Studies on Gaming Addiction?

twigles asks: "Every gamer I know worthy of the title has logged 8+ hours straight on their favorite game. But I've seen several people become so hopelessly addicted to gaming that they cease to function in the real world. After having witnessed two married couples deal with alcoholism (one made it, one didn't) the symptoms are strikingly similar. Has anyone actually dealt with this with any success? I've seen occasional articles mention this problem, but are there any studies?"

Comments

Re:Online activities are perfectly legitimate.

[Rhovanion]

I think this is a perfectly valid point. But I'm not sure it's the whole story.

For a lot of people, television and video games are fairly equivalent- i.e. you essentially make the point 'video games are the television of our generation.' We'd rather play video games than watch television, presumably because we find them more interesting and stimulating.

Some people, however, react to video games in ways they'd never react to television. Because video games are interactive, certain psysiological positive-feedback loops can more easily come into existence and create a real addiction. I'm not saying that no one can be addicted to television, but video games press more "psysiological buttons" than television and hence can lead to addiction in a larger subset of the population. Games like WoW press quite a few such buttons.

I've seen video game addiction. For those who are susceptible to it, it's as real as alcoholism or even cocaine addiction.

I'm not suggesting you're saying this, but for folks replying to my post, anecdotal evidence that "I've never been addicted to video games, and I play a lot of them, so video game addiction isn't real" isn't a valid argument.