Originally published at The Atlantic

The international health community has decided that if you play video games like Fortnite or World of Warcraft a lot, you might suffer from a mental-health issue: Gaming Disorder. It’s a behavioral condition that the World Health Organization has added to the proposed 11th revision of its International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, or ICD-11, the first update to the classification since 1992.

If you play a lot of chess or Settlers of Catan on a card table in the den, don’t worry, you’re fine—according to who, gaming disorder is a digital affliction. If you play obsessively online with other people, to the detriment of other activities, that’s one possible sign of trouble. But playing offline and alone—Candy Crush, say, or even Tetris—is also a potential red flag. Generally speaking, a player would have to game excessively over a year or more for the pathology to apply, and that activity would have to produce profound negative consequences for their social, familial, or work life.

The ICD-11 categorizes gaming disorder as an addictive disorder in the same category as drug abuse. But instead of a substance—a thing one consumes—underlying the addiction, a behavior does—an activity one performs. When the ICD-11 is adopted at the World Health Assembly in May 2019, gaming disorder will join one other behavioral disorder in the classification, gambling disorder.

But wait: Can people truly be addicted to games, like they can to gambling, or to heroin? And even if they can, why is gaming the only official computer-related behavioral addiction? Why not internet or smartphone addiction? Perhaps the issue isn’t that gaming should or shouldn’t be a mental disorder, but that the public is so willing to assume negative behaviors are the result of individual mental defects, rather than more complex social, political, and economic factors.

continue reading at The Atlantic
published June 28, 2018