TY  - CHAP
AB  - Purpose – To examine video gamers’ attitudes about and perspectives on the controversial topic of video game “addiction.”Approach – Ethnographic interviews and participant observation with a group of 52 regular video gamers, most also reporting considerable experience with substance use and/or dependence.Findings – Gamers tended to endorse one of two explanations for video game addiction, either arguing that games operate on the same reward centers in the brain as drugs or that gamers who do become addicted are weak, unintelligent, or actively pursue an addictive state. Several rejected the category of addiction as applied to video gaming due to the lack of withdrawal symptomatology or the confusion of pleasure-seeking with pathology. None offered sociostructural explanations for the phenomenon, despite the relative oversampling of poor and minority participants with low degrees of education.Research implications – Future research should attend to ideologies of causality and agency among populations affected by behavioral “addictions.”Practical implications – The perspectives of video gamers themselves are critical to research and advocacy that departs from a position of slightly greater sensitivity, both to the formal dimensions of those games held to be most habit-forming and to the ideological dimensions of video gamers’ thinking about what constitutes “addiction.”
VL  - 14
SN  - 978-1-78052-930-1, 978-1-78052-931-8/1057-6290
DO  - 10.1108/S1057-6290(2012)0000014014
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S1057-6290(2012)0000014014
AU  - Elliott Luther
AU  - Ream Geoffrey
AU  - McGinsky Elizabeth
ED  - Julie Netherland
PY  - 2012
Y1  - 2012/01/01
TI  - Video Game Addiction: User Perspectives
T2  - Critical Perspectives on Addiction
T3  - Advances in Medical Sociology
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 225
EP  - 243
Y2  - 2024/04/24
ER  -