Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 236 posts

Re: ‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

#61

Post by Tycho »

loupeabody wrote: post #57
Tycho wrote: post #53

Video games are fine for some people, but for nerd-like personalities they present far too great a temptation to supplant real life goal obtainment with virtual status/achievement. I think its helpful to make people aware of this tendency, and unhelpful to wave it away with a comparison to some more widespread non-nerd past-time like watching TV or sports.

How precisely do you define "nerd-like" personalities and what is it about them that is susceptible to having a "gaming disorder"? I feel like there's not much that would separate a gaming disorder from addictive behavior in general. So much so, actually, that to grant a special term for a video game related illness comes off as a little ridiculous.

The essence of nerdiness is the elevation of the abstract at the expense of what's real, including the elevation of accomplishment in abstract domains (eg. video games) at the expense of developing social skills and progressing towards real life milestones, and the misunderstanding of social relations and social status owing to incorrect, reality-starved mental models. Often manifests itself in things like unwelcome pedantry.

As another poster (always_good) observes, there is a huge observable difference between video game addicts and substance abusers. I would not expect nerds to be substance abusers, and I would not expect substance abusers to be video game addicts, but everything about video games, in their construction of alternative realities and virtual goals and online communities, is like a glove tailored to the hand of nerd-dom.

Re: ‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

#62

Post by bcheung »

loupeabody wrote: post #57
Tycho wrote: post #53

Video games are fine for some people, but for nerd-like personalities they present far too great a temptation to supplant real life goal obtainment with virtual status/achievement. I think its helpful to make people aware of this tendency, and unhelpful to wave it away with a comparison to some more widespread non-nerd past-time like watching TV or sports.

How precisely do you define "nerd-like" personalities and what is it about them that is susceptible to having a "gaming disorder"? I feel like there's not much that would separate a gaming disorder from addictive behavior in general. So much so, actually, that to grant a special term for a video game related illness comes off as a little ridiculous.

Agreed. It's too arbitrary. The pattern of addiction is the same. The method of delivery doesn't matter.

In terms of marketing and supporting affected gamers, sure. But from a medical perspective, it's as arbitrary as classifying behaviors on Monday as somehow being qualitatively different from behaviors on Tuesday.

Re: ‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

#63

Post by Karunamon »

Micrococonut wrote: post #49
Karunamon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of well poisoning, don’t you think? That one can’t call shenanigans without supposedly being affected?

True thanks for pointing that out. I'm addressing this as a self identified video game addict. I feel that pull to play in my brain every day. I just try to not live in denial telling myself that spending all my time gaming is a healthy and constructive way to spend my time. I've seen this behavior in my peers and in myself. Almost always among the addicts like myself you get two responses. "Yea no doubt lmao" or an…

That’s fair, but at the same time, nobody can diagnose addiction over the internet. There’s just too much critical context missing.

On top of that, as someone who has gaming as their primary hobby, seeing questionable armchair diagnosis brings back to memory shades of the anti-game hysteria that plagued the late 80s into the 90s. The feeling is decidedly “oh god not this shit again”. I’d be willing to wager a lot of the “Nintendo generation” that grew up on games is going to have a visceral reaction to what appears at first glance to be another attempt at demonizing them and what they do for fun, let alone the developers.

Put another way, if Tetris had been released today, I’d expect people to start banging on about addiction and how the developers are doing something wrong by releasing something so "adddictive". That deeply annoys me.

Re: ‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

#64

Post by loupeabody »

Tycho wrote: post #61
loupeabody wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How precisely do you define "nerd-like" personalities and what is it about them that is susceptible to having a "gaming disorder"? I feel like there's not much that would separate a gaming disorder from addictive behavior in general. So much so, actually, that to grant a special term for a video game related illness comes off as a little ridiculous.

The essence of nerdiness is the elevation of the abstract at the expense of what's real, including the elevation of accomplishment in abstract domains (eg. video games) at the expense of developing social skills and progressing towards real life milestones, and the misunderstanding of social relations and social status owing to incorrect, reality-starved mental models. Often manifests itself in things like unwelcome…

> Often manifests itself in things like unwelcome pedantry.

You callin me a nerd, Tycho?

So, broadly, I can agree that a tendency towards escapism is what would make someone develop a "gaming disorder". And perhaps video games are the pinnacle of what our culture can offer as the richest form of escapism.

