When someone says the words “video game”, what are the first things that come to
people’s minds? Neck beard. No life. Unproductive. Mentally ill. Fun. It really depends on the
demographic one may ask, but for many people there is a negative connotation to the name.
Many people have many views of video games and their effects on people, and it is important for
us to know and understand what exactly video games can to our physical and mental health. For
many, video games are a simple escape from the world and provide many people with simple
dumb fun, but as research for the subject slowly grows, scientists are figuring out how video
games are detrimental to mental health. On the flipside—many are also figuring out the “brain-
boosting” powers of video games and their benefits to mental health. Gaming is a growing
medium that provides people with clear beneficial effects but as with most substances can also
take a toll on one’s mental health and must be enjoyed appropriately.
There has been much debate of the treatment on people, mostly adolescents, playing
video games to excess which has led many researchers to jump on the subject. Video games
have been around for quite a while, but the treatment and research started relatively recently with
many people believing there is more to the subject than just mindless fun. Some researchers have
focused on the negative effects of gaming and others have focused in on the more positive
effects. What is most widely accepted among many psychologists is that excessive gaming “isn’t the healthiest way for a teen to spend an afternoon” (Park 1). Research has come a long way since it’s conception in the 90s and has recently seen a serious shift since the WHO (World Health Organization) has defined a new illness in their newest edition of mental illness, DSM-5, as gaming disorder (Lardieri 1,2). The main demographic that “gaming disorder” has affected are boys between the ages of ten through seventeen. Previous studies in video games and their effects on adolescence have been undertaken in school, but more contemporary ways of research have been going to message boards and the web (Griffiths 1). Gaming disorder is the first universally accepted definition for the illness which means doctors can actually diagnose the patients and help seek treatment. This is a big step for the medical community as the desire to make gaming disorder more known has been a hard struggle which makes the WHO’s recognition makes it sure that people are listening—but there is much more to the debate than just a one-size-fits-all label for people who play video games.
Video games are the cause of many things; good or bad, it is important to recognize these causes as simple as they may be. Video games are usually played by people who want to take a load off or just have fun, but for many it is a pseudo-lifestyle where keeping your name in the ranks is a matter of a paycheck or no money. The main cause for video games is almost strictly limited to just playing the game; but there are also different ways to play a game. A psychologist described his research to gaming as similar to “pathological gambling” (King 1). In recent years, gaming has become a sort of disguised gambling scene—with the recent EA Battlefront scandal, many legislators are making an actual attempt at trying to outlaw this sort of behaviors by developers. A lot of current day addiction comes from the drive of obtaining items or grinding (more on that later). Many psychologists fully agree that nothing, and that means nothing, should be done or used in excess. There has been much debate on the volatile nature of games, psychologist Neil Munro in the article says “By the time they get to me […] they’re already socially isolated and unsuccessful”. Many kids are dropping out of school to pursue a career in video games and pose a clear health problem (“Much” 1). Kids are not dropping school to make games, no, they drop to play the games that are already made. Getting into the industry is not an impossible task, but becoming a high-level video game commentator/ entertainer is almost entirely based on luck. Many have done it, but herein lies one of the roots of the problem: People have become too dependent on their success at making it big that they end up sitting at home playing video games and doing their “job” but making dirt. Of course, it is possible that they can make it and become as big as PewDiePie, who makes millions a year, but most YouTubers or Twitch streamers will make under one-hundred thousand a year. While the dream of making it big is definitely possible, for young adolescents, it came come as a rude awakening when they do not see the dollars flying in.
Over the past few decades, more interest in the realm of video game research, and specifically its effect on mental health, has grown immensely since video games main inception in the 80s and to the present. Most earlier research was focused on the negative effects of video games on adolescence since the insurgence of more hard-core PC games like MMOs and RPGs. Just in case, MMOs and RPGs stand for Massive Multiplayer Online and Role-Playing Game, respectively. These games usually require the user to “grind” which is a term used to describe a gamer playing a game usually for long durations to gain some sort of item/ reward in-game. Recently developers of these games have implemented a micro-transaction system (real money for digital currency) to bypass the grinding, but there has not been any extensive research on microtransaction, so this will primarily focus on WHO’s definition of gaming disorder. The WHO defines gaming disorder as:
“A pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour (…) which may be online (…) 1) Impaired control over gaming (…) 2). Increasing priority given to gaming to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interest and daily activities and 3) continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences” (Lardieri 1).
