Children Addicted to Gaming - News Report - Your thoughts?

[Master_Craig]

Not trying to sound funny or weird but in all seriousness C_nate, you sound like a pretty damn awesome dad.

 

[Sightless]

Yes, I was trying to say there's a distinction to be made beween the bio-neuro-psycho- science of what's going on, and the social understanding of how we perceive it. You're right that we don't have a consensus of what 'addiction' means, but we do have quite a bit of understanding of some particular types of activity that people call addiction. Not all measures are comprehensive or even reliable, but, for example, substance abuse in psychological dependency is relatively easy to self-diagnose, and the mechanisms at work are fairly well understood. Behavioural addiction, on the other hand, is a lot harder to assess and treat, but seem to rely on the same underlying systems of emotional reinforcement and reward pathways. We understand this regardless of whether or not you call it addiction, or whether you think it's good or bad.

Master_Craig, yes, that sounds good.