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My children have led a gaming-free life until now, so what happened when I gave them an Xbox for a week?

Hattie Garlick with husband Tom and children Johnny, 7, and Frieda, 4 - Rii Schroer
Hattie Garlick with husband Tom and children Johnny, 7, and Frieda, 4 - Rii Schroer
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This week my children and I have learned to ride horses, build skyscrapers and levitate. Of course, there have been low moments, too. We have blown up more things than I’d care to admit. I have also killed rather a lot of people. All in a typical week’s work for a video-gaming family.

Last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) added “gaming disorder” to the latest revision of its International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11). By placing it in the same category as drug abuse, it instantly threw gamers and industry experts into panicked and polarised positions.

The WHO’s Dr Shekhar Saxena attempted to quell the uproar by pointing out that “only a minority of people who game will satisfy the strict criteria for gaming disorder”. But it’s one more reason for parents to be concerned about what gaming may be doing to their offspring. 

Aged seven and four, my children have so far led a blissfully video game-free life. So what would happen if they had unfettered access to this apparently dangerous pursuit for a whole week? I set about finding out.

Hattie Garlick with husband Tom and children Johnny, 7, and Frieda, 4 - Credit: Rii Schroer
Hattie Garlick with husband Tom and children Johnny, 7, and Frieda, 4 Credit: Rii Schroer

Saturday

My children have never loved me as much as at the moment when I bring my husband’s ancient Xbox down from the attic. My seven-year-old son talks of the Minecraft and Roblox games that his friends play. This week, I explain, he and his sister will be allowed to try age-appropriate games too. 

The children embrace me gleefully, then sit glued to the Xbox. They remain there for an hour, making no mess and very little noise. At supper, they eat their vegetables in record time, so that they can return to Lego Harry Potter.  I begin to see how I could be tempted to become what addicts call “an enabler”.

But how likely is addiction, really? In 2009, a survey published in the journal Psychological Science found that eight per cent of video game players between the ages of eight and 18 “exhibited pathological patterns of play”. Last March, however, another suggested that as few as 0.3 to one per cent are likely to qualify as suffering from a “gaming disorder”. 

I am getting my first sense of what uncharted and disputed territory this is. 

Sunday

A beautiful sunny day, and we are visiting friends with a huge garden. It’s full of climbable trees and secret spaces for hide-and-seek – the perfect place for children.

Due to the “great gaming experiment”, however, we have also set up a PlayStation inside. The girls – four and six – get bored of the screen after 20 minutes and decide instead to raid make-up bags in the bathroom. 

When, more than three hours later, we finally drag the boys – aged seven and nine – away from their console, my son has developed “gamer’s neck”, a common physical affliction. He is also perplexed and upset about where the weekend has gone. 

We are only two days into the project, and already my journalistic and parenting duties have clashed. My priorities are clear.  For the rest of the week, I will set daily limits on gaming time. It’s quickly becoming clear just how addictive this activity can be. 

Fortnite - Credit: Alamy
One boy spent £650 in two weeks playing Fortnite Credit: Alamy

Monday

A friend puts me in contact with a colleague of hers, whose son may have crossed these lines.

A week ago, Sarah (names have been changed) checked her bank balance and found hundreds of suspicious transactions to the PlayStation network.

“I thought I’d been hacked,” she says. “Our system’s set up so that if the kids make purchases, I get a receipt via email.”

In fact, her son, Will, 10, had learned how to change that email address to his own; in just two weeks he had spent £650 while playing the popular game Fortnite.

When Sarah told her son that she would be removing his PlayStation, he reacted as if someone had died

When he finally came clean, “he went into meltdown,” she says, still in shock. “He sobbed his heart out, saying: ‘It happened once and then it felt so good, I couldn’t stop myself’.” When Sarah told her son that she would be removing his PlayStation: “it was horrific, as if someone had died,” she says.

“He was clinging to me, shaking, crying, begging me not to. In the height of hysteria he’d get aggressive. He was saying things like: ‘What have I got left to live for?’” She spoke to Will’s headmaster, who told her he had noticed that Will appeared reluctant to take part in after-school activities, racing home to play games instead. 

“He’s a very bright boy,” his mother tells me. “It’s not like he plays for four hours a day, or that I’m unaware of the dangers. But it’s a world I don’t understand, and I feel like I’ve let my boy down.”

Tuesday

Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones from the Royal College of Psychiatrists has met many people in the same position, she tells me.

Most manage to curb their compulsive relationship with gaming with the help of their families. But a small percentage require professional help and, for that reason, “while we’re not looking at an epidemic, I absolutely welcome the WHO’s recognition of gaming addiction as an illness,” she says, “because if you have a diagnosis, you can start accessing proper treatment, for free.”

It does not mean, she points out, that GPs will start diagnosing gaming disorder any time soon.  In the meantime, however, Dr Bowden-Jones is preparing to launch the first NHS-funded internet-addiction centre. The small London clinic will focus exclusively on gaming for its first few years, because “there is so much work to do, in order to understand the symptoms that people are presenting with, and inform our picture of the whole disorder”.

