Gaming, addiction, and health – what’s actually the problem? An ecological momentary assessment study combined with objective behavioral data

Gaming is a highly prevalent leisure activity that is enjoyed by billions of people as a way to socialize and to find enjoyment.

Gaming disorder was recently introduced in the draft of ICD-11, and it was included in the appendix of DSM-5 as a potential new diagnosis requiring further research.

ICD-11 is scheduled to be released in January, 2022, which means that gaming disorder will then become an official addiction diagnosis. This decision has been highly criticized as premature and not being backed up by robust scientific evidence.

Researchers have pointed out that the risk of misdiagnosis is high, and that other important underlying problems might be missed, such as neuropsychiatric problems.Earlier research consists mostly of studies of poor quality, and are often a mix of non-clinical convenience samples, using self-reported symptoms or retrospective reports of time spent gaming.

Recent research has shown that such self-reports tend to be inaccurate and that participants often misunderstand the diagnostic criteria.

The lack of high-quality longitudinal studies makes it close to impossible to say anything about the negative consequences of excessive gaming, e.g., it is not known whether gaming disorder is caused by other underlying problems, or if gaming is the root cause of, e.g., depression.

The lack of high-quality studies also means that little is known about how the disorder should be assessed and treated.The goal of this project is to generate robust knowledge about the negative consequences of excessive gaming.

This will be achieved through an international collaboration and the use of state-of-the-art methods both for data collection and analysis, combined with objective data on gaming behavior.

The results from this research will offer an unique opportunity to create a rigorous foundation for future assessment tools and interventions—which will avoid wasting valuable resources when devising interventions for a new clinical phenomenon.