Tag: video game addiction

Prince Harry: Fortnite Is Addictive & Irresponsible

The royal soon-to-be parent feels the video game has an alarmingly strong grip on kids these days… and perhaps should be banned.

Prince Harry spoke out against Fortnite, one of the most popular video games among kids today, during a talk with mental health experts in London. He even floated the idea that the game itself should be banned.

“That game shouldn’t be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household?” he pondered. “It’s created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It’s so irresponsible.”

He added that not taking immediate action would be a mistake.

“It’s like waiting for the damage to be done and kids turning up on your doorsteps and families being broken down,” Prince Harry said.

He feels sympathy for the parents dealing with something they might not understand.

“Parents have got their hands up – they don’t know what to do about it,” he remarked. “It’s like waiting for the damage to be done.”

Fortnite, developed by North Carolina-based company Epic Games, boasts 45 million players worldwide. Players battle each other on a large map, battle-royale style.

The game itself is free but players can purchase costumes and dances for their characters, reportedly earning Epic more than $300 million a month.

Prince Harry’s concern doesn’t grow from nothing. Some doctors are reportedly seeing a link between excessive gaming and the health of their young patients. Additionally, about 200 divorce cases in the UK from January to September of 2018 mentioned excessive gaming, including Fortnite, as a cause.

Fans and some experts are not convinced. Andrew Reid, a Scottish university researcher, says that calling games like Fortnite “addictive” needlessly stigmatizes all players and that there are positive social aspects to going online. E-sports director Sujoy Roy says believes panicked parents should take responsibility instead of pointing fingers.

“Fortnite isn’t the first hit game to have had a bad press and it won’t be the last. It’s really popular with younger gamers and, of course, parents should keep a close eye on what their kids are playing and doing online,” said Roy. “But, like many games, Fortnite is a really fun and sociable way to spend free time and, like everything, should be enjoyed responsibly.”

Prince Harry’s criticisms didn’t stop at video gaming. He also blasted social media for being “more addictive than drugs and alcohol.”

View the original article at thefix.com

8 April 2019
Nintendo President Addresses Gaming Addiction

Nintendo’s president Shuntaro Furukawa outlined the ways the company can help address gaming addiction during a recent Q&A.

As the debate about whether a dependency on video games qualifies as a legitimate medical condition continues to rage in both the gaming and mental health communities, the president of Nintendo spoke about his company’s efforts to address the issue at a recent investor meeting.

During a Q&A at a corporate policy and financial results briefing, Shuntaro Furukawa said that Nintendo has added features to its gaming products that will allow parents to reduce or limit the amount of time that children can spend with the game. Such features, said Furukawa, is “one way we can face the issues.”

Furukawa said that the core of the problem was “more about becoming overly dependent on video games than is about any issues with the games themselves,” and assured investors that Nintendo had taken measures to address the concerns. “One thing we have done as a company that creates games is to implement features that allow parents to limit the time that their children can play games.”

Such features, as well as making the public aware of them, is “one way” that the company can address concerns about gaming addiction, said Furukawa, though no additional measures were addressed during the Q&A.

Furukawa’s comments come on the heels of a fact-finding survey issued by Japan’s Ministry of Health to estimate the number of people who may be addicted to gaming as well as the impact on their lives.

According to the Japan Times, the ministry launched its investigation in late 2018 and will assemble data from medical institutions until March of 2019 at the earliest to provide statistics.

Current numbers of individuals in Japan who qualify as dependent on gaming are unknown, but the Japan Times article cited figures from Susumu Higuchi, director of the National Hospital Organization Kurihama Medical and Addiction, who said that 1,500 people annually seek treatment at the center for internet addiction, and 90% of that number were described as “gaming addicts” between the ages of 10 and 19.

In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it was including “gaming disorder” in its most recent revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) compendium, and based its decision on “reviews of available evidence” and testimony from a “consensus of experts from different disciplines.” The decision was rejected by members of the international gaming industry, which cited the need for more research into the alleged disorder before it was included in the ICD-11.

The Entertainment Software Association also cited statements by the American Medical Association (AMA) that opposed its addition to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, though as PC Games Insider noted, the AMA also expressed concern about the “behavioral, health and societal effects of video game and internet overuse.”

View the original article at thefix.com

14 February 2019
Conditions Under Addiction "Umbrella" Continue To Evolve

“Whether it’s drugs, sex, gambling or whatever, you’re looking at impulse-control disorders where people have difficulty refraining from maladaptive use,” said one expert.

