"Sticking your head in the sand won't help:" A mental health researcher pleads for game companies' data

gamedeveloper.com:

When it comes to the classification of video game addiction, the game industry's need to critically weigh in is a matter of when, not if, according to Oxford associate professor and senior research fellow Andrew Przybylski.

In recent years, the American Psychological Organization and World Health Organization have independently defined and promoted their own versions of gaming addiction "disorders." Both have been joined by what Przybylski calls "low-quality" studies, backed by "arbitrary surveys" and "unclean," non-transparent data sets, that count in the tens of thousands—telling what Przybylski fears may be an inaccurate story of players' relationships with games.

The consequences of these gaming-data assumptions are already happening in Przybylski's view. As he explained in a GDC 2023 presentation, they range from "emerging regulatory frameworks" across the world's lawmaking forces to the medical community's recommendations that could lead to who's liable for addiction-related "insurance reimbursements."

For all the potential players in these conversations, including gaming industry leaders, health professionals, and politicians, "evidence-based policy is ideal," Przybylski said. "We all want predictable rules of the road—how games fit into the wider landscape of our lives and societies. Player health is a common denominator across these stakeholders. To do that, we must acknowledge publicly what we might think implicitly: to have reasonable regulation, in order to serve the strong and vulnerable among us, as backed by rigorous and credible research. Without that, we don't have a firm foundation for intervention, whether it's zero or quite a bit."

Przybylski spoke to both fraught and promising attempts to engage the