Is your addiction to video games a disorder

99% of boys under 18 and 94% of girls under 18 report playing video games regularly. On average a young person will rack up 10,000 hours of gaming by the age of 21. Which is about the same amount of time they spend in a classroom for all of middle and high school if they have perfect attendance. 5 million gamers in the U.S. are spending more than 40 hours a week playing games. But are these addictive tendencies sufficient to warrant a disorder? 

In 2013, with the publication of the Diagnostics Statistics Manual 5, gambling was recategorised from an impulse control disorder to a non-substance use disorder. The symptoms of the disorder map almost perfectly onto those of substance use disorders such as alcoholism. There are tolerance and withdrawal symptoms, with people feeling the need to bet more to feel the same level of excitement and a constant urge to go back to the casino. Like a drug addiction, gambling is understood neurologically in a very similar way. The experience triggers dopamine (the neurotransmitter associated with reward sensations)  in the brain. The person feels excitement or reward as a result and becomes addicted to the sensation of reward. Cocaine works in a similar way. As does video gaming.

When you are, as I am sure you can relate, deep in the level twenty wilderness burying dragon bones to level up your prayer and a PKing tank 5 levels higher than you surprise attacks you with an Armadyl godsword but is subsequently defeated by your dragon daggers……. It feels good. Beating the Impossible Game during year 11 English was one of the most rewarding experiences. Not because it meant anything, the Impossible Game and Runescape are both equally banal, but they are designed to feel good. And they do. Like drug use or gambling people can use gaming as a coping mechanism. Escapism for the next generation of adolescents. Has the real world beaten you down? Enter a pseudo one and level up…. Feel the progress, the development, the successes.  

But is the addictive nature of gaming sufficient to earning it a spot alongside the ranks of non-substance use disorders? To be a disorder the impairment must cause distress to the individual, be deviant from the normal populace, and be dysfunctional behaviour. Video gaming is not all of the above. 

Is gaming distressing? Maybe once you turn off the PS4 at 5:00 AM and realise you have work in 4 hours. But for the most part the experience is the opposite. It acts as a relief from an overly stressful world. 

Is excessive gaming dysfunctional? The argument for this may have been far stronger a decade ago. But now there is an entire economy built around gaming, millionaires gaming every day as a career. These people would have to fit the category of an excessive gamer, but they are dysfunction if they are earning more than most of us could ever dream of? And further, would we discourage the pursuit of this career? My mother certainly does not discourage me from playing football, even though my salary is significantly lower than Messi’s and I stand little chance of every self sustaining off of it. Would it be right to discourage someone gaming for the love of the game, to discourage their ambitions?

It may be deviant to be an excessive gamer, but deviancy has always had to be unidirectional. We have to understand it in the context of something that is impairing your capacity to function, verses something that is an attribute. Olympic athletes are addicted to exercise. They are all probably suffering from a slew of distorted cognitions about the world and themselves that manifest in their day to day lives, and yet we wouldn’t diagnose them with olympic athlete syndrome. Einstein definitely had some form of antisocial or schizoid personality disorder, but we wouldn’t classify him. Simply put, the person is disordered if they are deviant in a way society deems bad.  

And even if you are deviant, what if it is society that is abnormal and not you. Existing in epoch in which the entirety of human history is threatened on two fronts, the greed of the powerful and the climate of the earth, perhaps a bit of escapism is justified. 

Video gaming has become a household norm in the 21st century, who would the baby boomers be to question that reality and attempt to stifle it by labelling it disordered, but the same people that brought us the rest of this mess.