Your kids play video games, read this!

A 17-year-old girl falls to the floor. She was playing the video game Dark Warrior. Her father, who fixes video players, fears that she has been electrocuted.

For years, the girl has fanatically played one game after another in her dad's shop; nothing like this has happened before. The girl is rushed to the hospital where the doctors determine that she has had an epileptic seizure--they call it Dark Warrior Epilepsy.

There was an unusual bright flashing sequence in the game that seems to have set her off . 

A 14-year-old boy is watching a football game. His team misses an important goal. He starts shaking and has an epileptic seizure . Two 13-year-old girls are playing Super Mario Brothers, a game that one of them has just received as a Christmas gift. When the pace of the action picks up in the third straight hour of their play, one girl starts to shake and, for three minutes, has nonstop epileptic seizures. The doctor labels the phenomenon Nintendo epilepsy .

What's going on here?

Ever since the early 1980s when the video game boom began, the occasional game player would react as did the first and third unfortunate teenagers described above.

The typical victim of what is now called Video Game Epilepsy is a 13-year-old male , but the age range is wide, and girls, women and men can all be affected. It is fairly common for victims to be unusually tired or stressed when they have such seizures.

Seizures can be triggered both when one is playing a game and when one is watching someone else play.

For most people who have epilepsy and suffer from the disorienting and often terrifying seizures that characterize the disease, video game playing is not a risky activity.

But for 5% of epileptics, the flashing patterns of certain games trigger epileptic seizures just as do flashing strobe lights, sunlight flickering through trees, light glancing off water, and even striped lines like the slats of a venetian blind.  

In the United States , there are close to one million people with epilepsy. (About 1 in 200 people around the world have epilepsy.)

Often, people sense that something is about to happen to them right before a seizure. This feeling, called an "aura," makes them restless, irritable, or just vaguely uncomfortable.