Scientists in St. Petersburg Find a Way to Study Game Addiction

In recent decades, video games have become one of the most popular forms of entertainment for people of various gender and age, with many spending a significant amount of time in front of a screen. With that in mind, researchers around the world are actively investigating how video games can influence the mental and physical health of users. 

On the global research agenda is gaming disorder – a mental health condition characterized by compulsive and uncontrolled playing of video games and even an addiction similar to alcohol or nicotine addictions. Nevertheless, the scientific community today cannot offer methods and statistics to efficiently treat the disorder. Worse still, it is difficult to tell when a simple interest becomes an obsessive need; the criteria are not obvious and are mostly dependent on psychological testing and subjective judgments.

A team of researchers from ITMO University, St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University, and Almazov National Medical Research Centre studied undiagnosed gamers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

“At first, we assumed that brain activity in people with substance and game addictions would be the same. Hence, we started with the former as our model because neural alterations in case of substance addiction are descriptive and can be tracked down to individual areas of the brain and their interactions via specific neurotransmitters. However, it turned out that the mechanisms are distinct, and they vary greatly,” explains Mikhail Zubkov, the leader of the research team and a researcher at ITMO’s International Laboratory of Applied Radioengineering.

Using the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model, the team found that neural alterations in keen and addicted gamers are similar, with the main difference being in their cognitive capacities. People who play games in moderation exhibit no changes in their cognitive skills.

“We discovered about 39 neural networks that differ in gamers and non-gamers. Though we first struggled to analyze them, by comparing the results to the I-PACE model we were able to define the functions of the neural networks and establish the relationship between the different models,” comments Pavel Tikhonov, the first author of the paper and a PhD student at ITMO’s Faculty of Physics. 

The experiment included 22 gamers who play games 20 to 30 hours per week and 25 gamers who play less than 10 hours per week. The volunteers were placed in an MRI unit and shown screenshots from their favorite video games mixed with other, non-game-related images, to explore which brain connections are stimulated throughout the process.

“Gamers with no diagnosis were found to have changes in their brain regions that are connected to self-control, pleasure, and affection, but not cognitive abilities, as highlighted in other studies. The results of our research hopefully can help recognize the early stages of addiction or confirm that a person has no addiction,” Artem Trufanov, a senior researcher at St. Petersburg State Electrotechnical University “LETI.”

The study did not include those who have been diagnosed with addiction; all the participants had to take the Internet Gaming Disorder Test (IGD-20 Test). Therefore, the results mainly shed light on the dangerous trends that place keen gamers at risk. The researchers hope their findings can help recognize the early stages of addiction and prevent addictive behaviors in people at risk. 

Reference: Pavel Tikhonov, Anatoliy Levchuk, Artem Trufanov, Alexandr Efimtsev, Mikhail Zubkov, Addiction-like alterations of brain activity in recreational video gamers detected via the cue-reactivity fMRI experiment. Computers in Human Behavior, 2023.