Snooker player Neil Robertson claims a ruinous addiction has harmed his professional career. It’s not alcohol, it’s not drugs – it is video games. In a recent interview with Eurosport, the Australian said his compulsive need to play the online fantasy game World of Warcraft interfered with his training and preparation for a tournament in China. “I’m two months sober from playing them,” he told the site. “My friend said to me: ‘you don’t get to choose the crack you are addicted to’. And the multiplayer online ones I can’t touch because I just get too hooked on them.”

It is only the latest article to put forward the possibility that video games have addictive qualities similar to drugs or gambling. Over the last 20 years, as the medium exploded in popularity, there have been regular scare stories about zombie-like teenagers slumped in front of their PCs, eschewing school work and social interaction. In South Korea, where online gaming is effectively a national sport and its pro players are treated like rock stars, the government has funded treatment centres for games addiction and passed laws to limit access to games for children.

But the parameters and definitions of addiction put forward in articles on the subject are often hazy and inexact, and contributing factors are ignored. The science around compulsive play is still in its infancy. Right now, the thinking works like this: do you spend a lot of time thinking about online games? Have they replaced previous hobbies? Do you ever play them to improve a bad mood? If so, you might one day qualify for a diagnosis of internet gaming disorder.

There are two main systems for classifying mental disorders in the west, and both may soon feature psychological disorders related to excessive gaming. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has proposed the inclusion of “gaming disorder” in the next edition of its International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Internet gaming disorder” also features in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) from the American Psychiatric Association (APA), in a chapter of Conditions for Further Study, which means it’s not yet an official disorder and its proposed criteria are not meant for clinical use.

And that’s probably a good thing. In a recent article for the New York Times, psychologists Christopher J Ferguson and Patrick Markey explained that people who fit the proposed criteria don’t actually seem to have a problem. They referenced a large-scale study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, which found that even the small percentage of the population who might qualify for an acute case of internet gaming disorder (at most 1%) tended not to actually experience negative effects on their mental or physical health as a result – a stark contrast to the popular concept of a mental disorder. That’s because, while the criteria involved in defining addiction may be problematic if you’re talking about something like heroin, they are relatively normal behaviour if you substitute the term “online games” for any other hobby.

“The title of the article is Video Games Aren’t Addictive,” says Markey. “It would probably be more appropriate to say Video Games Aren’t More Addictive Than Gardening. Anything that makes a person have a good time, a person could overdo.” The piece is focused on debunking the supposition that video games are addictive, but Ferguson and Markey are also interested in why the belief is so widely held. Why do so many people – from parents to researchers to 91-year-old actors – believe in the existence of video game addiction and other negative effects of video games when the evidence doesn’t support it?

The problem may be political. When Ferguson contacted the World Health Organisation to express concerns about the possible inclusion of gaming disorder in the eleventh revision of the ICD (ICD-11), he was told by one representative via email that the WHO has, “been under enormous pressure, especially from Asian countries, to include this”.

In an “open debate paper” on the subject, a group of 26 researchers from 24 departments across the west, including Ferguson and Markey, expressed their stark concerns:

“A diagnosis may be used to control and restrict children, which has already happened in parts of the world where children are forced into ‘gaming-addiction camps’ with military regimes designed to ‘treat’ them for their gaming problems, without any evidence of the efficacy of such treatment and followed by reports of physical and psychological abuse.”

The government in South Korea, for example, is so concerned about video game addiction that it has introduced laws to limit children’s access to online games, and government-sponsored medical practices offer treatments that can involve electric shocks. “It does remain kind of an open question whether youth in some Asian countries, particularly South Korea and China, do have more problems around games than in the west,” says Ferguson. “The evidence is unclear because it’s difficult to do cross-national comparisons, particularly when there’s no clear way to assess video game addiction cross-nationally.

“I would be interested in understanding whether there are larger sociocultural issues affecting kids. One thing I would suspect is that games are not really the root of the problem, but rather something else is, perhaps something more challenging or threatening to fix or less easy to blame.”

The authors of the open paper also worry that the mere proposal of gaming disorder would alter the course of research on the subject, by encouraging a “confirmatory” rather than “exploratory” approach. That is, instead of investigating the subject more widely, researchers might assume the validity of such a disorder and work instead on screening.

One might at this point want to put one’s faith in the objectivity of science, but Ferguson’s own research has shown that clinicians and scholars show the same susceptibility to bias as the general population. Age has an effect, for instance, at least insofar as it tends to predict how much direct gaming experience a person has had. “It really seems to be that people who are not familiar with how games actually work tend to be the people who are most panicky or afraid of what games do.

