Opponents wonder if WHO's bid to add gaming addiction as a disorder, while not mentioning internet or smartphone addiction, was made under political pressure
The World Health Organization has proposed a behavioral addiction pathology for excessive video-game playing. Tweets: @theatlantic , @ibogost , and @ibogost Tweets: @theatlantic : From “gaming disorder” to “smartphone addiction,” pathologizing purported cultural ills is easier than addressing their socioeconomic conditions, writes @ibogost. http://www.theatlantic.com/... Ian Bogost / @ibogost : About “Gaming Disorder”: What if the problem isn't (just) singling out games as a pathology—and not smartphones, or tanning, or cats—but the urge to see all problems as individual, behavioral defects instead of socioeconomic conditions? http://www.theatlantic.com/... Ian Bogost / @ibogost : If the gaming and technology industries are already thinking of people as “marks” who might be willing to dump obscene amounts of time, money, and data into their services, then offering those folks new mental-health disorders as salve is cold comfort. http://www.theatlantic.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after the WHO moved to add gaming addiction to its International Classification of Diseases (a proposal for the ICD), Ian Bogost argues in The Atlantic that the diagnosis singles out games while ignoring smartphones, tanning, or other compulsions — and that opponents suspect political pressure shaped the omission. His deeper point is that pathologizing cultural ills as individual behavioral defects is easier than addressing their socioeconomic conditions.
First-order effects
- The WHO faces a legitimacy challenge over selective classification: critics now frame gaming disorder as politically motivated rather than clinically derived, complicating adoption of the ICD entry among clinicians who must apply it.
Second-order effects
- Treatment providers are already moving ahead of the science — psychiatrists report an uptick in US in-patient programs for internet addiction even as key institutions decline to recognize it (per Reuters reporting) — so an official gaming-only label risks channeling patients into diagnoses that don't cover their actual device use.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, behavioral-addiction classification follows cultural panic rather than mechanism: the WHO made gaming disorder official with effect from January 1, 2022 (as it confirmed in 2019), and by 2025 researchers were linking self-reported addictive screen use in children to doubled or tripled rates of suicidal thoughts (a New York Times-covered study) — pressure that will keep forcing the taxonomy to expand or admit its arbitrariness.
The trend: Medical classification of digital behavior is being driven as much by public alarm and politics as by clinical consensus, with each new screen-based compulsion testing whether the diagnostic framework can keep up.