Their words are vague, but mostly to the point and is concurrent with what researched have been pin pointing as the problem. Prominent researcher and psychologist for this study Mark Griffiths has been describing the same effects on people since his initial research in the early 2000s-10s. Griffiths in his paper titled “Advice for Parents and teachers” said that addiction is reinforcement over and over and “If there (is not) […] detrimental effects […] it is not an addiction” (Advice 1). This is just reinforcement about most substance abuse, regulation. But what happens if it has detrimental effects? Many suggest that online gaming is currently the biggest topic for mental health research and for good reason, as said earlier, one of the biggest played genres is mainly focused on online play (Griffiths 2). Griffiths has also said that it depends on the gamer and how serious they are about video games (Advice 1, 2). There is a substantial amount of evidence proving the volatility of excessive gaming, and itself as a subject could be its own paper, but that is it—it is in excess. With that, it is also apparent that gaming could be beneficial to the brain.
Video games have been seen as a mindless form of entertainment that does not provide any benefits to the mind, but what if there really were benefits to playing games such as cognition and addiction therapy. A study in the late 1990s at the University of Rochester was conducted to answer and explore this answer. What they found was extraordinary, showing that video games did in fact have its benefits on the brain. Their hypothesis was that perhaps the adult brain could “rewire itself” and grow whole new brain cells in a process called “neuroplasticity”. (Bavelier 1). Sounds crazy, but what they found seemed to prove what they sought after and showed positive results. One of the main researchers, Green, started by testing their friends and showed heightened levels of cognition to a patient who did not play any video games. What was the difference? It was determined that the “friend group” had one key trait: They all played a certain First-Person Shooter called “Team Fortress 2” (Bavelier 1-2). After more and more research, Green and his colleagues found that some genres of games have certain benefits to certain types of cognition, for example action games showed a better grasp on visual details. But video games do not just have benefits to cognition, it also serves as a tool for therapy.
Many professors from Brown University in their Child and Adolescent Behavior Letter highlight the therapeutically effects of video games and more specifically Virtual Reality. It is now accepted for a tool for people with real disorders and addictions and “useful to mental health” (Hadley 2). Wendy Hadley, Ph.D, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown uses the method that sets up a real life situation to have them interact with the situation around them and then apply it to the real world. The environment is described as a “controlled environment” because the researcher is allowed to modify and tweak the situation according to the patient to provide a more personal and efficient system to therapy than other options available in the virtual realm. In one instance, a “virtual café” is set up for people with adolescents who have “autistic spectrum disorders” and “PTSD” to have them gain certain social skills to be then applied to real life (Hadley 3). VR is not for everyone though, and has to be controlled—some suggest that violent VR can have some real detrimental effects on the brain and may “accelerate aggression” (Rosenblum 2). As there is a lot of research to prove that video games have a negative, there has also been research on the positive effects of video games—but it has its caveats. Again, it is important to recognize the positives and the negatives of playing video games and making sure to keep personal boundaries in order to retain mental sanity. With most of the demographic of people who have gaming disorder to be adolescents, there seems to be a trend of mishaps leading to young boys getting gaming disorder.
