Steve Jenson [not his real name] realised he had a problem when he found himself getting angry at his young son. Having put him down for a nap—and expecting a couple hours of video game playing time—his baby wouldn’t settle. “Feeling that way towards my son because it meant I didn’t get to play [my] video games, I immediately realised was absolutely nuts,” he recalls. “I know I had to get off games much as you’d get off alcohol—not with moderation, but stopping completely.
“If I could still play once in a while I would,” adds Jenson, a spokesperson for the US’ Gaming Addicts Anonymous (GAA). “But if I did that I know the neural pathways in my brain that have been tuned to fire up by thousands and thousands of hours playing would just fire up again. Let’s just say that the early months [of going cold turkey] were very hard. Whenever I was stressed, gaming was the first thing that came to mind.”
This may be a familiar story to the many whose waking hours revolve around battling goblins or building worlds online. Certainly it’s a story Jenson hears from those who approach the GAA for help: distraught parents calling because their kids threaten to stop eating if their game time is curtailed, or who refuse to wash or go to school, and of older players who cannot hold down a job or maintain a relationship.
For all that gaming may be associated with teenagers—boys make up the majority of gamers, playing, by one count, an average of 2 hours and 19 minutes a day—the average age of a gamer (in the US at least) is actually 33. And, just like the population, half of them are grown women. It’s quite possible to be addicted to innocently playing four hours of Candy Crush a day on a commute as it is to be a 13-year-old locked down with Call of Duty in their parent’s basement. Scott hears all about their anxiety, aggression, insomnia and hyper-arousal.
“A couple of people had pointed out to me that my gaming behaviour was out of control and I tried to rein it in—it’s then I realised I didn’t have the control I thought I had,” Jenson adds. “Achieving objectives in a game definitely gave me a high, and I’d often sit down with the intention of playing for 20 minutes or so and end up playing until I was horrifically sleep-deprived. I knew what the red flags were but just didn’t think gaming addiction was ever a real thing.”
That is a debate that is on-going, particularly when it comes to the use of the word "addiction". Sure, the sedentary nature of gaming is not good for you: time spent gaming has been correlated with higher BMI, poor sleep and the excess consumption of caffeine and calories. Too much gaming can make you fat, wired and tired. The World Health Organisation has classified "video game addiction" as a mental health disorder. which psychologists now also refer to as IGD or Internet Gaming Disorder, while in 2022 the same was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR, its bible of mental health conditions.
It defines it as the experience, over a 12-month period, of criteria including a preoccupation with gaming, a build-up of tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, deception about one’s gaming, a loss of interest in other activities, as well as the loss of relationships, schooling or career. In some countries—the UK and South Korea, for example—specialist centres for the treatment of gaming disorders have been opened.
On the one hand the media has over recent years fuelled the idea that "too much" gaming is harmful—in parallel to concerns about smartphone and social media use. And, on the other hand, the science on the topic, for all that is it in its infancy, remains muddled and on occasion downright contradictory. It’s unclear whether problems often attributed to excessive gaming—ADHD, autism and depression, for example—are because of gaming; or whether people with those problems are drawn to gaming.
“Does gaming addiction exist? Yes. But whether video games are addictive is another question entirely,” stresses Professor Mark Griffiths, head of Nottingham Trent University’s International Gaming Research Unit, UK. “I’m not anti-gaming at all. I play. I let my children play. But I think what we have is only a small minority of players whose play has a [negative] impact on their life, and they remain functional. They may have a problem but they’re clearly not addicted.”
“Of course, not even the most fervent gaming advocate would deny there are people negatively affected by gaming—in ways that resemble addiction—and that the few people it harms, it really harms. But we need to be cautious of the medicalisation of what is normal behaviour for many people in 2025.”
Dr Mike Bishop argues that the terminology is perhaps moot. He’s founder of Summerland Camps, a US-organisation that each year takes on scores of teens who have become over-attached to their various screens. It attempts to teach them how to find a better balance through CBT-based methods. He sees over-dependency on video-gaming, especially among younger people, as the product of a perfect storm of factors: parents less willing to let their children roam outside—the Covid pandemic only underscoring a tendency to stay at home—meeting a need for escapism from the pressures of real life, meeting the appeal of immediate gratification in a world in which much of what we value—good relationships, success in school or work—takes effort and time.
Then add in the 24/7 availability of games, their immersive, often realistic quality, their avatar personalisation, and their reward mechanisms. It’s no wonder they light up that habit-forming dopamine release.
“And it’s not just about playing video-games,” Bishop says. “So much of what [younger generations] consume is ‘game-ified’ now. Social media is all about shares, ticks, followers and likes. We’re only now just coming to understand the impact of this. Look at ads for smoking from the 1940s telling you it’s good for you or ‘recommended by doctors’ and they seem crazy to us now. And I think in 20 years’ time—when the current call for more research [has been answered]—we will say the same about gaming.”
Certainly a slowly growing body of research is presenting a complex and sometimes disturbing picture. Dr Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, lead researcher in eSports at the University of Bergen, Norway, may speak more of “problematic gaming”. She stresses that certain individuals are more susceptible to developing a problematic relationship to playing video games, and that often these people have an underlying mental disorder such as anxiety or depression.