Video gaming, shopping, social media use, sex—according to The Guardian, the scope of what falls into “addiction” has broadened in recent years. Rather than just including alcohol, tobacco and drugs, other substances and habits now fall under the definition.

This is because those in neuroscience have determined that the same brain chemical, dopamine, is responsible for these cravings.

“The range of what people are getting addicted to has increased,” Michael Lynskey, professor of addiction at King’s College London, told The Guardian. “For my parents’ generation, the only options were tobacco and alcohol. Now there are more drugs, including synthetics, along with commercialisation and ways – especially online – of encouraging prolonged use of different things.”

Henrietta Bowden-Jones, a consultant psychiatrist involved with the UK’s future NHS internet-addiction clinic, said many of these newer conditions are behavioral instead of physical.

“I saw [a gaming disorder patient] yesterday,” she told The Guardian, “who then went on to spending money on objects and clothes. You can somehow shift the behaviour but it’s an illness we don’t yet know enough about.”

Even so, not everyone in the field agrees that emerging disorders necessarily classify as addiction. According to The Guardian, the only two to officially make the WHO list of addictions are gambling and gaming.

However, Lynskey argued, many of these conditions do meet the standard criteria for addiction diagnosis, including the inability to stop as well as withdrawals.

“If a teenager becomes irritable when a gaming session is cut short, there’s some discussion as to whether that’s a sort of mild withdrawal,” Lynskey said.

According to the research of Terry Robinson, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, dopamine is the neurochemical behind cravings in any form.

“Whether it’s drugs, sex, gambling or whatever, you’re looking at impulse-control disorders where people have difficulty refraining from maladaptive use,” he told The Guardian. “There are certainly similarities in terms of the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms involved.”

Robinson said three factors—an environment full of craving-inducing stimuli, dosage and access—combine to increase the likelihood of problematic habits and uses.

Lynskey told The Guardian that like with anything else, there is a range when it comes to problematic behavior.

“There is a spectrum,” he said, “whether it’s alcohol or drug dependence or shopping addiction and people have become a bit happier with placing the point at which behaviour becomes problematic at a lower level of use.”

According to Bowden-Jones, there are a number of ways to treat such disorders. However, certain ones become unique because they are impossible to avoid, such as the internet.

“Younger generations will be socially cut off,” said Bowden-Jones, “and what our patients say is when they feel they’re missing out, it pushes them more toward the virtual life that they already have a problem with rather than engaging properly in their face-to-face lives.”

View the original article at thefix.com

12 January 2019
"Fortnite" Addiction Is Becoming More Prominent For Kids, Teens

One expert says games like Fortnite are similar to heroin “once you are hooked, it’s hard to get unhooked.”

Whether or not tech addiction exists is still up for debate, but parents around the country are saying that their kids and teens are no doubt addicted to the video game Fortnite, prompting some parents to seek professional help for their children.

“This game is like heroin,” Lorrine Marer, a British behavioral specialist who works with kids with game addiction, told Bloomberg. “Once you are hooked, it’s hard to get unhooked.”

One NPR listener from Florida called in saying that he understands how people get hooked on the games. The listener, who is in his 30s, is nationally-ranked in a similar video game, and said that the adrenaline hit he gets from playing could easily be addictive to kids and adults.

“A lot of these games — I mean, my worry is they get kids addicted through chemical reactions,” he said. “If you go through a 40-minute game with 100 people, and you’re one of the last five people, your heart is beating so fast, when you actually win, they crave that rush. And that’s what they’re going back for.

Video games are part of life for many kids today, so having healthy boundaries is important, said Sarah Domoff, a clinical child psychologist and psychology professor at Central Michigan University who directs the Family Health Lab, a training clinic that promotes healthy media use in adolescents.

“For a lot of these different mediums, we cannot completely avoid them,” Domoff said. “What’s really imperative is to set limits early on, help children learn how to regulate their use, but then really be involved, set guidelines around use. If problems appear to arise, prevent future issues by checking to see, is my child only playing video games to the exclusion of other activities?”

Nir Eyal, an author and tech blogger who has written about producing habit-forming tech products, said that parents need to schedule time for games and introduce healthy limits for their children.

“I think a big mistake that parents make is having technology in kids’ rooms. They don’t need to have the technology in the room. Keep it outside in a more family-focused place,” Eyal said. “And then prevent distraction with the technology. Your iPhone today comes with a functionality called ‘Screen Time’ where you can set limits around how long kids have access to certain apps, so then it’s not you telling them to get off the device, it’s the phone.”