“This seems to fit into a longer historical pattern of people kind of panicking over new media. You can see this all the way back 2,500 years to the Ancient Greeks when they were arguing about plays like Antigone, and the effects of these plays on kids, that we now teach them in middle school – much to their chagrin.”

It happened with novels in the 18th century, comic books and rock and roll in the 50s, and video nasties in the 80s. Now it’s happening with video games. Thanks to the relative youth of the medium and the subsequent generational discrepancy in interest and understanding, older people are worried about the kids, which is funny, says Ferguson. “In fact, the people that tend to hold the more extreme negative views of video games tend to have more negative views of children and adolescents as well. And that’s true for scholars just as it is for people in the general public.”

And when researchers hold these negative views, it’s easy for them to present the data in a way that supports them, whether consciously or not. As Ferguson puts it: “Social science data is fluid enough that you can massage it to make it say almost anything.”

Markey offers one method: “Probably for me the biggest issue in the laboratory studies is the flexibility of measurements. So there’s this one task they give people where you blast them with white noise and it’s measured to see aggression. And you can measure that by how long you give it, or how loud do you give it. And so you have these two variables, but researchers have done things like averaging these together; they’ll multiply them, they’ll take the square root of both of them, then multiply them. I’m trying to recall how many different ways there were.”

“You get up above 150,” says Ferguson.

In short, 150 different combinations of these two variables – duration and volume of white noise – means many different numbers being used to represent “aggression” across different studies, even – Markey adds – from the same researchers. “And unfortunately that one measurement, just that one, has been used consistently throughout video game research, and so we can almost throw out a huge chunk of studies.”

Ferguson and Markey suggest that researchers can mitigate this by providing their methodology beforehand – known as pre-registration – to prevent them from changing it afterwards to push their results one way or another. But even then, the variables themselves are highly questionable. As well as white noise, researchers have also been known to measure how much hot sauce a participant will give to another person, and use that to represent their level of aggression. “And then those types of findings are used to say that violent video games cause school shootings or real acts of violence,” says Markey. “And that’s where I’ve always been most sceptical.”

For Markey, what’s most important is real-world data, like the observed decrease in violent crime whenever sales of violent video games peak. “For game addiction we have millions of people playing games, and just from our data of how many people might be ‘addicted’ to games it’s clearly not the same as, say, heroin or any of the hard drugs or anything like that. Imagine if we gave heroin to millions of people all at once. What would happen to our world, right? It would completely collapse.”

“I think a lot of the issues come from just how we use the term ‘addiction’,” he says. “When as parents we might say, ‘Oh, my kid is addicted to that video game,’ we don’t mean addiction like, ‘He’s addicted to cocaine.’” Again, the disdain on the part of parents seems to come from a lack of understanding, as Ferguson says: “I think there’s that kind of misperception: ‘My kid is wasting time on this thing that I see no value in, and therefore because they can’t tear themselves away from it to do things that I value, I’m worried that they’re becoming addicted.’”

Of course, everyone has some bias, and just as those with little experience with games might undervalue them, the rest of us may be predisposed to overvalue them. In their book on moral panics around video games – Moral Combat – Markey and Ferguson dedicate a chapter to debunking some of the proposed positive effects of video games, like the widely exaggerated benefits of brain training games.

The only readily quantifiable benefit to video games seems to be that they’re fun: that they might be good for stress reduction, if you actually like them. “This says, again, it’s probably that games are just like a lot of hobbies,” says Ferguson. “It’s not that games are miraculous, that there’s something special about them, but like lots of hobbies, if you do something you enjoy you probably feel better after doing it. For some people, coming home and crocheting is a stress-reducing activity. If you don’t enjoy games, it isn’t going to work. This may seem obvious, and it is, but it’s taken us three decades of research to get there.”

Those seeking objectivity should pay attention to how words like “addiction” are used, and whether a supposed addiction comes with actual negative health outcomes. It seems that for a tiny percentage of regular game players, their behaviour can become problematic – even destructive – but the numbers do not support an addictive pandemic. When looking at research, we must consider what variables the researchers have used and whether they pre-registered their methodology beforehand. We must find out where the researchers are coming from, and whether their research was funded through grants – which, Ferguson says, are more likely to go to the “scary stuff”.

In the end, Neil Robertson’s story may just tell us that intensely demanding video games and an intensely demanding sporting career are not compatible. If you’ve built your professional life around something that’s generally a hobby, you might want to stay away from other hobbies that are more fun.

Source: The Guardian