New Mental Disorder: Video-Game Addiction
The New Scientist reports that doctors at a debate at the AMA “backed away from a controversial proposal to designate video-game addiction as a mental disorder akin to alcoholism on Sunday, saying psychiatrists should study the issue further.”
The problem with designating video-game addiction as a mental disorder is that the definition of video game is getting rather fuzzy. As I’ve said before, many of the most popular online applications and Web media, such as YouTube, employ many of the core attributes that make games more fun, compelling and addictive — what Ami Jo Kim, creative director at ShuffleBrain and holder of a Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscienc, calls game mechanics.
So if you’re going to designate video-game addiction a mental disorder, then you’d better be prepared to tackle the much broader area known as the Internet, which, in many ways, is manifesting into a giant, distributed video game itself.
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