If parents suspect their child is developing an unhealthy habit around tech, Eyal said that parents need to help them figure out why that’s happening.

“For some folks, there are underlying issues: a lack of autonomy, confidence, connectedness, and for those type of things we need to dig deeper to figure out what we’re really trying to escape with these devices,” Eyal said.

View the original article at thefix.com

7 December 2018
Fortnite Addiction Leads Sports Team To Institute Ban

The self-instituted ban was put in place so the team could focus on bonding with teammates.

The popular video game Fortnite has caused problems in some marriages and in academic settings—and now it’s being banned from some professional sports teams for the same reason.

TSN 1040 reports that members of the Vancouver Canucks, a Canadian ice hockey team, have taken matters into their own hands, with a self-instituted ban on the game while on the road.

Team Captain Bo Horvat told the radio station, “Yeah, that’s definitely a no-go on the road. No more Fortnite. No more bringing video games on the road. It’s strictly team meals, team dinners and hanging out with the guys. So we put an end to that.”

Horvat also added that there are better options for killing time when traveling, such as bonding with teammates.

“In my opinion, there’s better ways to spend time on the road, whether it’s hanging with the guys in the room or going to a movie with the guys,” Horvat said. “There’s a lot of cool cities we visit and to be cooped up in your room all night, playing Fortnite, is a waste of your time.”

Personally, Horvat says he has never played the game.

“Hopefully a lot of parents and little kids are listening right now,” he told the radio station. “I don’t play it. Nor will I ever.”

According to TechDirt, the Fortnite issue first arose for the Canucks last year when the team claimed a young player was “inactive and seeking counseling for video game addiction.”

This isn’t the first time Fortnite play has disrupted professional sports teams. According to Fortune, players from the Ontario Hockey League were asked to remove Fortnite references from their social media accounts.

Reporter Renaud Lavoie says that executives in the sports world have spoken out about the issue.

“That GM told me it’s an issue,” Lavoie told Sportsnet 590. “Before, the athletes were going to bars. Now, they’re staying in hotel rooms or at home and playing video games for hours.”

Major League Baseball has also claimed to have issues with the game, including one case of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Outside of sports, the game is causing issues in some families. In the UK, the game has been cited as a reason for divorce in 200 divorce petitions filed in the UK from January to September 2018.

A nine-year-old British girl was admitted to treatment after her Fortnite addiction kept her up all night and affected her grades and health. The girl’s parents say the tipping point came when her father found her sitting in her own urine while playing the game.

“She was so hooked to the game, she wouldn’t even go to the toilet,” the girl’s mother told the Daily Mirror.

View the original article at thefix.com

17 October 2018
Can Severe ADHD Predict Video Game Addiction?

A new study explored whether there was a connection between ADHD and video game addiction.

While debate continues to swirl about the validity of video game dependency, a new study has opined that individuals with severe symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may also be more prone to develop an equally severe dependency on video games.

The study profiled gamers, types of games, and amount of time spent playing games, and found that while a small percentage of respondents had ADHD symptoms, those individuals also exhibited tendencies toward more problematic behavior during play and longer periods of game play.

Though the study size and actual number of participants with ADHD were limited, the study authors concluded that gamers with ADHD symptoms may want to look into the risks of excessive video game play.

The study, conducted by researchers from Loma Linda University and published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, was culled from an online survey of 2,801 video game players taken between December 2013 and July 2014. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 57, with an average age of 22 and 4.3 months; 93.3% were male and 82.8% were Caucasian.

After factoring the age and gender of each participant, the researchers also measured the responses by types of game and time per week spent gaming, and used the Conners’ Adult ADHD Rating Scales, which measure the presence and degree of ADHD symptoms to determine severity of ADHD, if applicable.

Their analysis found that only 157, or 5.6% of respondents had what could be described as clinically significant ADHD symptoms.

Upon analyzing those participants’ conclusions, the study authors suggested that in regard to type of game and length of time devoted to play, the severity of ADHD symptoms were linked to severity of video game dependency. They also put forth the notion that younger players could be at greater risk to develop more problems with video game play than older players.

The authors also acknowledged that several factors posed limitations to the study’s conclusions, including the relatively small sample size number of participants with diagnosable ADHD. Lack of female participants, which accounted for only 6.7% of respondents, also posed limitations on the study’s findings.

Despite these limitations, the study authors did suggest that “individuals who report ADHD symptomatology and also identify as gamers may benefit from psychoeducation about the potential risk for problematic play.”

Take a look at these safer natural alternatives to adderall for ADHD symptom management.

View the original article at thefix.com

13 July 2018