Is Gaming Addiction a Symptom of an Unhappy Life? A Study Explanation

The idea of gaming as a diagnosable addiction has sparked years of debate. A prominent debate within gaming addiction is the origin point for addictive gaming. While some argue that addictive components of games gradually encourage gaming addiction (James & Tunney, 2017), others argue that excessive gaming provides a distraction for those living unhappy and unsatisfying lives (Stavropoulos et al., 2017).

The second argument was researched in a recently-published study titled ‘Investigating the Motivational and Psychosocial Dynamics of Dysregulated Gaming: Evidence From a Preregistered Cohort Study’. While this study is available for everyone to read, I appreciate that its contents can be difficult to understand for non-academics. As I am committed to keeping you as educated as possible, I will be explaining this study and its findings in language that is easy to understand. Please note that I will be using the terminology of the authors and referring to addictive and disruptive levels of gaming as ‘dysregulated gaming’.

As usual, there will be a summary at the end if you do not wish to read everything. Thank you and please enjoy!

Introduction

The authors state that research on dysregulated gaming typically explores two topics: how common dysregulated gaming is, and how accurate questionnaires are at measuring it. I can’t disagree with this statement as I found this a lot when exploring dysregulated gaming. However, this means that due to lack of research attention, our understanding of why people game in disruptive amounts is limited.

Using the framework of self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000), it is argued that people engage in dysregulated gaming for three reasons: to feel competent and good at something, to feel in control of their actions, and to feel connected to others. While excessive gaming could be used to meet psychological needs such as social interaction, it could also be triggered by life frustrations. For example, if you feel powerless and not in control of your life, using a character in an MMO decked in gear symbolic of your in-game achievements can help you feel better.

The authors wish to explore the relationship between psychological needs, psychological frustrations, mental health and dysregulated gaming in a sample of adolescents. This is important as research conducted on young people for this topic is lacking, despite the expectation that young people will receive the most diagnoses for a gaming addiction (APA, 2013). In this study, five hypotheses were tested:

Those with met psychological needs (i.e. feel loved, capable and in control) will have lower dysregulated gaming.
Those who experience psychological frustrations (i.e. feel unloved, insecure and lack control) will have higher dysregulated gaming.
Adolescents would be more likely to experience dysregulated gaming if games helped them overcome their frustrations (e.g. helped them connect socially).
Those who experience psychological frustrations will have poorer mental health.
Dysregulated gaming will have an effect on the relationship between psychological frustrations and mental health.

How the Study was Conducted

1,004 14-15 year olds (54% male, 92% white) were recruited from England, Scotland and Wales to participate in an online survey. This survey included questions on mental health, gaming activity, dysregulated gaming, psychological needs and frustrations, and psychological needs within games. How each category was measured will be described below:

Mental health: This was assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman et al., 2000), an incredibly common and valid method of measuring mental health. The SDQ examines two facets of mental health: internalising problems (social and emotional difficulties) and externalising problems (hyperactivity and conduct problems).

It is interesting to note that adolescents’ mental health was reported via a parent/caregiver while the adolescent was absent from the room. This will be discussed more in the discussion section.

Gaming activity: Adolescents were asked whether they played video games and how long they played for. Those who played video games were asked to name the games they played the most in the past month. They were also asked how often they played these games and whether they played these games online with others. 525 participants (52%) stated that they played an online game with others. This information was used for the next section.

Dysregulated gaming: Adolescents who had played an online game answered nine questions which mirror the proposed diagnostic criteria for Internet Gaming Disorder. Questions include: ‘I feel that I should play less but couldn’t’ and ‘I risked friends or opportunities due to games’.

This is where we get a little statistical. When we’re giving out questionnaires, we need to make sure that the questionnaire accurately measures what it intends to measure. To do this, we use what’s called Cronbach’s alpha. The closer the alpha value (α) is to one, the more reliable the questionnaire is at measuring what it intends to measure.

The alpha value for the dysregulated gaming questionnaire was 0.64. Alpha values of 0.8 and above are recommended as an indicator of a reliable questionnaire (DeVellis, 2012). This suggests that there is some ‘noise’ in the questionnaire that measures something other than dysregulated gaming. All other alpha values in this study exceeded 0.8.

