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Excerpt from readwrite.com
A group of American parents is seeking to sue several video game companies, alleging their children have been harmed by video game addiction.
As reported by Bloomberg, one mother claims that her 14-year-old son has played such a quantity of video games over the last nine years that it has caused him brain damage, seizures, and a stroke. Another mother says that her nine-year-old who has been diagnosed with multiple psychiatric disorders has been gaming “at an increasing and uncontrollable pace”.
Targets of the lawsuits, of which over a dozen are expected to be heard on May 30 in Salt Lake City, Utah, include Microsoft, Nintendo of America, Epic Games, Roblox, and Sony Interactive Entertainment.
A key part of the lawsuit is research that shows Internet Gaming Disorder (the medical term for video game addiction) has a measurable effect on the brain in the way that other addictions do. However, the filing suggests that psychiatric problems such as ADHD are also caused by gaming – this is a contentious issue and research finds that the correlation is more likely in the other direction. That is to say, people with ADHD could be more likely to develop Internet Gaming Disorder, and not that Internet Gaming Disorder causes ADHD. The debate over the addictiveness of games is ongoing and hotly debated.
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