Online gamers beware, you might be dangerously addicted

Addiction to online gaming can cause far more damage to an individual than one can imagine, writes Justin Thomas

The reality of excessive online gaming can be far more damaging than the innocuous stereotype. Patrick T Fallon / Bloomberg News

The double-handed battle-axe cut straight through the sinew and shattered the bone. The lifeless body slumped to the ground, joined a few seconds later by the now decapitated head. Sandrella, also known as Reem, smiled broadly, high-fived her oblivious baby sister and got straight back to her online-game.

Reem is not alone in her passion for gaming. Typically, she plays online with friends from Tokyo, Buenos Aires and London. The gaming community is borderless and huge. No one knows the exact figures, but according to a market intelligence report by Comscore, a digital analytics provider, there are more than 217 million online gamers worldwide, 42 per cent of whom are female.

Nothing becomes popular without some people trying to suffix psychiatric terminology to it: Beatlemania, Bieberphilia and chocoholism to give just three examples. The internet has been viewed as a source of psychopathology, with some concerned individuals talking about “addiction”.

It is not the medium that is addictive, but the content. In most cases, the internet simply provides a powerful platform for the pursuit of long-standing obsessions.

Online games are a good example of a particularly potent form of content. In addition to rewarding gamers with a false sense of achievement, many games also provide a social dimension and a false sense of purpose, especially in situations where gamers come to rely on one and other. Consider the multiplayer online role-playing games made famous by World of Warcraft. The players of such games are widely satirised as geeky obsessives who spend way too much time slaying digitised dragons.

The reality of excessive gaming however, can be far more damaging than the innocuous stereotype.

People overly engaged with these games can lose their jobs, fail their courses and end their marriages. At the extreme, there are even reports of online-gaming related suicides and homicides.

For example, earlier this year, in France, a father was arrested for allegedly strangling his 23-year-old son to death because he was spending too much time playing online games. Also earlier this year, in South Korea, a man was charged with strangling his infant son so he could go back to his gaming.

While both of these cases are extreme, they illustrate a clear argument for the idea that excessive online-gaming might be viewed as a psychological disorder. A common way to classify a behavioural disorder is to consider the four Ds: deviance, distress, dysfunction and danger.

Online-gaming seems as though, at least occasionally, it can fit this model. It is deviant in that it can demand an excessive amount of time. It is distressing in that social relationships can be negatively affected. It is dysfunctional in that real-world duties can become neglected, and dangerous in that physical health can be impacted through excessive sedentariness.

Despite the obvious distress that sometimes goes with excessive online game play, there is still no official diagnosis for this problem. The latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual however, has included Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) as a problem warranting further clinical research. Essentially this means that it will be reconsidered for inclusion in the main book as a formal disorder in the not too distant future.

There has already been much promising research in this area, and the emerging findings suggest a model for IGD that is not too dissimilar from classical models of addiction (substance abuse). In the case of IGD there is preoccupation with internet gaming, and also the idea of withdrawal – agitation when prevented from playing – and tolerance, the need to spend increasingly larger amounts of time gaming. In addition to preoccupation, tolerance and withdrawal, there is also conflict. This can take the form of deception, for example, lying about how much time one spends gaming. Conflict also arises from continuing to play excessively in spite of being fully aware of the social and occupational problems the behaviour is causing.

Reem was playing online when her parents left the home six hours earlier, when they arrived home she was still playing. When asked if she’d been playing the whole time, she mumbled something about exam revision and having only come back to the game 10 minutes ago.

Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well- Being in the Gulf States