Psychological needs and frustrations: Adolescents were asked 12 questions on psychological needs and 12 on psychological frustrations (Chen et al., 2015). Examples of needs questions include: ‘I feel that my decisions reflect what I really want’, ‘I feel close and connected with other people who are important to me’, and ‘I feel confident that I can do things well’. Examples of frustrations questions include: ‘I feel pressured to do too many things’, ‘I feel excluded from the group I want to belong to’, and ‘I feel insecure about my abilities’.

Psychological needs within games: Adolescents who played online games were asked the 12 psychological needs questions in the context of their online gaming. For example, the ‘I feel capable at what I do’ question was reworded to ‘When I play online games I feel capable at what I do’.

Data was analysed using regression analyses. Simply put, regression analyses are used to try to explain why something happens (known as ‘variance explained’). For example, when trying to explain number of ice creams sold on a day, significant predictors may include variables such as temperature, time of year etc.

Now it’s time to see what the data analysis uncovered. To keep things organised, I will be discussing analysis findings under each hypothesis.

Research Findings

‘Those with met psychological needs (i.e. feel loved, capable and in control) will have lower dysregulated gaming.’

This hypothesis was supported as those with high psychological needs scores had significantly lower dysregulated gaming scores. However, unmet psychological needs only explained 2.4% of dysregulated gaming. So what does this mean? This will be explained in the context of the second finding.

‘Those who experience psychological frustrations (i.e. feel unloved, insecure and lack control) will have higher dysregulated gaming.’

This hypothesis was supported as those with high psychological frustration scores had significantly higher dysregulated gaming scores. Psychological frustrations explained 13% of dysregulated gaming, much higher than the needs finding above.

So it seems that experiencing psychological frustrations is a key factor in dysregulated gaming, much more so than lack of psychological needs. But isn’t ‘lack of psychological needs’ the same as ‘psychological frustrations’? Not exactly, let me explain.

Let’s take students M and O. M hates school and he doesn’t think his teachers like him, but he doesn’t really care and can’t wait to get home to play games and chill with friends. O always tries his best at school and still doesn’t get good grades, much to the disappointment of his family and teachers. He feels useless no matter what, so he throws himself into video games.

Both M and O would be likely to have low scores on questions such as ‘I feel I have been doing what really interests me’, but O would be more likely to have high scores on questions such as ‘I feel pressured to do too many things’. According to the data, young people such as O are at risk of dysregulated gaming.

‘Adolescents would be more likely to experience dysregulated gaming if games helped them overcome their frustrations (e.g. helped them connect socially).’

Interestingly, this hypothesis was not supported. This is contradictory to research finding that people may game excessively as a method of obtaining rewards and engaging with others (Griffiths & Wood, 2000; Mills et al., 2018; Anderson et al., 2017). The authors themselves were surprised by this finding, and encourage further research into this topic to try to understand why.

‘Those who experience psychological frustrations will have poorer mental health’

This hypothesis was supported as high psychological frustrations significantly related to poor mental health. Psychological frustrations predicted 17% of externalising problems and 25% of internalising problems.

‘Dysregulated gaming will have an effect on the relationship between psychological frustrations and mental health’

This hypothesis received the most minute of support. While dysregulated gaming did have a relationship with poor mental health, it accounted for only less than 0.3% of poor mental health. In comparison, experiencing psychological frustrations accounted for over 23% of poor mental health.

Discussion

This study had three main findings:

Young people are more likely to turn to dysregulated gaming if they feel unloved, incapable and not in control of their lives.
Contrary to previous research, young people who engage in dysregulated gaming did not receive psychological needs from games (e.g. engaging socially with others). Further research is required to explore why this is the case.
The relationship between dysregulated gaming and poor mental health is incredibly small (<0.3%) in comparison to feeling unloved, incapable and not in control (>23%).

The authors argue that this finding has important implications for gaming addiction as a diagnosis. If the young people in this study were to be treated only for excessive gaming, this would ignore the massive contribution that psychological frustrations have on their mental health. Treating young people for their psychological frustrations would be a much better method of improving their mental health than targeting their gaming behaviour. The authors make a very firm statement regarding this:

“This program of work is needed to determine if the attention that researchers and clinicians give this immensely popular activity [gaming] is empirically justified. Judged on the basis of the evidence reported in this study, we would conclude it is not.”

