Video Game addiction is a conentious subject in the community most affected by the recognition of the disorder. Gamers are the first people to grab their phones and weild their twitter accounts to make fun of anyone who dares agree with mental health experts about the subject. Let me go out on a limb and defend the idea of video game addiction and push back against the narrative that this is the new “violence in video games” type attack on video games and the people who play them.

Starting off, not all gamers (#NotAllGamers) are video game addicts. Just because you play video games and they are your favorite type of entertainment media dosen’t mean that you are an addict. I think the best way to prove this is to talk about my own instance of video game addiction and show you what it actually looks like and how it became a negative factor in my life.

In high school, I was an autistic person that had yet to be diagnosed. I didn’t understand any of the social cues of people around me. I didn’t fit into any groups. I didn’t have any friends that I felt I could be honest with because people would think I was crazy if I told them how my brain really worked. Every day was an act to just blend in. That being said, video games were the only way that I felt like I could interface with the world around me.

I played video games any time I wasn’t doing something that was directly ordered of me. I brought my 2DS to school and played it whenever possible. Whenever I got off work, I would play video games 30 minutes after work until 12am – 2am in the morning. I would go to sleep, wake up late, and play video games before dragging myself into school an hour late. I was using the video games as a way to live instead of finding out why things were so tough for me and fixing the real world issues I was having. I gained weight, my grades slipped hard, my social life got even worse than it was before, I started getting suicidal thoughts and I saw no way to interact with the people around me. All I saw was free time to play games. I saw role playing games as a replacement for life and competitive games as a place for me to prove to myself that I was worth something.

Video games aren’t evil inheretly. They are however a form of escapism that can be used to run from issues instead of fixing them. I don’t think dismissing the idea of Video Game Addiction wholesale does anything for people who are suffering from it. People who are addicted to other things like smoking and addiction are more likely to continue what they are doing and not get any help if the people around them enable them to continue their negative behavior. If you are a gamer that does not suffer from Video Game Addiction and you see an article or study that comes to a conclusion that the addiction exists, don’t throw a fit because you aren’t who they are talking about.

I will leave you with a story that I recently saw unfold in my local community. I used to play Pokemon Go pretty regularly (another game I played so much it caused me mental harm) and I would always see another person at the local events. Lets call him “Larry”. Larry and I were in a group on Facebook dedicated to letting local players know when events were happening. I realized that I was spending too much time and money on the game and that it was making me unhappy so I stopped playing. Larry had no such realization. He was always the first one at all the local events and he had multiple accounts and multiple smartphones to increase his odds of catching rare Pokemon.

Larry was married with a child. I went to high school with his wife and she was a family friend. Months after I had stopped playing, my dad tells me that Larry’s wife is having to take care of the baby by herself now because Larry admitted himself to a mental hospital because he was neglecting his child and wasn’t going to work so he could play the game. Bills were piling up and Larry’s family was suffering because of his addiction so he took the responsible step of deciding to make his life better. I’m proud of Larry but there are a lot of different ways that this could have ended that were much much worse.

Mental health is complicated and nuanced. If something does not affect you, don’t disparage people that need help by acting like it doesn’t exist.