City university researchers find gaming addiction fears ‘exaggerated’
THERE is little evidence to suggest that gaming addiction is a clinically unhealthy habit for young people, scientists claim, calling existing fears “exaggerated”.
Researchers from Cardiff University and Oxford University believe obsessive gamers are likely to have underlying frustrations and wider psychosocial functioning issues away from consoles.
After studying more than 1,000 players and their caregivers, they think excessive gaming could actually be a symptom of underlying frustrations in life, rather than a cause.
It comes after the World Health Organisation described “gaming disorder” as a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour so severe that it takes “precedence over other life interests”.
Dr Netta Weinstein, co-author of the report and senior lecturer at the University of Cardiff’s School of Psychology, said: “We urge healthcare professionals to look more closely at the underlying factors such as psychological satisfactions and everyday frustrations to understand why a minority of players feel like they must engage in gaming in an obsessive way.”
Co-author Professor Andrew Przybylski, director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, added: “If you’re playing games in a potentially unhealthy way, is this a cause for your problems or is this just another symptom? Are you blaming your runny nose for the fact you got sick?
“What we found was, if you feel like you don’t have good relationships and you don’t have a sense of choice in your life and you don’t feel confident.
“That, over and above anything that happens in the gaming world, is going to predict whether or not you have emotional problems, whether or not you have peer problems, whether or not you get into fights or you feel hyperactivity, so what we found was a whole lot of nothing basically.
“Online games, if you play them out of a sense of compulsion, that’s probably more likely to be a symptom of what’s going on, rather than a cause.”
According to the research, fewer than half of daily online gamers exhibited symptoms of obsessive gaming, with players clocking an average of three hours a day.