But I still don't think that's enough to draw a categorical line between the vices through which escapist tendencies become pathologized. It seems to me the solution to the mentation of escapism is to reinforce what you appeal to as "anti-nerdiness": pursuing meaning in a world you can (and do) fully occupy with the senses. And I agree there too.

Noting the bit at the end of the article about how terribly few people manifest a "gaming disorder" is what I'm not pleased to hear. Calling it a "gaming" disorder makes it seem like if you get rid of games, you've solved the problem. But obviously that's not necessarily the case, and so I think it's a useless distinction which potentially obscures the real issue.

If the WHO is making an indictment against the entertainment industry to formally warn against the ethical risks of making games which exploit escapist tendencies, that's fine. But I don't think there's actually much of a problem here that couldn't already be meaningfully identified as an addictive tendency.

Re: ‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

#66

Post by ekianjo »

Micrococonut wrote: post #48
nickjj wrote: post #18

All 3 of the article's points could be applied to any hobby / passion driven profession. Next up... Guitar disorder Karate disorder Baseball disorder Fast forward 10 years... Someone coins the term "hobby disorder" after detecting numerous patterns of people wasting their life away on doing things they enjoy. Fast forward 20 years... Being passionate about anything is a thing of the past. Everyone works a corporate j…

This is really funny. How much have you "innovated" while gaming? You are living under the thumb of entertainment media already. You're trapped in your time waster instead of innovating.

Everything is a time waster until you know, investments pays off. Playing an instrument is a time waster until it turns into something you can market. Its difficult to judge future benefits of current actions.

Re: ‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

#67

Post by gehwartzen »

contravariant wrote: post #55
kingbirdy wrote: post #2

I'm curious why this needs its own definition, rather than being part of a larger "addiction disorder".

For what it's worth "Gaming" is broad enough to capture pretty much any 'non-chemical' activity that can be addicting. There's a somewhat grey area between "Gaming" and "Gambling", but I think it's fair to consider "Gambling" a subset of "Gaming" where the games actually pay out money (or something of monetary value). This probably doesn't match the WHO definition though.

There are people that spend most of their available hours staring at screens of graphs while trading various tokens in order to achieve the highest score... but of course we call them professionals not addicts.

Re: ‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

#68

Post by creep »

ekianjo wrote: post #9
oligopoly wrote: post #4

Next up Social Media Disorder (SMD), Internet Disorder.. I'd be surprised if the latter isn't a thing already

i expect Wikipedia Disorder as well for people who are too curious and read too much. So basically any deviation from the normal boring person is a disorder,says the thought police.

Yes, and anyone looking for help in managing their lives will get slapped with any such term and made to feel like deviants.

I've been "diagnosed" with all sorts of things. ADHD, ODD (obsessive defiance disorder), asperger's (ASD 1), GAD (generalized anxiety disorder), and I'm sure I qualify for others. The thing is, there was always this search like that to look for what was the ultimate cause for my distress. And then, after all that searching, nothing came of it because I grew as a person. And I think there's a small thing there, which is that if you have a diagnosis, you have an excuse, and oh, you'll have loads of friends with similar diagnoses who will encourage you to whine and wallow in it and make excuses, and there will even be competition as to who is the worse for it.

I think the system is very wrong.

Re: ‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

#69

Post by toomanybeersies »

mmirate wrote: post #24
brandonjm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the same organisation that seems to care so much about giving every little addiction it's own name also lumps every variety of autism under the same umbrella term.

Each addiction clearly and openly differs in the object of addiction. Whereas, with autisms, we don't yet know how to analyze symptoms well enough for there to be a bijection between set-of-symptoms and underlying-autism-variant; indeed, we can barely even separate autism's causes and effects, if at all.

Is video game addiction fundamentally different from gambling addiction?

Especially when comparing video poker machines, it's just like a video game.

Re: ‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization

#70

Post by noobermin »

Tycho wrote: post #61
loupeabody wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How precisely do you define "nerd-like" personalities and what is it about them that is susceptible to having a "gaming disorder"? I feel like there's not much that would separate a gaming disorder from addictive behavior in general. So much so, actually, that to grant a special term for a video game related illness comes off as a little ridiculous.

The essence of nerdiness is the elevation of the abstract at the expense of what's real, including the elevation of accomplishment in abstract domains (eg. video games) at the expense of developing social skills and progressing towards real life milestones, and the misunderstanding of social relations and social status owing to incorrect, reality-starved mental models. Often manifests itself in things like unwelcome…

Sounds like artists and philosophers and academics fall into your category of nerdiness.
Post reply on HN