The Development of Online Gaming Addiction in Adolescents

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The online gaming community has increased drastically throughout the years. The community consists of people at the ages of five to forty years old. Among the group, adolescents that play online games are at greater risk of becoming addicted which is a detrimental problem in their daily lifestyle. Before discussing what online gaming is, an explanation must take place about the reason that the adolescent group is the most at risk.
Adolescents are at the age where they are planning on going to college to follow their career. It is imperative for them to maintain good grades in order to increase the possibility of getting into the college they desire or obtaining a job after graduating. Some adolescents may choose to go straight to work after high school. Adolescents may turn to online gaming for entertainment and/or to relieve stress.
Online gaming takes place on computers and gaming systems such as Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Wii, etc. These devices enable people to connect and play with other people from places outside their area. There are many genres of online games. One type of online game may be a role playing game where the user creates a character. With this character, the user is able to control it and begin an adventure in the online world. Another type of online game can be an action-shooter game. There are two teams and each team must eliminate the other team in order to win the game. Whatever type of game is played, a development of addiction may occur in some users. We begin to search for signs of addiction.
Kuss and Griffiths in the 2012 article, Adolescent online gaming addiction, suggests that excessive online gaming from adolescents may lead to symptoms experienced by substance addicts, namely salience, mood mo...

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... a positive role in the human development. People learn to insert playtime in their daily schedule without having it to interrupt with each other.
This topic interests me because growing up, I always had my attention to my gaming systems. My parents would buy them to keep me out of trouble. But I come to realize that it is becoming an issue where it is too much. I have limited myself and even remove the attention to something productive. However, research has been conducted in which playing action role playing games can increase the ability to focus, give the ability to multitask, and learn. Another genre of games gives players the ability to strategize, plan, etc. The point I am leading to is playing games may only be a problem if it interrupts our daily lifestyle. However, if it does overlap to important lifestyles such as work, relationships, it can be a problem.

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