The study
| Bonnaire, C., & Lambert, L. (2026). From healthy to problematic gaming use: Considering the role of age. Journal of Behavioral Addictions. |
This commentary makes two arguments about the line between healthy and disordered gaming. First, time spent playing is a poor diagnostic signal: hours alone fail to separate the passionate gamer, the professional, and the person in real trouble, and treating duration as the marker leads to both over- and under-recognition. Second, age matters — gaming begins in childhood, is legal across the lifespan, can benefit development, and accompanies people through stages when the brain’s control systems are still maturing. The authors argue that diagnostic criteria should bend to developmental stage rather than apply uniformly.
My take
They are right, and the first point is one I keep arriving at from the other direction — the clinic. The count is the seduction; the function is the finding. What a person plays away from, and what the playing costs them, tells me far more than the number of hours ever will. But I would offer three refinements from practice, because the paper, in its proper caution against overpathologizing, lets go of more than I would.
First, time is the wrong metric — until it isn’t. At the extreme, quantity becomes its own quality. An adolescent, or an adult, who plays fifteen or more hours a day, day after day, is not a case where hours are merely uninformative; at that magnitude nothing else in a life survives, and the number has become the finding. The field has corrected so hard against time that it risks waving away the outlier it should not.
Second, the signal is rarely time itself — it is time measured against what the time costs. Four hours on a school night and eight on a summer afternoon are not the same behavior scaled up and down. The summer eight may displace little; the school-night four can cost sleep, study, and the next morning. The same hours read as benign or alarming depending entirely on what they take the place of. That is the reading the raw count obscures.
Third, developmental stage matters more than the paper’s own instrument can capture — because chronological age is a poor proxy for developmental maturity. The argument to adapt criteria by stage is correct in spirit, but the variable that matters is the maturity of the regulatory system, and that is not reliably indexed by the birthday. It is not uncommon to see a sixteen-year-old more developmentally advanced than a twenty-two-year-old. “Impaired control” has to be judged against the control the person actually has, not the control their age is presumed to confer.
Key Insight
Hours are not the measure. What the hours cost — and what they take the place of — is the measure.
None of this contradicts the paper; it sharpens it. The clock is the wrong instrument for the ordinary case, a necessary one at the extreme, and useful in between only when read against context and against the person’s real, rather than assumed, developmental stage. As ever, the behavior is not the finding. What it costs, and who is doing it, is.