The gaming masses have come to vehemently reject the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recent classification of gaming addiction as a mental health disorder. I’ve seen very aggressive responses from colleagues and friends in the gaming niche, responses that stem directly from a place of fear about what this label means for us and our interests. A unified cry bellowed out from the depths of the internet, wailing about what an injustice it was to pen the addition to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) known as “gaming disorder”. These various responses to the classification have pushed me to realise that our fears — while entirely understandable in the historical context of gaming taking the blame for society’s ills — are quite misplaced, and might be preventing gamers and non-gamers alike from having an important discussion.

Gaming has in the past been used as a scapegoat — by worried mothers, lawmakers, religious individuals — to rationalize unexpected negative behaviours among certain populations, especially young men. Overall aggression and gun-related violence are at the top of the list for occurrences blamed on the influence of video games, but we’ve seen a wild range of other subjects approached in the past. The beloved Pokemon franchise, known for it’s hardcore heathenish story of “become friends with cuddly animals and travel the world with a smile on your face and a spring in your step” was blamed for secular or occultist beliefs and practices. The younger among us might not remember the poke-scare as something real and tangible — it may seem a distant memory or something only brought up as a joke, but there are still groups that hold on to beliefs and prejudices against video games based on these wild claims. Search “Things Video Games Have Been Blamed For” and you’ll pull up list upon list of the ridiculous claims that have been leveled against games in the past, including homelessness, sexual deviancy, loss of limbs, and Shrek 3 not selling well.

Despite researchers’ best efforts to uncover the truth behind gaming’s (non-existent) link to extreme violence, we still keep having this conversation.

So when the WHO comes out to say that the recent draft of the ICD includes a “gaming disorder”, many gamers are ready to put up the barricades once again and defend their pastime from another unjust assault. For the record, I will not be spending time refuting or even lending credence to the theories that bemoan video games as the root of all evil — video games are not the reason for gun violence. Video games are not the reason your marriage sucks. Video games aren’t the reason nobody bought Shrek 3 on DVD (which you may remember as being released the same year Netflix decided to start their streaming service, but no, go ahead and blame games). Those theories come from the same fear-mongering spirit that needs something easy to pin our world’s problems on — easy enough to point out and say “there’s the culprit”, but foreign enough that a comfortable majority does not feel implicated in the problem at all.

That fear-mongering is different from the WHO’s classification of gaming disorder, and unfortunate for us, that means we have to come up with a different response than the usual “that’s stupid” that would normally fit for when people start blaming axe murderers and child rapists on gaming. Unlike the previous examples, the ICD’s definition of gaming disorder does not implicate gamers in causing problems for the rest of the world — merely causing problems for ourselves. It is defined as “impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.” This definition has a lot of flaws that you’re probably already identifying.

What does “increasing priority given to (digital or video) gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities” mean? To non-gamers, or “concerned citizens”, this phrase can easily be used as a weapon against us. I speak directly to those reading who know that their primary interest is in gaming, to those for which E3 is real Christmas, your biggest purchases are gaming related, you possibly subscribe to multiple services made to bring you as many games as possible and intend to maximize your use of those services. Your Steam library has more titles than your local library. Your priority given to gaming is already increased over other activities because this is your favourite activity. You have other interests and daily activities, but this is the one that you pay attention to the most.

And anyone who says those traits alone are “unhealthy” is a boring person who’s never heard of being interested in something. What are they into, filing a cabinet of manila envelopes? Sock-folding?

From a glance, the way this “disorder” is written applies to literally any dedicated gamer in existence. It leaves us wondering why other people with singular focuses or one major favourite hobby aren’t also being harangued for their beloved pastime. Where’s “Dungeons and Dragons disorder”? Where’s “amateur soccer league disorder”? Where’s “baking fancy cakes disorder”? There are plenty of people who dedicate themselves wholly to one passion in their life, and these people are often praised in their circles for their talent and their passion.

This laser-like focus on an activity is the reason why we have top chefs and violinist prodigies, it’s why we have pro athletes and world-renown designers. But what I’ve listed are not simply people who have given one activity in their life extreme precedence, they are people who have given their activity precedence and have respected titles. They have jobs. And gaming, though it generates a new and exciting market of game-related careers — developers, pro-players, streamers, journalists, event organizers — suffers from a stigma of being “the lazy” and “the wasteful” activity. It’s not even that most gamers will never craft a career out of their passion — plenty of home taught chefs and musicians and the like will never earn money with their hobby either, and yet we’ve yet to rain on their parade with a diagnosis of being “diseased”. Say your hobby is gaming and some people will look at you like you just said your hobby is masturbating. As the years go by, gaming’s reception has been a lot friendlier, but there are still those who live outside of the generation in which gaming earned its biggest confidence boost that feel alienated and concerned about the whole enterprise. Those people write things like the WHO’s ICD.

