Does V Ideo Game Add Ict Ion Ex Ist?

The rise and popularity of computer games as a leisure phenomenon has become an ever-increasing part of many young people’s day-to-day lives. Coupled with the rise in popularity and usage, there have been a growing number of reports in the popular press about excessive use of the video games (‘‘joystick junkies’’). Although the concept of ‘‘video game addiction’’ appears to have its supporters in the popular press, there is a form of ‘‘knee-jerk skepticism’’ within the academic community—not least among those working in the field of addiction research. It is not hard to understand the skepticism. For many people, the concept of video game addiction seems far-fetched, particularly if their concepts and definitions of addiction involve the taking of drugs. Despite the predominance of drug-based definitions of addiction, there is now a growing movement that views a number of behaviors as potentially addictive (e.g., gambling, computer game playing, exercise, sex, and now the Internet). Such diversity has led to new, all encompassing definitions of what constitutes addictive behavior. Researchers have consistently argued that excessive gambling is no different from (say) alcoholism or heroin addiction in terms of the core components of addiction (i.e., salience, tolerance, withdrawal, mood modification, conflict, relapse). If one can show that a behavior such as pathological gambling can be a bona fide addiction, then there is a precedent that any behavior that can provide continuous rewards in the absence of a psychoactive substance can be potentially addictive (i.e., a behavioral as opposed to a chemical addiction). Such a precedent opens the floodgates for other excessive behaviors to be theoretically considered as potential addictions (such as video games). In addition to press reports, researchers have alleged for over twenty years that social pathologies are beginning to surface among excessive video game players. For instance, Soper and Miller (1983) claimed ‘‘video game addiction’’ was like any other behavioral addiction and consisted of a compulsive behavioral involvement, a lack of interest in other activities, association mainly with other addicts, and physical and mental symptoms when attempting to stop the behavior (e.g., the shakes). More recently, such addictions (including addictions to the Internet and slot machines) have been termed ‘‘technological addictions’’ (Griffiths, 1995a, 1996a) and have been operationally defined as nonchemical (behavioral) addictions that involve excessive human-machine interaction. They can either be passive (e.g., television) or active (e.g., computer games), and usually contain inducing and reinforcing features that may contribute to the promotion of addictive tendencies (Griffiths, 1995a). Technological addictions can thus be viewed as a subset of behavioral addictions (Marks, 1990) and feature core components of addiction first outlined by Brown (1993) and modified by Griffiths (1996b), such as salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse. Research into the area of video game addiction needs to be underpinned by three fundamental questions: (1) What is addiction? (2) Does video game addiction exist? (3) If video game addiction exists, what are people actually addicted to? The first question continues to be a much-debated question both among psychologists within the field of addiction research as well as those working in other disciplines. For many years, this author has operationally defined addictive behavior as any behavior that features all the core components of addiction. It is this author’s contention that any behavior (e.g., video game playing) that fulfils these six criteria is therefore operationally defined as an addiction. In the case of video game addiction it would be: