The World Health Organization’s 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, oftentimes abbreviated to ICD-11, has officially recognized and added gaming addiction as a disorder to the international listing.
According to Video Games Chronicle, the WHO added the classification after final deliberations on Saturday, May 25th, 2019. Gaming addiction as a disorder was described as…
“[…] a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences”
This comes after it was initially proposed back in January, 2017.
The Yonhap News Agency explained the new classification and how when it will come into effect, writing…
“Committee B of the World Health Assembly unanimously approved the 11th revision of the ICD, which is set to be submitted to the plenary committee meeting for adoption by member states on Tuesday. ICD-11 will come into effect on Jan. 1, 2022, according to the WHO.”
What’s interesting in the Yonhap piece is that they state that South Korea’s health ministry was opposed to codifying gaming addiction as a disease. The Korea Creative Content Agency argued that compulsive gaming or addictive behaviors are based on a number of other social factors, such as school,home life, teachers, peers, and more. This means that when it was originally reported that “Asian countries” had supported the World Health Organization adding gaming addiction to the ICD-11 index, South Korea wasn’t one of them.
It would be somewhat shocking if Japan actually was one of the “Asian countries” that did support the index. Then again, Sony’s CEO Kenichiro Yoshida was already poised to embrace the ICD-11 addition of gaming addiction and said that they were already prepped to ”adopt countermeasures” to deal with video game addiction. Yoshida didn’t clarify or explain what those “countermeasures” were.
[Update:] In an interview with Fanbolt, a researcher and author of Psychology of Games, told the outlet that this even became a discussion due to a lack of treatment paths and information regarding the phenomenon, saying…
“According to Shadloo et al. (2017), an increasing number of mental health services have reported people asking for help controlling their gaming. The system is currently unequipped for this in two ways. Firstly, clinicians are unsure what disordered gaming truly looks like. Secondly, there is no clear treatment path for those who feel they are addicted to video games. This means that not only is the mental health system unequipped to help people, but people may be unable to access help if their insurance refuses to cover treatment. I can imagine that it is this set of circumstances that prompted the WHO into action.”
We still don’t know exactly what the outcome will be for the industry now that gaming addiction has been added to the ICD-11 index. The ESA spoke out against the addition of gaming addiction to the index, along with various other gamers and researchers, the latter of whom criticized the World Health Organization for the scarcity of research on the subject matter. We’ll find out how this affects the gaming industry in the coming years as the classification becomes more widespread and adopted by various health clinicians around the world.
(Thanks for the news tip FightSJWCensorship, Mike Phalin and Alex9234)
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