When play is no longer a game
Apparent addiction to video games may be hiding other issues.
Every night, parents across the globe fight a battle of wills when they tell their kids to power down their game consoles to do homework, eat dinner or go to bed.
The directive is usually met with some serious side-eye and whining.
In some cases children yell, throw tantrums or slam doors. No one likes to be forced to stop having fun, but something unique appears to be going on here — you don’t hear much about kids having epic meltdowns when they’re told to stop playing with Legos.
So what’s happening in that moment, the forced transition from game play to real life?
Children and adolescents don’t yet have the capability to stop doing a rewarding activity and move on to something less fun, neurologists say.
That doesn’t mean a child is addicted to video games. Although experts say children with depression and anxiety are more prone to immerse themselves in games as a coping mechanism, it’s generally just hard for most kids to stop.
There are ways for parents to deal with this problem, but first they have to understand their kids’ minds.
“What’s happening in our brains is that there are systems that evolved to sustain our interest. It will lead you to seek food for days until you find it, and that’s followed by satiety,” says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the US National Institutes of Health, who has studied similarities between the effects of gaming and substance abuse.
Dopamine rush
Pulling the plug in the middle of a video game — before a child has had the chance to feel satisfied by completing a level or mission — is a bit like yanking a half-eaten doughnut out of someone’s hand.
The anticipation of playing video games results in a roughly 75 per cent boost to baseline dopamine levels in the brain, according to Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, who has analysed studies on gaming. That’s far less than the boost associated with doing hard drugs, according to data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, but it’s not much higher than the boost from that doughnut.
Eating the doughnut is a finite act, however. Video game makers build in a stream of intermittent rewards to keep people playing. In some games, there’s no real end or it can take hours to achieve.
A 1998 study involving adult gamers found that dopamine release correlated to how the players progressed — the better they got and the more difficult the challenges became, the more dopamine was released, says the study’s author, Matthias Koepp, now a neurology professor at the University College London Queen Square Institute of Neurology.
Accurately measuring dopamine in the brain is a challenge and can involve injections of radioactive materials that can be tracked on a PET scan.
That’s why there haven’t been many studies — and none performed on children.
Controlling the impulse
While adults have the reasoning ability to override the dopamine rush and move on to more important tasks, children do not, neurologists say. The brain’s prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain involved in making decisions and controlling impulses — isn’t fully developed until age 25.
Amirah Counts, a single mum in Boulder, Colorado, struggles most nights to get her seven-year-old son to stop playing World of Warcraft.
“On a good day, he gets home from school and the rule is to do homework first, but as soon as he’s done, he wants to play video games,” she said. “If I tell him no, he’ll just sit there and not do anything. It’s like he doesn’t have the capacity to entertain himself. A bad night is when we just come home and I’m so exhausted I let him play video games until bedtime and then he’s livid when it’s time for bed.”
“There is no intrinsic reason a child should stop playing on his own unless there is a more rewarding experience available at that moment,” says Marc Palaus, who reviewed more than 100 papers on the neural and behavioural effects of video gaming while working on a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at the Open University of Catalonia.
When Chris Fuller’s son was in sixth grade, he would plough through his homework so he could play Fortnite, the popular internet game where 100 players battle to be the last one standing. The boy’s homework quality and grades began to slip. “What drove me to complete madness was he’d turn off one device and go to another. He would get off Fortnite and come upstairs with us and get on his phone to watch YouTube videos about Fortnite,” says Fuller, a public relations executive.
He and his wife stopped allowing their son to play video games on weeknights when he started seventh grade last year and Fuller says that has resulted in better homework and an improvement in grades. But on weekends their son, now 13, has moved on to Overwatch, another online multiplayer game he has a hard time shutting off. “I recently heard something at 5am and went downstairs and found him playing,” Fuller says.
Gaming disorder
Experts say most kids who play video games are not at risk of developing a serious problem such as gaming disorder, which the World Health Organisation says is a pattern of behaviour characterised by “impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities … and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences”.
Frequency or duration of game-playing alone doesn’t equate to having a disorder. Less than 1 per cent of gamers qualify for such a diagnosis, experts say. Some experts, including the leadership of the American Psychiatric Association, say there’s not enough evidence to declare gaming addiction a unique disorder.
Rather than worrying about whether your children are addicted to gaming, psychologists suggest figuring out whether they use video games to cope with depression, anxiety or stress. A 2017 study found that adolescents who played video games four or more hours a day for six or seven days a week showed more depressive symptoms than those who played less often.
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What you and your child can do
Even when an underlying mental health issue is not at play, many parents face surly children when it’s game-over time. So how can you manage the nightly battle?
Institute rules around game play — and follow them consistently
“Don’t let yourself fall into these traps like, ‘Well, he didn’t play last week so we let him play an extra three hours this week,’ ” says Michael Milham, vice-president of research and founding director of the Centre for the Developing Brain at the Child Mind Institute.
Some experts advise parents to warn children about 20 minutes before it’s time to shut down so they know what to expect and don’t begin a new level or mission. Milham suggests not letting them play video games right up until bedtime because some have trouble settling down to sleep.
Give your children a role in creating the rules
Susan Groner, a parenting coach and author, says children are more invested in following guidelines if they have a say in developing them.
If you and your child can come to an agreement on when video games can be played and for how long, you can try it for a week and then revise if it’s not working. She also suggests having kids set a timer so they can monitor their own game-playing.
It’s never too late to establish rules
Recently Colorado mother Amirah Counts decided to do a “detox” with her son. In a written agreement, he said he’d try to whittle down game-playing to about an hour a day and that the two would do more activities together, including reading books. While they haven’t reached their goal yet, she says it’s helped by giving him an activity to look forward to.
If a serious problem develops, seek treatment
Stetson University professor Chris Ferguson says concerned parents should seek treatment from professionals who specialise in young children and teens.
“I wouldn’t take kids to a place that specialises in gaming addiction,” he says. “A lot of them are capitalising on this moral panic and they don’t have empirically valid treatments. They may treat the gaming addiction and give you your depressed kid back.”