High Addiction among Young Video Gamers
Study indicates possibility of real problems among children with pathological behavior
According to a new study, 8.5 percent of young video game players show signs of gaming addiction.
Playing a lot of video games is not that simple. It interferes with family interaction, school performance and increases chances of health problems, reveals the study.
The study is the first to highlight prevalence of video game addiction by using a nation-wide sample of children and adolescents, said Douglas A. Gentile, a developmental psychologist and an assistant professor at Iowa State University in Ames.
Gentile, whose study is due to be published in the May edition of Psychological Science also said, “What’s most concerning to me is really the total percentage, just the vast number of kids that are having real problems in their lives because they play games, and they may not know how to stop it.”
Experts hold different opinions about the existence of “video game addiction.” Till date, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not include it in the list of mental disorders. The manual describing criteria for determining different psychiatric disorders will be updated in 2012.
“I think we’re at the same place now with video gaming as we were with alcoholism 40 years ago,” said Gentile, pointing out that alcoholism has been proved to be a disease after decades of research.
He began studying video game addiction in 1999 and admits to have a skeptic view of it then. “Addiction has to mean you’re damaging your functioning and not just in one area of your life,” said Gentile. The data astonished him with the level of damage exhibited by kids playing a lot of video games.
For the new study, a survey was conducted throughout the country. It involved 1,178 U.S. children and teens, aged 8 to 18 and was conducted by Harris Interactive, the research firm based in Rochester, N.Y. About 100 children at each age represented in the sample were involved in the January 2007 survey.
The children’s video gaming habits were assessed through an online questionnaire including questions like:
“Have you every played [video games] as a way of escaping from problems or bad feelings?”
“Have you ever lied to family and friends about how much you play [video games]?”
The criteria used to diagnose pathological gambling were adapted by Gentile to measure pathological gaming in kids. If they exhibited six or more of the 11 criteria, gamers were categorized as pathological.
Characteristics of pathological gamers include higher frequency and time length of gaming, lower grades and lack of concentration in school as compared to non-pathological players. More health problems associated with video gaming like hand and wrist pain were also reported by them.
The probability of video game addicts to have attention-deficit disorder was also much more than other players, being 25 percent of pathological gamers versus 11 percent of non-pathological players. Their chances of being involved in physical fights in the past year were also higher than others (24 percent vs. 12 percent).
Cheryl K. Olson, co-director and co-founder of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said, “I think it does highlight that parents and kids do need to talk about game play and they do need to talk about rules.”
Still, she remains skeptic about the suitability of adapting questions used for assessing gambling problems in adults to assess video gaming addiction in children.
“It’s one thing for a child to fib to his mom about how long he’s played a video game,” said Olson. “It’s another thing to lie to your wife about gambling.”
She also questioned the ability of young kids, about 8 years old, to complete a self-administered questionnaire correctly.
As director o research for the National Institute on Media and the family in Minneapolis, Gentile suggests that parents who feel that their kids have a problem should trust their instincts.
Experts believe that mental disorders may be indicated by behavioral problems among children who play video games, such as compulsive gaming, bunking school and avoiding playing with friends.
Dr. Michael Brody, a psychiatrist in private practice in Potomac, Md., and chairman of the media committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry said, “What you usually find with these kids is this [video game compulsion] is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath you usually find a lot of depression and anxiety.”
According to him, “To put a label like ‘video game addiction’ is too superficial.”
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