Governor Allen, I come forward in a spirit of public service and self-loathing to admit my own sad story. I was a Minesweeper addict.

Minesweeper is another poisoned gift from Microsoft, a jazzed-up cyberversion of the old grade school battleship game that was played long ago by wanton boys behind the math teacher's back. Well, I'm 44 and school's out. Who's to stop me now?

Alas, no one. Having also forsaken family, friends and work in pursuit of the 100 hidden mines in the cryptic grid, I now come forward. Not just, however, to confess and admonish. This story has a happy ending. I come to heal. In the best Oprah tradition, I come to announce and share my cure.

The technical name for my cure is flooding, a technique usually reserved for treating phobias. In the early '70s, London researchers reported a novel treatment for the obsessive-compulsive washing that comes from a pathological fear of dirt: they confined a washer to a hospital room and arranged for the room to be increasingly soiled. As the grime got thicker, the patient's anxiety level would rise and rise-the doctors had turned off the water taps-until the agony was no longer bearable. At which point, no, the doctors did not take the patient out of the room-they were pitiless and quite successful-the aversion would break, and the phobia was banished.

In the Salkian spirit of self-experimentation, I have long applied this technique to my addictions. The first time, admittedly, the experiment was unintentional. In college I was a big coffee drinker. Working on the McGill Daily, I once stayed up all night writing and rewriting editorials (one habit of which I later purged myself with great ease), drinking cup after cup of coffee along the way. By dawn I had consumed at least a dozen and was sick as a dog. That was 25 years ago. I have not touched a cup since.

I have had intermittent success applying the technique to my most chronic addiction: chess. George Steiner is right that chess is ultimately an entirely useless, self-referential experience, but telling yourself so is of no use because it is also totally absorbing. During, say, a 10-hour binge of speed chess, you tell yourself other things. You tell yourself it is a noble game. You tell yourself it was Ben Franklin's favorite pastime while ambassador to France ("I call this my opera," he would say, explaining his absence from the Paris opera). You tell yourself that Natan Sharansky kept his sanity in solitary confinement by playing mental chess against himself ("I always won," he recalls with satisfaction).

But that does not help. As the hours slip away and you see life passing you by, you remember the real chess paradigm, Nabokov's Luzhin, the genius who finally apprehends "the full horror and abysmal depths of chess" and goes quite bonkers. And you know you've got to stop.

But how? Flooding. The remissions don't last forever, but long enough. With a prodigious effort of overindulgence, playing till my mind is numb and my eyes are crossed, unable to stand another look at a checkered board, I emerge blinkingly into the light of life, free of the monkey for another while.

And now I am happy to announce that with a similarly prodigious effort of overindulgence, I have kicked Minesweeper. I did not avoid the temptation. I drowned it. I played. Night and day. Till I dropped. When I wanted to stop, I didn't. I forced myself back to the keyboard. Grid after grid, I kept hitting the Restart button. Long after I'd had enough, I made myself play some more. And then it broke: I'd played my final game.

Interestingly, it was just around the time of my Minesweeper cure that Cohen's Solitaire confession appeared, with its dire warning "not to start, not to move even a single black queen on a red king, lest before you know it you have imperiled your marriage and neglected your family." Hmm. The warning pricked my curiosity. I had never tried Solitaire, but when someone of Cohen's intelligence finds himself so intrigued by a game of this kind ... Well, I might just have a quick peek.

I had a peek, and I like it. I like it a lot. I like it so much that I've got to stop now and hurry home for just a little dose.

Oh, don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Next week I flood.