GAMEBOY LIVES –
Sept. 4, 2025 – From Pong and Pac-Man to Minecraft and Fortnight, video games have always been a lot of fun. Sometimes, however, gamers become fixated, compulsive or — worse — spiral into a full-blown gaming disorders. A new study by brain scientists Kylie Falcione and René Weber at UC Santa Barbara’s Media Neuroscience Lab helps answer that question, and their findings may have profound impacts on treatment options for gaming addicts. Their research, “Psychopathology and Gaming Disorder in Adolescents,” was recently published in JAMA Network Open, an open-access, peer-reviewed international medical journal of the American Medical Association.
“We’ve known for some time that gaming disorder exists, but we’ve also known that not every gamer develops the disorder,” Falcione said. “So the question that a lot of researchers have been asking about is what drives people to develop a gaming disorder. Is it the addictive nature of all these rewards and punishments of the video games themselves? Or is it that some people have preexisting conditions or personal core characteristics that are leading them to develop a gaming disorder?” The results of Falcione and Weber’s research points to the latter.
