Well, in psychology, the standard for "does X have a problem with Y" is: does behavior Y interfere with X's work and with relationships? Yes? Then you have a real psychological problem.
As I'm sure most people have seen, there are common things to become "addicted" to (both legal and illegal, socially-accepted and stigmatized), and there are much less common things.
If a large group of people have the same object of their addiction, then there might be an immediate biochemical explanation (i.e. nicotine), or that object meets a certain psychological need these people have in common (say, alcohol?). It also suggests that a uniform treatment might be possible; experience with one bunch of people may be transferrable to others in the same category (or maybe not).
Beyond those objects which cause physical addiction, too many people get caught up believing the object causes the addiction, and removing the object ends the problem. That's where you get crusades against video gaming, or jazz, or flappers ... y'know, that stuff that is "sapping the moral fundation of our civilization".
Ultimately, you need to figure out what psychological need the addiction is meeting, and try to find another, more helpful, more acceptable way to meet that need. My feeling is that most often, that need will have a social root to it; we're innately social animals, and much of our anxiety is rooted in the mental mechanisms that evaluate our social situation and motivate our social behavior.
I guess the upshot is that you can be addicted to videogaming, but we should focus more on "addicted" than on "videogaming". If many, many people can handle something without disrupting their life, the problem doesn't lie in the inherent nature of the object.
As I'm sure most people have seen, there are common things to become "addicted" to (both legal and illegal, socially-accepted and stigmatized), and there are much less common things.
If a large group of people have the same object of their addiction, then there might be an immediate biochemical explanation (i.e. nicotine), or that object meets a certain psychological need these people have in common (say, alcohol?). It also suggests that a uniform treatment might be possible; experience with one bunch of people may be transferrable to others in the same category (or maybe not).
Beyond those objects which cause physical addiction, too many people get caught up believing the object causes the addiction, and removing the object ends the problem. That's where you get crusades against video gaming, or jazz, or flappers ... y'know, that stuff that is "sapping the moral fundation of our civilization".
Ultimately, you need to figure out what psychological need the addiction is meeting, and try to find another, more helpful, more acceptable way to meet that need. My feeling is that most often, that need will have a social root to it; we're innately social animals, and much of our anxiety is rooted in the mental mechanisms that evaluate our social situation and motivate our social behavior.
I guess the upshot is that you can be addicted to videogaming, but we should focus more on "addicted" than on "videogaming". If many, many people can handle something without disrupting their life, the problem doesn't lie in the inherent nature of the object.
