Harmful compared to what? The problem of gaming and ambiguous causal questions.

Abstract

There has been much concern regarding potential harmful effects of video game-play in the past 40 years, but limited progress in understanding its causal role. This paper discusses the basic requirements for identifying causal effects of video game-play and argues that most research to date has focused upon ambiguous causal questions. Video games and mental health are discussed from the perspective of causal inference with compound exposures; that is, exposures with multiple relevant variants that affect outcomes in different ways. Not only does exposure to video games encompass multiple different factors, but also not playing video games is equally ambiguous. Estimating causal effects of a compound exposure introduces the additional challenge of exposure-version confounding. Without a comparison of well-defined interventions, research investigating the effects of video game-play will be difficult to translate into actionable health interventions. Interventions that target games should be compared with other interventions aimed at improving the same outcomes.