The first scene of the Sundance-featured documentary "Web Junkie" begins with a group of young men playing the popular online role-playing game "World of Warcraft." With the game responsible for more than 100 million accounts worldwide, it's a scene that could take place in any country with broadband Internet access.

But as the opening of the film takes place at an Internet café in China — the first country to deem Internet addiction a mental disorder — it takes on a greater significance.

The film, screened nationally on PBS's "POV" series July 13, focuses on a boot camp for treating Internet addiction in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing. The Daxing boot camp is one of 400 run by the country's government that treats teenagers for Internet addiction.

In "Web Junkie," the addiction to online gaming is treated like a drug that the teenagers are helpless to stop using, and strains or eliminates relationships with family and the outside world. In several cases, subjects in the movie dropped out of school entirely because they couldn't stop playing video games.

Some of the teenagers mention multiple times that they feel as if the "reality" that video games gives them is better and more interesting than the real world.

"They are the same as heroin addicts," Professor Tao Ran, the director of the Daxing boot camp, said about the teenagers at the facility. "Heroin addicts crave and look for heroin every day. The teenagers we have here crave and look forward to playing games every day."

While in China there seems to be a medical consensus about the existence of gaming addiction and the need to treat it medically, the American psychiatric community is less convinced. In the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition" (DSM-5), released by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013, Internet Gaming Disorder is "a condition warranting more clinical research and experience before it might be considered for inclusion in the main book as a formal disorder."

Curiously, the explanation of the condition via the DSM-5 does not include online gambling. With more and more video games requiring payment for additional features, and the gambling industry moving toward video games to replace slot machines for a younger generation, the lines are increasingly blurred. In one scene in "Web Junkie," a patient talks about how he spent $8,500 playing "Dream to the West."

For a movie that explores the loneliness and emotional distance of the Chinese teenagers, its most powerful scenes come in group situations.

In one passage early in the film, teenagers are huddled around a table playing cards and bragging about their longest passage gaming without a substantive pause. One patient boasts that he spent an entire summer break from school, or two months, doing nothing but sleeping and playing video games.

Family plays a big role in the movie, as parents are also counseled about their child's addiction and how they can be better parents. Sixteen-year-old Wang Yuchao, known as "Nicky" for the film, is the basis for perhaps the two most jaw-dropping exchanges in the film, each coming in a family therapy session.

In the first, after watching his tearful mother talk about what being addicted to games has done to the family, a nurse with the camp asks if he's felt the pain and fear that his family is going through. His response is a curt, "I'm too lazy to pay them any attention."

In the second, in a larger group with several families and patients, Nicky talks about suicidal and homicidal emotions and has to be physically restrained from attacking his father. After calming down, he talks about what loneliness means to him in the context of gaming with fellow lonely teens.

The movie ends on an upbeat note, with Xi Wang, or "Hope," leaving the camp with his father after completing treatment. His turning point in the camp comes after 10 days in an isolated room, punishment for spearheading an overnight escape from the facility to an Internet café.

Israeli filmmakers Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia are not active participants in the film with narration or even much on-screen text aside from the translation subtitles from Mandarin, and let the subjects do the exploration and storytelling.

Many next-level questions are still touched upon through the film, such as the role of aggressive parenting in the child's addiction, the pressure to study and make good grades in the culture, and the role of China's controversial one-child policy in the "national crisis" of gaming addiction.

However, the filmmakers also neglect to mention disturbing details about the camps, such as multiple beatings at the camps in the past.

In America, private facilities to treat Internet addiction have opened up in recent years. But for now in the U.S., that style of treatment appears to be unlikely, pending more research and possible recognition in the DSM.

If you'd like to watch the film, PBS is streaming it free online through Aug. 13.