Can video games be addictive? One U.S. expert has no doubts.
Douglas Gentile, a psychologist at Iowa State University, has been studying the subject for decades.
"The first study I began in 1999, to basically try to show video game addiction isn't a real thing, and it turns out I was wrong!" he told CNN.
According to his research, roughly 8.5% percent of children who play video games in the United States are addicted. He found similar numbers across the world.
"Even though different researchers across the world may define the problem somewhat differently, or ask different questions in different countries with differently aged kids, we find almost the same results across the world" Gentile says.
"The estimates perhaps vary somewhat, but they all seem to come out somewhere between about 4 and 10 percent: that's the amount of gamers I would classify as addicted."
Access is key
Gentile sees the increased availability of technology and the spread of broadband internet as a key reason for this.
"A risk factor for addiction is access," he says. "It's really hard to get addicted to drugs if you can't get them.
"This is why we're seeing Internet Gaming Disorder becoming a bigger problem because now, not only has almost everyone got a computer, and almost everyone has a video game system in their home ... but now you've got a cell phone and you've got games on it and you can access games pretty much everywhere."
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