Why are games such an effective conduit for compulsive behaviour, I ask. “It’s very hard to say that the game is the whole problem,” she stresses. For that tiny minority who suffer, however, “games can suck you into a whole other dimension. You can become increasingly isolated and then depressed.”

For young children particularly, who have yet to develop resilience, she says it can be hard to find their way back. 

Wednesday

My husband and I have been spending our evenings playing an action adventure game called Red Dead Redemption, a Western in which you play the lead role. 

We spend hours exploring a dusty landscape that seems unending in scale and detail. The soundtrack, too, is mesmerising.  We appear, however, to yo-yo between protracted horse rides – so easy and monotonous that they are almost meditative – and sudden gunfights – fiendishly difficult and strangely stressful.

Just as we begin to get somewhere, we die and are returned to the beginning. Yet we stay up later than usual, unquestioningly pursuing this Sisyphean task.  This doesn’t make us addicts, I realise, but it does make us pretty stupid.

Good game? Frieda and Johnny - Credit: Rii Schroer
Good game? Frieda and Johnny Credit: Rii Schroer

Thursday

We are nearly late for school because the children are playing Minecraft on the iPad. I ask them about 17 times to put the screen down and to put their clothes on. We eventually leave the house cross, and with mismatching socks. 

Last year, Dr Netta Weinstein published a study on internet gaming disorder. The study examined nearly 6,000 adults for signs of the disorder, such as “feeling moody or anxious when unable to play,” she tells me, “or experiencing distress because of game play.”

Dr Weinstein then looked to see if there was a correlation between exhibiting these signs and reduced health, socialising or physical activity. “You might expect there to be negative associations,” she says. “In fact, we found none.  “There’s a lot of concern about this idea of gaming disorder,” she tells me. “But not a lot of evidence that it is as problematic or addictive as we assume.”

What we think of as gaming disorder might really be a symptom of something else going on

That said, “we also found that feeling isolated, ineffective, and pressured actually encouraged more internet gaming disorder,” she explains, “so what we think of as gaming disorder might really be a symptom of something else going on. If you aren’t finding fulfilment in the rest of your life, then video games give you a world to escape into. Games might be the band aid, not the disease.”

Clearly my family was never going to show signs of addiction after just a week. And at the moment, we all have fulfilling and demanding work, social and family lives. But, Dr Weinstein implies, our resilience to their appeal might also be due to the fact that we are, simply, lucky.

How the design of video games like Fortnite makes them more addictive
How the design of video games like Fortnite makes them more addictive

Friday

In fact, gaming has many advocates. Games, Dr Tom Hollenstein, a psychologist, tells me, are not “inherently evil”. Studies have shown correlations between gaming and improved perseverance, attention and spatial awareness.

“Games provide the opportunity to play, to be creative, to strive for a goal, despite repeated losses. That is a good thing,” he says. Dr Andrew Przybylski, at the Oxford Internet Institute, has found evidence that “those who played games about two hours a day showed higher levels of mental well-being compared with those who had no screen time”.

Sonia Livingstone OBE, professor of social psychology at LSE, is running a research project called Parenting for a Digital Future. “I’ve been struck by how many dads are gaming with their children,” she says, “either because they already loved gaming and wanted to share that with their kids, or because they saw it as a way into their children’s worlds. Our research showed that it often brings families together.”

Loath as I am to admit it, this does ring true. I am not sure I will ever enjoy gyrating to Just Dance as much as our nightly family story time, but it does prove to be a huge amount of shared fun. 

Consoles such as Nintendo's Switch sell the idea of gaming as a shared activity - Credit: Getty Images
Consoles such as Nintendo's Switch sell the idea of gaming as a shared activity Credit: Getty Images

Saturday

Our experiment is over. It seems we have witnessed no dramatic changes to our real lives or behaviour, beyond moderate increase in demands for screen time, and a rise in crabbiness.

But I am concerned about the future. In just three years, my son will be the same age as Will, the boy whose gaming habits have become so troubling. By then, games will be even more sophisticated and realistic.

My final call is to Andy Robertson, author of Taming Gaming, a book which aims to “help parents understand the ingredients of a healthy relationship with gaming, and steer their children towards a varied diet”. Robertson – a father of three – argues that games can give children a relatively safe environment in which to explore and develop qualities including “empathy, resilience and patience”.

The key is for parents to find a way into their world, too, he says. “My 13-year-old was playing one particular game and began talking in a blasé way about shooting people,” he says. So Robertson sat him down to watch a film that explored the real impact of war.

“At the end, he turned to me and said: “War is horrid, isn’t it?”’

I decide to sit down with the children and play Minecraft: Story Mode, a game that is rather like a cartoon show, in which children can choose the lines the main character delivers and thus the direction the story takes. 

“Look,” I say, “If you say nice things to these other strange, pixelated people, nice things will happen. That’s a bit like life isn’t it?”  “Mmhhhuuhhhuu,” say the children, vaguely.

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