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NO BUSINESS WOULDWHOWHOYour browser does not support the element. welcome being compared to Big Tobacco or gambling. Yet that is what is happening to makers of video games. For years parents have casually complained that their offspring are “addicted” to their PlayStations and smartphones. Today, however, ever more doctors are using the term literally.On January 1st “gaming disorder”—in which games are played compulsively, despite causing harm—gains recognition from the World Health Organisation (), as the newest edition of its diagnostic manual comes into force. A few months ago China, the world’s biggest gaming market, announced new rules limiting children to just a single hour of play a day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and none the rest of the week. Western politicians worry publicly about some games’ similarity to gambling. Clinics are sprouting around the world, promising to cure patients of their habit in the same way they might cure them of an addiction to alcohol or cocaine. Psychologists are split. The case for the defence is that this is just another moral panic. Killjoys of yore issued similarly dire warnings about television, rock ’n’ roll, jazz, comic books, novels and even crossword puzzles. As the newest form of mass media, gaming is merely enduring its own time in the stocks before it eventually ceases to be controversial. Furthermore, defenders argue, the criteria used to diagnose gaming addiction are too loose. Obsessive gaming, they suggest, is as likely to be a symptom (of depression, say) as a disorder in its own right.The prosecution retorts that, unlike rock bands or novelists, games developers have both the motive and the means to engineer their products to make them irresistible. The motive arises from a business-model shift. In the old days games were bought for a one-off, upfront cost. These days, many use a “freemium” model, in which the game is free and money is made from purchases of in-game goods. That ties playtime directly to revenue.The means is a combination of psychological theory and data that helps games-makers maximise that playtime. Psychologists already know quite a lot about the sorts of things that animals, including humans, find rewarding (thanks to a long line of experiments, stretching back decades to those conducted on rats and pigeons by B.F. Skinner). Smartphones and modern consoles use their permanent internet connections to funnel gameplay data back to developers. That allows products to be constantly fine-tuned and tweaked to boost spending. The industry is even beginning to use the argot of the gambling business. The biggest spenders are known as “whales”—a term that originated in casinos.While psychologists argue the finer points of what exactly counts as addiction, and whether gaming’s design tricks cross the line, the industry should recognise that, in the real world, it has a problem, and that problem is growing. Now that gaming addiction comes with an official code, diagnoses will become more common. Clinics are already reporting booming business, as lockdowns have given gamers more time to spend with their hobby. The regulatory climate for tech is getting chillier. And being lumped in the public mind, fairly or not, with gambling and tobacco will not do the industry any favours.It would be wise to get ahead of the discussion. A good place to start would be with hard data. Many of the studies underpinning the contention that games are addictive in a medical sense are woolly: they rely on self-reported symptoms, contested diagnostic criteria, skewed samples and so on. Even basic questions about the amount of time and money spent by users are hard to answer. The industry has an abundance of data that could help. But gaming firms mostly keep details of how gamers behave secret, citing commercial sensitivity.In the long run, that will prove unwise. Gaming firms should make more of their data hoard available to researchers. If—as seems likely—worries about addictiveness are overblown, it is hard to think of a clearer way of showing it. And if not, it is better for firms to recognise the problem now, and do something about it voluntarily. The alternative is that regulators will force them to act. And as China has shown, once a government is seized by a fit of moral panic, it can lash out.