But her own research has also revealed what she calls Game Transfer Phenomenon, in which excessive play leads to physical and perceptual behaviours echoing after play has stopped: your fingers twitch as though still on the controller, or you see the world in the context of the game in ways akin to hallucination.
“Our understanding of [gaming behaviours] is improving and we’re starting to develop criteria that help us identify those people for whom gaming really is problematic, though there are certainly also areas—like Game Transfer Phenomenon—that we don’t understand well enough yet. Science takes time,” she says. But Dr de Gortari also stresses that concerns are also a product of a generational disconnect—and experience gap—between non-game-players and game-players.
“Outside of the video game world it’s very hard to understand its appeal,” she adds. “Maybe playing can lead to dependency, though in these times we have an unhelpful tendency to talk about ‘addiction’ in relation to anything people seem to get pleasure from. But there are plenty of studies that describe the positives that come from video game-playing and these tend to get overlooked.”
Come again? Positive qualities? Recent studies—some using fMRI scans to compare gamers with non-gamers—have indicated that gaming has many positive mental health benefits, among them increased awareness and reaction times, improved working memory and increased cognitive activity. Some studies have even suggested gamers show a relatively higher IQ, perhaps a consequence of the fast information processing required of players by many games, or perhaps because it takes that processing speed to enjoy the games in the first place.
“Video games are all about problem-solving, managing resources, overcoming obstacles, developing perseverance and building your confidence to deliver objectives—which all sound to me like useful skills to be taught,” argues David Mullich, a leading video-game designer for Apple and Activision, and the first video game producer appointed by Disney. “Play offers people the chance to achieve mastery over something, and that can be hard for a young person especially to find in the rest of their life.”
He speaks of the cultural theorist Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens—game-playing man: the idea that play has always been a formative aspect of human culture; that it’s through play that we enter a parallel world of make-believe and unnecessary challenges that give insights into the real world. Video games are perhaps the most carefully engineered gateway into that parallel world we’ve yet devised.
“Of course, not even the most fervent gaming advocate would deny there are people negatively affected by gaming—in ways that resemble addiction—and that the few people it harms, it really harms. But we need to be cautious of the medicalisation of what is normal behaviour for many people in 2025,” agrees Dr Nick Ballou of the Oxford Internet Institute, UK. “We know gambling is essentially a bad thing in the way I don’t think gaming is, which is, on average, an activity people benefit from.”
It was Ballou’s breakthrough 2022 study—for the first time actually using hard data provided by gaming companies that concluded that gaming can improve well-being through the sense of autonomy, relatedness, competence and straight-forward enjoyment that they encourage. His latest study—published end of next year—examines the effectiveness of strategies used by parents use to moderate their children’s game-playing.
Therein, arguably, lies the rub. As Ballou stresses, it’s the very things that make gaming for the majority enjoyable—their motivation to achieve goals, for some games the colour, sound, spectacle and action—that make them “addictive”. “Without those traits we’d end up with digital oatmeal,” as he puts it. This isn’t to say that he doesn’t think there are ways in which gaming could be made broadly healthier—greater data transparency, for example, or less forceful monetisation of all the upgrades you might spend your hard cash on. And, he admits, he feels fairly cynical about the gaming industry’s attempts at self-regulation, to the point where he expects a legislation—maybe akin to that brought in by the Chinese government last year, controlling content and limiting hours played by minors—to be the only recourse.
But we’re dealing here, he suggests, with something of a moral panic, a backlash to a new medium which, despite now underpinning a USD300bn-a-year business, we haven’t yet got our collective heads around. Unsurprisingly, Ali Farha, a gaming industry commentator and senior game producer with Stockholm-based Star Stable Entertainment—whose games remind players it may be time to take a break—agrees. There are plenty of things we use to excess, he argues—our smartphones will even tell us just how excessively, if we care to ask them—so why pick on video games?
“My brother-in-law has zero friends in real life but connects with people he’s close to all around the world through gaming. Isn’t that positive?”
Yes, he says, games are designed to be addictive, if you want to call it that; that’s because some games are just very good. He reckons there’s maybe only a couple of genuinely good blockbuster games released each year. And, yes, some are deliberately manipulative, deploying an equivalent of the near miss effect—in gambling a loss that’s comes close enough to a win that it encourages more gambling—or “abusive and dirty” ‘dark patterns’, design elements that exploit player psychology to do things not in their best interest, be that to spend more money or play for longer.
“And I know from my own experience that you can carry bad feelings, as well as good ones, away from a game after a long spell of play,” he says, “and I say that as a games developer who understands all the triggers that I’ve been exposed to. In time I hope those psychological tricks will come to be better understood by games players, just as most supermarket shoppers know they’re being sold to when, say, a product is priced at 9.99 and not 10.”
But he insists that video games—and the culture around them—are developing so fast that the gap between the reality and the understanding of that culture in government and by other authorities is only widening. The negative perception of games that they’re left with? It’s just out of date. The stereotype of the socially-isolated teenager who never leaves his bedroom?
“He’s actually part of a huge online community, an eco-system that is hard to leave and which keeps him coming back because these people are his friends,” Farha counters. “My brother-in-law has zero friends in real life but connects with people he’s close to all around the world through gaming. Isn’t that positive? We have to face up to the idea that we live in an era in which the line between the real and the virtual is breaking down. It’s time to admit that the post-video game world is different to what went before.”
