Video games addiction

VIDEO GAMES ADDICTION

Today, online games are incredibly widespread all over the world. A lot of people, especially teenagers and young adults, enjoy playing video games for hours and hours without taking care of what is going on around them. The pandemic caused social distancing, and everybody must be at home with no activities outside, so video games became a good distraction for loneliness and isolation, which may influence increased consumption. The problem is that the games are or are not addictive. Do they help people in their daily life?¬ Those are great big questions to answer.

There are wrong beliefs and misunderstandings about video games. Some people believed that these online programs are completely negative, promoting violent behaviors, chauvinism, and social isolation among young people. Other viewpoints said that video games can be an important device for education and individual development, letting people perform the roles of great and powerful heroes. However, video games have both positive and negative attributes, and the effect of playing games often depends on the player’s feelings toward games and life in general.

Videogame addiction is a type of dysfunctional behavior, it focuses on being a pattern of continuous or recurrent behaviors that change the functionality of the person in family, social, personal, and occupational aspects. According to a study by the World Health Organization (WHO), the percentage of people affected by video game addiction and uncontrolled use is between 1% and 10%. Another study by Claire McCarthy in 6 years of research about videogame addiction, found that 10% of adolescents suffer from videogame addiction. They have present symptoms of spending extended periods playing video games, leaving, and quitting daily activities such as homework at school, exercises, or even lack of relationship with family or friends. They called it gaming disorder and internet gaming disorder IGD. The researcher Sarah M. Coyne studied 385 teenagers for 6 years and during that time, 10% of the video gamers showed pathological disorders. When they grew older, they showed elevated levels of depression, anxiety, aggression, and the use of cell phones for prolonged periods.

Most of the arguments against video game addiction are that excessive gameplay is a symptom of a strong problem, or the video game addiction appears from panic about innovative technologies from research and clinical data and no clear differences between a hobby and addiction for video games. The director at the Oxford Internet Institute said that people enjoy video games like fishing, running and they are not pathologies. But, for the American Psychological Association playing video games for about 30 minutes a day can improve the lives of people in solving real problems by learning from mistakes, trying different things, learning when to give up, facing a lot of different problems.

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