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Gaming addiction poses ‘pandemic’ ?

Posted on September 20, 2009 by Axel dans My digital f

The Swedish organization, the Youth Care Foundation (Stiftelsen Ungdomsvård), wrote a very pessimistic report about gaming habits of children.

“I believe we’re dealing with a problem of pandemic proportions.”

Sven Rollenhagen of the Youth Care Foundation

This organization has long experience in treating the children’s gaming addictions. So, they have a deap understanding of the problem. But, is gaming really comparable with a pandemic.

A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν pan “all” + δῆμος demos “people”) is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance a continent, or even worldwide.

Wikipedia

So, with its international spread, if gaming would be an infectious disease, it would definitely be a pandemic. But, it is neither contageous nor a disease. It is an addiction. As such, it is more comparable with tobacco or, even better comparison, gambling.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t make it a smaller problem. The good thing about infectious disease is that most of them can be treated with a vaccine. And pandemic, if treated early and systematically, can also most of the time be stopped.
With addictions, one of the problem is that most of the patients don’t realize their addiction and are not interested in changing. When accepted, the treatments involve psychological treatments: it usually tries to identify specific ways to avoid the addictive stimulus, and help the client learn healthier ways to find satisfaction.
But, even if addictions are very complicated to treat, they are easier to avoid than infections, especially with gaming. Parent can help their kids prevent the addiction, by spending some time playing with their kids. It helps creating a common reference, useful to communicate, understand and suggest good gaming practices to their children.