It's Official: 'Gaming Disorder' Is An Illness And Addiction, According To WHO

Your PUBG Mobile obsession might actually be officially considered an addiction, at least according to the World Health Organisation.

The WHO recently recognized gaming disorder as an illness, and an issue that needs to be both monitored and tackled worldwide.

The 194 members of the WHO, at the 72nd World Health Assembly on Saturday, agreed to adopt the eleventh revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, also known as ICD-11. The new version of the ICD officially includes gaming disorder as an illness. It's defined as:

"A pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behavior ('digital gaming' or 'video-gaming'), which may be online (i.e., over the internet) or offline, manifested by:

1. Impaired control over gaming (e.g., onset, frequency, intensity, duration, termination, context);

2. Increasing priority given to gaming to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests and daily activities; and

3. Continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences. The behavior pattern is of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning."

The WHO says it's made the inclusion based on experts from various disciplines around the world. It was in January last year they first began exploring the definition of gaming addiction, finalizing it later in June.

At the time, the Entertainment Software Association in the US pushed back on the move, saying it, "recklessly trivializes real mental health issues like depression and social anxiety disorder, which deserve treatment and the full attention of the medical community." The ICD-11 will go into effect on January 1, 2022.

Gaming addiction is a topic that has really come to the fore these past couple of years. Where gaming was once only the indulgence of a section of people, title like PUBG Mobile have found such unrestricted success across spectrums that it's put the industry in a new light.

The problem itself though is very nuanced. Take for instance the comparison between addiction to gaming and to chemical substances like heroine. Only one of those has obvious health effects, and causes a physical dependency that's hard to shake.

So it's easy to say the other shouldn't be called an addiction at all. After all, millions of people play games without getting addicted and exhibiting the harmful symptoms described by the WHO. However, this doesn't eliminate the fact that some people are indeed susceptible to becoming addicted to gaming, in whatever form. Why or how is something that's still being researched.

So the answer then is to treat the nuanced argument with tailored precautions. It's nonsensical to ban games for their possible addictiveness like you would a chemical drug, given that their "effects" are not universal.

Instead we need counsellors and psychologists trained in the specifics of dealing with gaming addiction and treating their underlying causes. We need to ban certain parts of games that certainly promote addictive behaviour, like skin gambling sites, loot boxes, and microtransactions for "energy" or "gems" or what have you in smartphone games.

Gaming addiction is certainly an issue, but not one like any we've seen before. So we need to approach the problem with caution and with tact.