– Przybylski & Weinstein, 2019

No study is perfect, and it is the role of academics to critique research so that future studies can improve upon it (I even critique my own research!). Here are a few critiques for this study:

As you may have noticed, only young people who played online games were used for this study. This excludes young people who may experience addiction symptoms due to single player games. However, this decision is understandable as online games are typically cited as the most common games to become addicted to (Rehbein et al., 2010).
Parents and guardians were responsible for reporting the mental health of their children. While this is common practice for young children, mental health data is commonly sourced from 14-15 year olds themselves. Adolescence is a difficult time in life, and these young people may be hiding things from their guardians that can impact the reliability of their mental health ratings. I feel that mental health data would be more reliable straight from the young person, but we can’t be too hard on the researchers as they were not responsible for collecting the data.
Data was collected from a general population of British adolescents. This can limit how widely we can apply these findings to other cultures and populations. The authors recommend that this study should be replicated in other countries and among young people seeking help for gaming addiction.

In conclusion, this study provides interesting insight into the young people who experience gaming addiction symptoms and how their mental health can be improved. I hope researchers aim to replicate this study for further information as it will be incredibly important for developing Gaming Disorder/Internet Gaming Disorder treatment programmes.

Summary

Research on gaming addiction tends to focus heavily on how common it is and how reliable questionnaires are at measuring it. This study aimed to address this research gap by exploring motivators of addictive gaming in adolescents and their mental health.
The study used data from 1,004 British 14-15 year olds, with 525 (52%) reportedly playing an online game in the past month. For these 525 young people, psychological needs, psychological frustrations, gaming addiction symptoms, in-game psychological needs, and mental health were explored.
Data analysis demonstrated three main findings. 1) Young people reported more gaming addiction symptoms if they felt unloved, incapable and not in control of their lives. 2) Young people reporting gaming addiction symptoms did not report in-game benefits such as feeling competent and liked by others in a game. 3) Compared to the relationship between mental health and feeling unloved, incapable and not in control (>23%), the relationship between mental health and gaming addiction symptoms was incredibly small (<0.3%).
The authors argue that gaming addiction symptoms appear to be influenced greatly by psychological frustrations. Due to the much larger relationship these frustrations have with mental health, therapists should focus on addressing these issues in young people rather than focusing solely on their gaming.

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References

American Psychiatric Association. (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Text Revision. 5th ed. DC: American Psychiatric Association

Anderson, E. L., Steen, E., & Stavropoulos, V. (2017). Internet use and Problematic Internet Use: A systematic review of longitudinal research trends in adolescence and emergent adulthood. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 22(4), 430-454.

Chen, B., Vansteenkiste, M., Beyers, W., Boone, L., Deci, E. L., Van der Kaap-Deeder, J., … & Ryan, R. M. (2015). Basic psychological need satisfaction, need frustration, and need strength across four cultures. Motivation and Emotion, 39(2), 216-236.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The” what” and” why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological inquiry, 11(4), 227-268.

DeVellis, R.F. (2012). Scale development: Theory and applications. Los Angeles: Sage.

Goodman, R., Ford, T., Simmons, H., Gatward, R., & Meltzer, H. (2000). Using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) to screen for child psychiatric disorders in a community sample. The British journal of psychiatry, 177(6), 534-539.

Griffiths, M., & Wood, R. T. (2000). Risk factors in adolescence: The case of gambling, videogame playing, and the Internet. Journal of Gambling Studies, 16(2-3), 199-225.

James, R. J., & Tunney, R. J. (2017). The relationship between gaming disorder and addiction requires a behavioral analysis: Commentary on: Scholars’ open debate paper on the World Health Organization ICD-11 Gaming Disorder proposal (Aarseth et al.). Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 6(3), 306-309.

Mills, D. J., Milyavskaya, M., Heath, N. L., & Derevensky, J. L. (2018). Gaming motivation and problematic video gaming: The role of needs frustration. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48(4), 551-559.

Rehbein, F., Psych, G., Kleimann, M., Mediasci, G., & Mößle, T. (2010). Prevalence and risk factors of video game dependency in adolescence: results of a German nationwide survey. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 13(3), 269-277.

Stavropoulos, V., Bamford, L., Beard, C., Gomez, R., & Griffiths, M. D. (2019). Test-Retest Measurement Invariance of the Nine-Item Internet Gaming Disorder Scale in Two Countries: A Preliminary Longitudinal Study. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 1-18.

Is Gaming Addiction a Symptom of an Unhappy Life? A Study Explanation