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Study Suggests Video Games Are Addictive

Researchers find 8% show signs of addiction

April 21, 2009

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Many parents have long suspected their ‘tweens and teens were addicted to video games. Now a new study concludes that indeed, video game addiction is a real possibility.

The research was conducted by Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University and published online by the journal Psychological Science. It was based on the researcher’s extensive observation of the way young people use video games.

"Although the general public uses the word 'addiction,' clinicians often report it as pathological use," said Gentile, who is also director of research for the Minneapolis-based National Institute on Media and the Family. "This is the first study to tell us the national prevalence of pathological play among youth gamers, and it is almost 1 in 10."

Based on his study, Gentile concludes that just over eight percent of the children, ages eight to eighteen, that he surveyed display a number of signs of behavioral addiction.

Among the signs is when game playing becomes an overriding presence in a child’s life, throwing the rest of his or her life out of balance. Games begin to crowd out friends, family, and other childhood activities, becoming a destructive force.

The finding took him by surprise, he said, since he believed parents’ claims that their children were “addicted” to games was hyperbole.

Gentile, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State, created a survey of questions about video games and how they were played. Pollsters for the Harris Survey presented them to more than 1,100 children and teens and recorded their answers.

Gentile said he was looking for pathological behavior. He said he found it in the children’s answers, when they revealed spending more and more time with a controller in their hand; of spending more of their limited money on games, and even stealing money to buy them; and of feeling a sort of physical withdrawal when their playing time was curtailed.

The pathological gamers in the study played video games 24 hours per week, about twice as much as non-pathological gamers. They also were more likely to have video game systems in their bedrooms, reported having more trouble paying attention in school, received poorer grades in school, had more health problems, were more likely to feel "addicted," and even stole to support their habit.

The study also found that pathological gamers were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with attention problems such as Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

The researcher said he labeled respondents “pathological” if they displayed at least six symptoms. When the counting was over, he had found boys were four times more likely to be pathological gamers than girls.

Gentile doesn’t suggest doing away with video games, but does say parents should make sure their children’s game playing remains in balance and doesn’t crowd out other parts of their lives.

"There is still much we do not know," Gentile said. "We don't know who's most at risk, or whether this is part of a pattern of disorders. That's important because many disorders are co-morbid with others. It may be a symptom of depression, for example. And so we would want to understand that pattern of co-morbidity because that would help us know how to treat it."

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