Video gaming disorder is a disease? Sounds like cultural bias

Can’t peel yourself away from the NBA 2K tournament at Full Sail University this weekend? Then you might be on the road toward a gaming addiction, says the World Health Organization.

For the first time in history, a medical governing body has classified video gaming disorder as a disease. Video game addiction has been talked about as a potential disease for almost 30 years, but the WHO voted to adopt this language last month.

Frankly, this entire discussion reeks of cultural bias toward a younger generation that enjoys virtual entertainment.

For starters, the symptoms of this disease are pretty vague.

■ Impaired control over gaming

■ Increased priority to gaming over other life interests

■ Escalation of gaming despite negative consequences

The problem with this description is that you could substitute gaming for any behavioral addiction plaguing society, like online shopping, exercise or the most pervasive condition today, cell phone attachment.

So why is gaming being singled out? Mental health disorders like bipolar, schizophrenia or post-traumatic stress, are real and serious. That is in part why I take issue with labeling someone who spends too much time gaming with a mental health disease.

And what if we applied this logic to other periods of time?

In the 1940s, medical experts believed it was possible to suffer from radio addiction. A 1941 Journal of Pediatrics study actually referenced a group of children as “radio addicts” in a study about the effects of horror films and radio. The study defined addiction as a medical condition by “giving oneself to a habitforming practice” that is difficult to break.

Radio addiction was eventually cured by a modern-day medicine, television. Of course, radio addicts became television addicts and television addicts become computer addicts and computer addicts became gamer addicts and now all addicts are some version of internet addicts.

“Unlike depression, which is at any time point in history, gaming disorder can only happen now,” said Chris Ferguson, a professor of psychology for Stetson University. “Whenever a mental illness needs to be rooted to a particular historical period, that for me is a red flag that they might have conceptualized this thing wrong.”

The Society for Media Psychology and Technology, a division of the American Psychological Association, pushed back against the WHO’s decision to classify video gaming order because of the lack of clear research.

The organization, which Ferguson chairs, said the clinical research is unstable and gamers who experience symptoms of a disorder could arise from other mental health disorders the individual is already suffering from like depression or anxiety.

Gaming disorder is still a source of debate among medical experts. While the Society for Media Psychology and Technology opposes the WHO’s classification, the American Psychiatric Association hasn’t committed to calling the excessive gaming a disorder.

Researchers who have studied the topic so far found that 0.3 to 1.0 percent of the general population might qualify for potential diagnoses of internet gaming disorder. That percentage would apply to the more than 2 billion people who play games across the world, according to the games and esports analytics research firm Newzoo.

It’s entirely possible that millions of people struggling to limit their interaction with games, but more research seems necessary before moving to the disorder phase.

Here is what we do know. A lot of people enjoy gaming and many are finding successful careers in this multi-billion dollar industry.

Some people are even finding wildly lucrative careers on live streaming platforms for gamers like Twitch. People like 26-year-old Twitch mogul Tyler Blevins. Better known to his 11 million followers by an alias, Ninja, he makes roughly $500,000 dollars a month because sponsors and gamers pay to watch him narrate online gaming for about 12 hours a day.

Weird, I know.

An obsessive culture? Possibly.

But no more obsessive than a sports culture where college basketball fans miss work hours every March to monitor their NCAA tournament brackets, and football fans call into work sick after Super Bowl Sunday.

By the way, missing work to watch or recover from a sporting event meets at least two of the nine proposed symptoms by the American Psychiatric Association for gaming disorder; preoccupation with gaming and risk or jeopardized a job due to gaming.

We call these people enthusiastic fans. In the gaming world now, we call this addiction.

But there’s little need for hand-wringing. The world is changing so quickly that I’m sure we’ll have a new addiction to worry about next year.