The Debrief - July 2024

Video game addiction, child safety in Roblox and an Assassin's Creed non-apology

---

• Finding the middle ground in the video games addiction debate

• Roblox’s country sized child safety problem

• Why Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed apology set the wrong tone

  ---

Welcome to the second edition of The Debrief,

I am somewhat surprised I was able to successfully write this over the course of the week. I was remarkably tense up until yesterday’s book announcement and then spent all of Thursday dazed by the positive reception to it, so I’m grateful for your patience.

Last month, I kinda messed up my paywalling for The Debrief before I went on holiday. I was meant to share with you all the first part of it for free (before locking the rest to Insiders only) but, frankly, I cocked up the formatting in my dash to San Sebastian.

So let’s try again to give you all a taste of The Debrief - a sharp look at three big stories from the past month, followed by some recommendations and announcements from moi - in an effort to coax you into subscribing as a paid insider.

Bon appetit!

---

I might need to pay for some good stock photos one day - Source: Unsplash

Finding the middle ground in the video games addiction debate

The video games addiction debate reared its head again this month, as hostilities broke out between The Guardian and The Observer - two sides of one of the UK media’s most famous coins.

Tim Lewis from The Observer fired the opening salvo on Sunday 7th July by writing about the work of the NHS Gaming Disorder clinic in the publication’s insert magazine.

In it, he followed the pattern seen in stories that the clinic has pitched before to The Times and The FT: highlight a particularly grim case study that none of us can find anything other than deeply worrying, cite figures from the clinic that show its case count is much higher than expected and, crucially, not balance the piece out with any industry perspective.

But two days later on Tuesday 9th July, Lewis’s piece did receive a reply of sorts from industry in the pages of The Guardian: a joint op-ed between the publication’s lead games writers Keith Stuart and Keza MacDonald.

In it, Keza and Keith make a simple argument: they don’t deny that terrible cases of overplaying can occur, but they try to set it in context.

Not only are the number of cases of disordered playing comparatively small, they argue that pathologising video games misses both the wider mental health benefits that games provide the vast majority of players (e.g. providing social interaction) and blames the medium for the degradation of the wider social environment around young people - leading to the emergence of a blame culture that helps nobody.

So what’s interesting here? Well, there’s a couple of things. For those of you who, like me, enjoy some inside baseball commentary on the media, this is an interesting example of why you should never treat a media organisation as a single unified entity.

The divergence in perspective between two pieces published in the same outlet within 48 hours is likely an example of what happens when the “chain of custody” - essentially the pathway of people a story goes through before it gets published - doesn’t fully function. 

What should happen with a piece like this is that a non-subject matter expert should, at the very least, pop a quick email or phone call over to a relevant games expert to test the proposition contained within.

The publication of a dissenting op-ed less than two days after the initial post went out suggests that the outlet agrees the story on the Sunday wasn’t fairly balanced - forcing the later course correction.

But what’s more interesting is how far apart the medical and industry perspective on gaming disorder is.

Nearly seven years after The World Health Organization controversially announced its intention to include it within the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), there remains a sense that the two parties remain as far apart as ever over what to do about it.

So can we, or should we, close the gap? Having been decisively in “the games industry is right” camp on this one, I’ve slightly shifted my position on the matter after speaking to a doctor about the likely use of the term within the profession.

I remain of the opinion that the careless use of the term is problematic. I continue to be concerned about the way the NHS Gaming Disorder does generate its data for the story, given that it previously did inflate its ‘victim’ count by including parents of young players within its treatment total. I also believe that the evidence base behind the creation of a gaming disorder condition is shaky and continues to wobble under the scrutiny of people like Professor Pete Etchells.

But from the perspective of the person I was speaking to, the term “addiction” was far more neutral in the practical world of the medical profession. 

For the most part, it’s just a label that’s used to both help a patient grasp what they’re dealing with and make decisions about where to start treatment.

While they believed that overplaying of games could be described as an “addiction”, they also added that its exceptionally low prevalence means the profession, and public health bodies generally, will lean towards treating it as a minor concern because they have much bigger fish to fry.

And in what can only be described as somewhat ironic, the industry’s protestation that it isn’t a condition is almost certainly more likely to make medical professionals think it is an issue.

In short, the video games industry’s hostile reaction to the term - and its fervent lobbying against it on the basis that it believes it is the manifestation of another video game moral panic - becomes reminiscent of the positions adopted by alcohol and tobacco towards medical professionals: inadvertently creating an unfortunate equivalence between games and those substances in the process.

So do I still believe that the term should be pulled out from being a separate condition within the ICD?

After half a decade of formal inclusion within the ICD, and 700 cases out of tens of millions of players in the UK to show for it, I’d continue to question it and suggest that its inclusion remains unsound.

But if we move to a world where our opposition to the term is less defensively couched and more about opening up a real dialogue with the medical profession about what to do about it, we may be better placed to find a middle ground where the experience of overplayers is properly referenced within mental health treatment (e.g. as a recognised defined symptom of an issue) instead of a separate disorder.

And if this helps that small number of people get the treatment they need, while reflecting the reality of the overwhelming positives of play today, that would be a reasonable outcome for what has often been a divisive and damaging debate.

---

A country sized problem, a country sized perspective?