Risk Factors

 Risk Factors

Video game addiction is defined as excessive video gaming behaviours that are difficult to control and severely interfere with academic, social, occupational, relational, and/or mental health functioning.

In recent years, the media, psychologists, doctors, academics, parents, and the general public have all paid increased attention to the risk factors for video game addiction.
Excessive and harmful gaming appears to be on the rise, and research has begun to identify a number of risk factors for video game addiction. 
This could be helpful for people who are attempting to figure out if they have a possibility of being hooked to gaming.

Parenting

Despite the fact that the existing research implies that parenting activities (e.g., parental control, monitoring) can lessen children's gaming addiction, findings from a study show that parenting actions can have both positive and negative effects on gaming addiction. It was shown that good parent-child bonding is required for parenting actions to be helpful in decreasing gaming addiction. Some parenting strategies, such as parental control, monitoring, and unstructured time, will actually exacerbate gaming addiction in children with poor parent-child bonding. It also found some evidence that rationalisation is only successful in the presence of strong parent-child attachment. Dissuasion is the only one that does not influence children’s addiction in any case.

Age

The prevalence of gaming addiction among adolescents is between 1.3% and 19.9%. The prevalence in the non‐adolescent group is between 0.3% and 27.5% which is similar to the adolescent group. However the prevalence of gaming addiction decreases with age. Thus children and young people are more at risk of getting addicted to gaming.

Gender

In children and teenagers who are addicted to gaming, 11-12% are boys, and 6-7% are girls. Although gaming addiction is seen to be mostly present in males, Recent studies have shown that the gender breakdown of video game addiction is more balanced than previously thought. 10.8% of a sample consisting of problematic internet users were potential at-risk gamers, of which 5.5% were females while the rest were males. Also women tend to be more addicted to mobile games than men.

Familial Factors

The male sex and being younger was linked to a higher prevalence of gaming addiction. Gaming addiction is influenced by a variety of family and marital factors, such as parental difficulties and disharmony, as well as marital difficulties, such as marital status (whether single, separated, or divorced).

Mental Disorders

Anxiety, sadness, ADHD, social phobia, and a lack of psychosocial support have all been linked to video game addiction.

Video game disorder is more likely to develop if you have ADHD or its manifestations, such as impulsivity and behavioural difficulties. While there is a definite link between gaming disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, the two disorders are not the same, and internet gaming disorder is phenomenologically and neurobiologically unique, demonstrating that impulsivity rather than compulsivity defines internet gaming disease.

Some personality traits have been found to be consistently significant predictors of internet gaming disorder, such as high neuroticism, impulsivity, and aggression, and a combination of personality traits appears to play a vital role in the condition's acquisition, maintenance, and growth.

Yashwin Saraswat