Video Game Addiction: It’s Real and Potentially Harmful

For most consumers, playing video games is a harmless leisurely past time, but for others it spirals out of control and becomes an addiction with very real offline consequences.

In a new report in Vice, Cecilia D’Anastasio dives into a multitude of effects video game addiction produces and the malaise it causes for many youth in this country. The constant use of video games has been linked to creating attention deficit disorders and anxiety with many feeling a need to shut out the mendacity of real life.

Treatment programs with support groups such as Computer Gaming Addicts Anonymous (CGAA) have gained wider traction as addicts try to cope with life without video games. D’Anastasio dives into the stories of a few addicts such as 69 year old addict Patricia and traces many parallels of drug addiction with video game addiction including withdrawal symptoms such as “sleeplessness, anxiety and hallucinations.” Vice reports:

Experts estimate that more than 3 million Americans between eight and 18 could be suffering from video game dependency. And medical authorities are finally noticing. The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders recently christened the phenomenon as “internet gaming disorder.” The DSM warns that such “persistent and recurrent online activity results in clinically significant impairment or distress,” adding that certain neural pathways are triggered just like a drug addicts’ would be when ingesting their substance of choice. To put that comparison in perspective, there could be about 1 million more diagnosable dependent gamers in America than coke addicts.

The DSM notes that this condition is entering the sphere of mainstream mental health disorders, but there isn’t a good medical model for diagnosing it yet. Dr. Douglas Gentile, one of the world’s leading experts on adolescent media addiction, believes that you can measure video game dependency the same way you measure other psychological conditions. Experts combine cues from gambling addicts and substance abusers to diagnose destructive gamers. The disorder even manifests in addiction signifiers such as tolerance, withdrawal, a loss of control, and harm to social or academic pursuits. But Gentile understands the skeptics. He began his research on media addiction in 1999 “largely trying to show that it was wrong.”
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Games like World of Warcraft aren’t inherently evil or even inherently habit-forming. In fact, all the addicts interviewed—they prefer to be called “addicts” regardless of their recovery status, like AA members—stressed that their game of choice was irrelevant to their gaming dependency. They latched on to a variety of games ranging from Tetris to Halo.

“It’s not about the games,” said the 21-year-old Conor S., a gaming addict I connected with over the internet. “It’s like asking a recovered alcoholic what they used to drink. It’s all about this,” he said, motioning to his head over Skype.

DansNewLife, a Reddit commenter on a gaming-addiction forum, speaks from personal experience: “The addict seeks relief from distress—think of how highly motivated you are to take your hand off a hot stove. When you stop, all the bad stuff keeps rushing back… for an addict, stopping means returning to a very painful, tortured existence.”

—Posted by Donald Kaufman

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