Study Claims 8.5% of Young Gamers "Pathologically Addicted" 296
schnucki brings word of new research which claims roughly one in twelve American children between the ages of eight and 18 are "pathologically addicted" to video games. The study, conducted by Douglas Gentile, director of the National Institute on Media and the Family at Iowa State University, says that "pathological status was a significant predictor of poorer school performance even after controlling for sex, age, and weekly amount of video-game play." However, Professor Cheryl Olson, who has conducted her own research into video game use, questioned Gentile's methodology, saying, "The author is repurposing questions used to assess problem gambling in adults; however, lying to your spouse about blowing the rent money on gambling is a very different matter from fibbing to your mom about whether you played video games instead of starting your homework."
What are these video games? (Score:4, Informative)
'Video games' is an extremely broad category, especially when talking about addiction. The differences between a mmorpg, a fps with no artificial progress indicator, and a puzzle game need to be noted.
Most of these studies just seem to take a few random popular titles and assume the results apply to all.
Re:pathological? (Score:4, Informative)
"Pathologically" would mean in this context, like in most health contexts, "having a detrimental effect on your quality of life".
Saying that something is an 'illness' depends entirely on the severity. For instance, my back isn't perfectly straight - I have a very slight scoliosis. But it has had zero impact on my life and its quality. So it's not something you would ever bother to treat medically, even if it's not 'normal'.
People tend to think of medicine in binary terms, like with infectious diseases: Either you're infected or not. But that's not a realistic way to view medicine, and in particular, it fails completely when it comes to mental disorders.
So the bottom line about whether a gaming 'addiction' is a 'pathological' addiction or not, is dependent on whether it's actually an addiction, proper. Does the person have control over it? If they don't, then it's pretty obvious that's a negative for their quality-of-life.
For the same reasons, it'd also be stupid to define a gaming addiction in simplistic terms as "hours played", etc. And I'm skeptical of this particular study; the diagnostic criteria seem pretty simplistic. You can't really evaluate whether someone is addicted or not just from a few survey-type questions. I doubt any practicing psychiatrist would, either.
But I don't see any reason to doubt the actual idea that computer-gaming addiction exists. Heck, I read about a lady who lost her life to Bingo. Yes.. *Bingo*.
Re:Ya, totally impartial.... (Score:5, Informative)
From Wiki:
"It is a nonsectarian advocacy group which seeks to monitor mass media for content that it deems is harmful to children and families."
Define "harmful to children and families" and I might let this one slide.
"The 2005 MediaWise Video Game Report Card criticized the Entertainment Software Rating Board's system of rating video games for age-appropriate conduct in its annual series of report cards, noting the scarcity of "Adults-Only" rated games and citing the perceived inadequacy in retailer enforcement."
They forget to mention that AO games would not be sold in stores by any major retailer. If a game can not be sold then it will not be made.
"In 2005 the NIMF made the controversial claim that the video game industry was promoting cannibalism after analyzing stills and video clips from a zombie-themed game titled Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse."
How is playing a zombie and doing zombie things like eating humans promoting cannibalism?
I'm sure I could find more if I tried. Also TFS states:
""The author is repurposing questions used to assess problem gambling in adults; however, lying to your spouse about blowing the rent money on gambling is a very different matter from fibbing to your mom about whether you played video games instead of starting your homework.""
Re:Ya, totally impartial.... (Score:2, Informative)
How do you infer bias? Because it has the word "Family" in the name?
No, because they're a well-known group [wikipedia.org] and we've heard all their shit before.