Personal Analysis
Video games are an extraordinary medium—and has grown to something bigger than originally expected when it was originally conceived. Video games are now a multi-million-dollar business involving shareholders and various other serious business practices. The mass industrialization of the industry has left many developers to push their games heavily to boost profits. This has led many adolescents asking their moms for their credit cards to buy these games. Many parents do not know what they are getting their child into, whatever makes their child happy… Right? Well the main problem that needs to be fixed is the lack of regulation. Of course, video game addiction is not limited to adolescents, but let us admit it, adolescents are not the brightest sometimes especially when it comes to the regulation of something. Griffith in his advice for parents says that video games do in fact have quite positive outcomes, but regulation is the biggest proponent for the problem that has arisen (Advice 3). I am not a strong advocate for people saying that violent media causes violence, because in many cases it acts as therapy for people but for distressed kids they will act upon and potentially shoot up a school. (Park 1; Rosenblum (1-2). It’s unfortunate, but Japan produces some of the most violent media in the world, but their violence rate is not high. Again, it all boils down to regulation. Many kids are able to be away with a lot of stuff because of the lack of regulation and discipline—and this does not just apply for video games, it’s everything. But in video games case, we have many kids playing video games for hours and hours on end and play until 1 AM and takes a heavy toll on mental health.
Excessive video gaming is a problem. Children (and adults) play for hours on end and that is usually classified as an addiction. Addiction runs rampant in the world, everyone, it seems, is addicted to something. Many people joke about being addicted to Netflix, or social media, or something as normal as eating—but they are addictions nonetheless. Parents seem to not know what to do when their child gets addicted to something because they don’t know what to do. Is it appropriate to go and talk to a therapist about getting someone’s internet addiction treated? It seems absurd, something so benign and inoffensive as Netflix to be a psychological detriment to our brains, but it is entirely possible. With the boom in the internet, it feels like we have such an astronomical thing on our hands. Video games have fallen in this sub-category and has been argued if it should be a “separate disorder” (Griffiths 2). Where researchers have failed is finding the sweet spot on how to treat gaming disorder. The researchers, I have found to discover, do not understand video games at all. The way they talk about them in their papers do not make any sense when you actually play the game. There is a clear disconnect between the researcher and the “patient” and that is a lack of understanding. That lack of understanding unfortunately translates when talking about the diseases itself, sure many people who having gaming disorder have it bad, but how do you know if it is bad? I know many people who play their fair share of video games, but I would not say they have gaming disorder, so how are researchers handling this conundrum? They do not fully understand gamers and gamers do not fully understand them, so the problem is not only the lack of regulation, but a lack of understanding as well and the only way to fix that is to simply do more research on video games and gamers to make more solid conclusions on what and who they are.
It is apparent that regulation is the solution, so the real question becomes “How can we regulate the amount of time kids play and what they play”. Some parents think it is a hard task, but it really is not. Many companies that create the consoles put some sort of Parental Controls on the device. This allows the parent to regulate the amount of time the child plays or what they play. Many parents are concerned on the content of the games especially since kids can just ask for the parent’s credit card and could get any game they want. Again, the parental controls allow for the parents to set what games the kids could play. Although rating of the game is important to this, the main concern on gaming disorder is the chronic behavior of the player and the effects it has on their life—violent media is an arguable subject and does not seem to have a rooted answer or conclusion, so for the sake of my paper we will focus on the amount of time. It is widely accepted that playing for long amounts of time and getting quite literally addicted to playing video games.
The connotation for the word video game usually revolves around something like mindless or a waste of time, but there are actual benefits (and downfalls) to video games. The medium has been highly scrutinized by modern media, but so are a lot of things. There is always a controversial piece of entertainment with times: Rap in the 80s, Funk in the 70s, even Jazz in the 20s it seems that they always add up to a cultural revolution whether or not it was widely accepted by the public. In the case of video games, parents and authorities are concerned on whether or not video games can actually be detrimental to one’s health, and as observed it very well could be, but with regulation and control it is also apparent that it could help people with mental illnesses and simple cognition. Video games have and always will innovate the entertainment medium, with such creators like Hideo Kojima making flashy high-budget games with Hollywood stars or Neil Druckman pushing the envelope narratively and collaborating with high profile writers to work on one of the most anticipated sequels of all time, The Last of Us Part II. Of course, video games have their ups and its downs, but with a little regulation and control over how we as a society, it broods a beautiful art form that should be welcomed and cherished while simultaneously accepting the negative outcomes if handled incorrectly.