All of that might sound purely critical of the WHO’s inclusion of gaming addiction, so this may come as a surprise: I still believe we need to address gaming addiction on a level which classifies and diagnoses its existence. We are angry that gamers might once again be thrown under the bus for problems we’re not starting, but we’re also scared of re-examining our relationship and our friends’ relationships with video games as a whole. I have met enough people with gaming addictions to want to do something about it and say something about it — but with this kind of dialogue surrounding gaming addiction, it becomes nearly impossible to approach the subject. Worry about gaming addiction even a little and you may be disregarded as the nagging religious mother who thinks Pikachu will turn her son into Satan’s apprentice.

Yet the most popular solution people offer to gaming addiction is just “go outside” which is not even the beginning of a rigorous solution to the problem. It’s right up there with just saying the sun is literal magic and will fix all of your problems. We’re offered magic instead of real solutions because we’re not even sure what we should do. We cannot ignore that few, if any of us, would know what to do if a friend or loved one’s life was seriously impacted by a gaming-related disorder. We’re more versed on what to do with, say, alcoholism because our culture talks about it. People proudly announce their anniversary of sobriety. We air TV episodes about seeking help or planning interventions for alcoholism, and we’ve gotten a lot better at not making those corny TV episodes that paint alcoholics as demons and instead as simply people who do indeed have an addiction.

We need to learn about treating gaming addiction accordingly and having people who are actually involved in gaming in healthy ways lead the way to balancing life and pleasure. I cannot state enough that the influence has to come from within gaming culture itself if we’re to have any success, and that means we have to get past our stubborn belief that talking about it makes us a bigger target for non-gaming media to pin their issues on us.

I have lost friends to gaming addiction — I have even personally introduced people to new games that radically changed their personality and their routine habits. And I have wondered myself, when I allow myself that freedom and let go of my own stubbornness, whether the time I spend gaming is benefiting me emotionally, physically, and psychologically or not. The WHO has us terrified that non-gamers will start seeing even a budding interest in the format as something to be destroyed at all costs to keep the status quo of society, but what we should be afraid of is the growing gap between the gamer experience and the non-gamer understanding of it. Our hesitancy to speak honestly about gaming in moderation and gaming addiction only serves to push us further away from a point in the future where we’ll no longer be the first they jump to blame the next time there’s a school shooting.

When someone talks about gaming addiction, your first instinct should not be anger, and it should not be derision. Even if they don’t understand anything about video games. The gaming world is constantly evolving and growing, and some people haven’t handled it well at all. Those are our people — our friends, our guild mates, our team leaders, our tanks and our healers. Take care of your people and they will take care of you.

Games come in so many genres and feed into so many different psychological needs that it’s hard to even say we can talk about gaming addiction without discussing which games are involved, on a case-by-case basis, but the time to approach these conversations is now. We need to understand how getting deep into gaming (in a healthy way) can mean changing our behaviours and reprioritizing our hobbies, but should never mean behaving in such a way that we put our own lives at risk even for a second. Talk to people who do 24 hour gaming streams and come back a day after to do it all again. Talk to people who admit they barely eat more than one meal a day. Talk to people who haven’t been out of their house in a month. Talk to people who feel angrier and more hateful or have lost a feeling of self-worth because of failure at a competitive game. People who’ve started using the N-word for the first time in their life and their new gut-reaction to criticism is “kill yourself”. Someone who missed their father’s funeral because they couldn’t miss a raid.

Non-gaming media at large wants to use these people as their scapegoat. The World Health Organization’s mis-characterization of them could mean a greater stigma for even those with healthy relationships with gaming. More than anything, I implore us to be more concerned with the well-being of those who struggle with gaming addiction than our meaningless pride. Our priority should be to make our gaming communities foster healthy behaviour — society can go on shouting about violent video games and how we’re the scourge of mankind for all I care, I just don’t want to lose any friends.

After all, do you really expect me to kill this zombie horde on expert mode without a couple of good friends to back me up?