When one of World of Warcraft’s top ten guilds recruited Cam as their chief hunter, his suicidal thoughts surged. To earn the enviable invitation, Cam had spent 16 hours a day grinding on WoW, to the detriment of everything else. He told his father he’d scored a job at a local restaurant, but every day after his dad dropped him off at the McDonald’s across the street, Cam would hop the first bus home and log back on. There was no job. There would be no paycheck. Cam’s only obligation was to his night elf hunter, and it was an all-consuming commitment.
What if I just ended it? Shortly after transferring WoW servers, Cam wrote a final note to his parents. On a phone call with Kotaku, Cam recalled how his mother had made Swiss chard soup that night. Upstairs, sobbing over a warm bowl, he strategized a suicide plan. Mid-thought, his phone buzzed: Cam’s only friend invited him to see the movie Superbad. Fuck it. In his buddy’s car before the movie, they smoked enough weed to cloud the windows grey with smoke. Superbad was hilarious. Wave after wave of laughter came over Cam. After the movie, he realized that he was a danger to himself.
Today, Cam has been sober from gaming for seven and a half years. For him, it was a problem that insinuated itself into every corner of his life over the course of his adolescence. “Gaming fulfills all of my needs in one thing,” Cam explained. He earned rewards consistently. Benchmarks for success were clear, tangible. He got his social interaction. Structure. It helped him forget about how he had dropped out of high school, lost friends, got too out of shape for hockey. Or his bullies, his deteriorating family life, his pretend jobs. He had an identity. Unambiguously to him, the word “addiction” explains his relationship to games: obsession, withdrawal, compulsion, lying, a total shift of values.
“In my 20s, I tried to numb it out with drinking. In my 30s, I numbed out with gaming.”
It’s clear that some minority of game players, like Cam, have found themselves gaming so compulsively that they neglect the rest of their lives—and can’t get themselves to stop. But what they, and experts, disagree on is whether or not that constitutes an “addiction” to games, whether games are “addictive” and whether the excessive gaming is just a symptom of a deeper issue. The addition of “gaming disorder” to the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases this year has spurred contentious debate on all sides of the issue.
Until recently, it was controversial to apply the word “addiction” to a behavior. Addiction was a term reserved for heroin, crack, cocaine—tangible things the body screamed out for. Substance addiction makes sense; behavioral addictions, psychologists argued, were fuzzier. Nicotine is addictive at its core: Smoke too much, and you’ll risk craving cigarettes, feeling volatile without a smoke, struggling to stop, even while knowing the health repercussions. But when the vast majority of players can enjoy Fortnite long-term without suffering a major blow to their quality of life, is “gaming addiction” a legitimate problem?