With all due respect to the author, this article is a spectacular exercise in fear-mongering with little in the way of substance. This is well exemplified by the sudden leap from the mental health impact of video games to a story of a 16 year old who killed his parents. Although this is used to somewhat question links between video games and violence, it makes the same mistake many have made in connecting the two — little to no discussion is bothered with about other factors and influences behind Petric’s behavior.
Mental health professionals are often the first to note that mental well-being is not something that admits of one isolated cause, but has to do with a variety of them because of both the complex ways our minds work and the complexity of our interactions with the world around us. Something similar is also often true as physical health goes.
Another reason to call this fear-mongering is because it draws together multiple studies conducted under varying conditions, focusing on varying outcomes (meaning there is usually one study cited per effect, i.e. Rickets), and attempts to generalize from them without offering next to anything in the way of standardization. What is “excessive” gaming? In one place, a time span of 2+ hours per day is given, but this ranges to everything from increased risk of heart disease to distemper. The Rally Health study, on the other hand, talks about adults clocking in an average of 11 hours of screen time per day. Another one talks about an average of 4.6 nights spent gaming per week.
To be clear, what the author is doing is more than just ‘laying out the facts’ because the facts come with pretty specific contexts and under pretty specific conditions, as they do in any social-psychological or medical studies. In all these cases, there are outliers, varying sample sizes, sample populations from different countries and different demographics, and other variables worth examining in greater detail — which this article glosses over entirely. Research that collects and examines an assortment of information and studies like this is called a meta-analysis, and a good meta-analysis will look at all of these factors and control for them. The absence of anything like this is part of what makes it so ludicrous to claim that the benefits of gaming don’t “make up for the loss of up to a decade of […] life expectancy, heart disease, cancer, depression, anxiety, and loneliness.”
This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the way risk operates, particularly across a range of different possible outcomes. But the icing on the cake for me comes from this: “Live without video games for thirty days. Unplug your console and put it in the closet out of sight. After thirty days, ask yourself if life got better or worse.”
This sounds to me like the advice of someone who came to this topic with a preconceived conclusion and fit the evidence to support it. It makes it hard to buy the line that you’re not telling anyone what to do when you’re literally telling them video games are ruining their life and suggesting they take a month long hiatus just to see if you’re right. Yet this is also a naive view of recovery if one truly thinks gaming is an addiction on par with alcohol or drug use. Tell any other addict that they just need to be informed and quit doing what they’re doing and see how successful that is.
Other people here have already stated that a lot of this is obvious and a lot of the risk is there for many, many other types of activities. This is true, but it’s worth noting that this is also what frequently goes wrong in talking about addiction and things we do in excess. It’s easy to focus on one particular or immediately apparent cause to attach blame to because we all like easy answers. Real and lasting recovery is as much about addressing the conditions that facilitate an addiction as it is about confronting the content of that addiction, though. It’s not just a way of safeguarding against relapses, but provides us with a far better context for understanding what addiction is and how to treat it. And on the other hand, knowing this stuff is also important for putting the potential for harm that something has into a sensible context that doesn’t descend into fear-mongering under the guise of ‘stating the facts.’
