An Investigation into the Pathologizing of Digital Play

Debates surrounding the legitimacy of the term ‘game addiction’ have been taking place ever since digital games achieved mass-market appeal in the early 1980s, often couched in the ‘conceptual chaos’ of trying to define and categorise behavioural addictions. The few anthropological treatments of this topic have been reasonably dismissive of the idea that excessive engagement with video games constitutes a mental disorder, and as of 2025 a burgeoning literature from psychologists, neuroscientists and physicians has failed to reach a consensus. The World Health Organization has nonetheless classified ‘Gaming Disorder’ as a formal pathology in their ICD-11 manual, galvanising techno-sceptics and deepening controversy over whether video games can be a social ill.

Independently of this discourse, since 2002, self-identified gaming ‘addicts’ have built online communities that enthusiastically adopt tropes from substance abuse that reproduce, adapt, and internalise social narratives of deviance and moral panic associated with games. Certainly, these spaces provide people who self-identify as ‘addicts’ the means to voice a legitimate articulation of their suffering with peers who recognise and understand their experience in ways institutional actors sometimes fail to, and to give and receive emotional support in an understanding environment.

However, at their fringes, these communities can also foster a dogmatic moral economy that positions ‘addicts’ as victims in a broad techno-corporate conspiracy in which academic and medical institutions are complicit. Moreover, their narratives of suffering often depart from established and emerging clinical wisdom in meaningful ways, presenting obstacles for intervention, definition, and diagnosis in and of this mercurial condition.

This emerging and vague pathology also implicates fundamental aspects of play: competition, escapism, social interaction, as key elements of games deemed culpable in inciting disordered behaviour, thereby challenging long-established anthropological notions about the nature and unseriousness of play from Huizinga, Caillios, and others. Previous treatments of this question from all disciplines – whether ‘games’ truly ‘addict’, if so, which games?, who plays them?, and why? – are often frustrated by slippery anecdotal notions of gaming and the analytically redundant category of ‘video games’ which leaves little room for the nuanced position that perhaps some games, some design mechanics, are more or less problematic than others.

My DPhil thesis, currently being written up in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, is a comprehensive investigation into competing notions of ‘video game addict’ as social deviant, as myth, and as diagnostic label, and asks how – in its transposition to the digital and virtual – the ubiquitously human urge to play has become pathologized. It provides a netnography of online communities of ‘gaming addicts’, engaging Ian Hacking’s model of ‘making up people’ to explore the intersection between ‘reclaimed’ identities of illness and social anxieties around games and other technologies. This is underpinned by large-scale quantitative data analysis that establishes the precise dimensions of the ‘field’ for these issues and makes use of nascent thinking about ‘Dark Patterns’ to meaningfully evaluate questions of culpability and intentionality in design that are packaged with the freighted deployment of ‘addiction’ as a behavioural outcome of video game play.

It posits that players reside within a nexus of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations to play video games, and that a constellation of social factors can be reliably correlated with patterns of problematic behaviour, possibly understood and modelled as being a matter of player ‘archetype’, presenting a refinement of Bartle’s influential taxonomy.