Gaming also gives people something of value that they may be missing in their lives — whether a person is a smart kid craving stimulus and mental challenges, like Eric, or an adult who lacks a sense of accomplishment in life. Alok Kanojia, a Boston psychiatrist who specializes in gaming disorders and says he was once addicted to video games himself, says, “People will play 40, 60, 100 hours of World of Warcraft” — a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO, in which people cooperate and compete with each other in real time — “and they derive a sense of value out of it. You may feel like you’re no one in the real world, but you’re someone in the game.”
Just playing a lot of video games is not enough to qualify someone as an addict. But if someone is playing compulsively, despite negative consequences, or neglecting school, work or personal obligations, there might be cause for concern.
Young men are particularly susceptible to gaming addiction, although opinions differ about why that is. Steel, a former family medicine physician and licensed mental health counselor, says games “provide a really full spectrum of what young men are often looking for,” particularly bright, introverted young men, including “competition, a sense of accomplishment and mastery, fun, independence, intellectual stimulation and social interactions.”
Other experts, including Kanojia and Christakis, argue that girls are just as susceptible to tech addiction as boys are, but tend to gravitate toward social media — perhaps because game companies haven’t figured out how to target them yet. “I think it’s just a matter of time before the gaming industry figures out that, ‘Gee, we’re missing 50 percent of the market here, and why don’t we start to develop platforms that have appeal to the female gender?’ ” Christakis says.
As kids’ use of video games and other forms of digital media has risen, so have rates of depression and anxiety — twin trends that some experts believe are intertwined. Steel says that many of her own clients discover that once they stop playing games around the clock, their depression or anxiety goes away, suggesting that the addiction was causing the depression, and not the other way around. Others believe kids and young adults turn to video games as a response to underlying issues that aren’t being addressed.
