With the World Health Organization still pushing for gaming addiction to be classified as a mental disorder in the upcoming ICD-11 revision and various industry organizations trying to stand their ground against this decision, the latest report by Qutee (whose methodology for the survey has been detailed at the end of the article) is particularly timely.
51% of the voters have replied that gaming addiction shouldn’t be lumped together with alcohol, gambling or drug addictions. 26% of the pool was unsure about this topic, while 23% believed that indeed, gaming addiction is as bad as the aforementioned ones.
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Surveyed gamers were far more unified in their judgment of the media’s repeated obsession with linking games and violence. 93% of them said that this obsession is entirely unjustified, 4% was unsure and only 3% thought it’s justified.
Moving onto other topics, 89% of gamers feel gaming is beneficial to society and almost two-thirds have made up to five friends through gaming; a further 37% say they have made more than five.
44% of the participants said that the most important benefit of gaming is improved emotional well-being; over 30% of gamers believe gaming improves cognitive skills and problem-solving.
Over one-third said that gaming has inspired future careers and hobbies outside of
IT/development, including history, art and science.
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95% of the 835 gamers who participated were aged between 18 and 34, with 51% living in the US, 19% in the UK, and the remaining 30% living in other parts of the world.
The Gaming and You data discussion generated over 4.5k poll votes and 886 comments. 654 sentiments were recorded across 251 discussion topics, with some of the most popular issues discussed being community, stress, skills, friends, hobbies, enjoyment, and problems.
HeavyDT on June 22nd, 2018 at 18:02 UTC »
Gaming addiction is absolutely real. Humans can become addicted to just about anything and games are actually a no brainer since they are made to be entertaining and rewarding to keep the player interested. The violence link is absolutely BS though. If games cause violence the so does everything else and there would be a dozen massacres each day.
ColdAsHeaven on June 22nd, 2018 at 17:50 UTC »
Gaming addiction is 100% a real thing.
Gaming being linked with Violence is questionable at best. There's been studies saying there's a link and studies saying there isn't a link. It all depends on which study you try and cite and from when it was done.
colkcolkcolk on June 22nd, 2018 at 17:28 UTC »
Eh gaming addiction is pretty real. Especially online games— the way that games are structured hits all the right spots in our reward system to bring us back to playing. And gaming has become a more visceral experience than gambling could ever be because of how far technology has come. You can sign onto overwatch and be paired with 11 players around the world within 2 minutes and even communicate via voice chat.
And something as simple as getting a headshot dink as hanzo is extremely rewarding, and are frequent, bringing players back for more. Not much in real life can emulate that kind of instant gratification.