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Effects Of Video Game Addiction

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Almost everyone has played a video game at least once in their life. The people who play them on a normal basis though, probably only spend an hour or two doing so per day. However, there are people who are affected by video game addiction and do not know it. The DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) does not even consider video game addiction to be a real problem. But, video game addiction is, in fact, a real phenomenon and it is a direct cause of health and social problems, particularly in adolescent males.
So, what is a video game and what is an addiction? According to Merriam Webster, a video game can be defined as “an electronic game played by means of images on a video screen and often emphasizing fast …show more content…

At the time of this writing, the video game market’s value surpassed that of 2016, reaching 18.4 billion dollars, with two months left in the year. November and December are one of the two most crucial months for the video game industry. Both months account for almost half of the sales for the entire year. With Black Friday arriving in November and Christmas in December the video game market is expecting a big boost in sales. In 2017, mobile device users downloaded over 197 billion apps. An estimated 39% of those apps were games, accounting for 76.83 billion. In the 2015 National BDPA Technology Conference, it stated, “It’s a remarkable amount of time we're investing in gaming 5 million gamers in the U.S., in fact, are spending more than 40 hours a week playing games -- the equivalent of a full-time job!” According to Jane McGonigal, the U.S as a whole spends a total of about 3 billion hours a week playing video games. The widespread popularity of video games is not what makes them addicting though. It is the fact that video games share some of the same properties with other things that are considered addicting. A person is considered addicted when they become obsessed with something and are constantly thinking of an object, activity, or substance. They experience withdrawal symptoms and continue to seek out and engage in the behavior even though they are aware it

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