An Ontological Reconstruction of Gaming Disorder: A Qualitative Meta-Phenomenological Foundation

Videogames have become one of the most prevalent forms of cultural production around the world. While their role in teaching and physical culture (“esports”) keeps growing, the health debates on videogame play, or gaming, culminated in 2019 with the World Health Organization’s historical decision to add “gaming disorder” to the International Classification of Diseases. This made gaming, next to gambling, the first and only cultural product with a diagnostic category of addictive use. The above echoes a greater conflict between culture and human development: how can science address potential problems in intensive technology use, when intensive use is also globally integrated into healthy everyday living? To build a foundation for answering this question, I pursue a Meta-Phenomenological Taxonomy of intensive gaming on three levels of lived experience: play, health, and design interaction. The taxonomy is “meta-phenomenological” in the sense that it is structured on the experiences of intensively gaming individuals. These experiences surface in distinct sociocultural contexts in interaction with specific videogame designs, which are the studied meta-areas. This interdisciplinary project is cross-cultural, longitudinal, and qualitative. Participants with and without health problems (n=240) will be followed for three years in South Korea, Slovakia, and Finland. In collaboration with clinical experts, phenomenological interviews are carried out with diaries that include gaming activity logs. The design structures of the videogames in the participants’ lives are analyzed to map out the phenomenological forest of health and play with specific design interactions. The elements are refined into a taxonomy that not only serves as a new foundation for “gaming disorders” but also situates such instances in the colorful spectrum of diverse lives and designs at large—providing grounds for sustainable future theory development at the intersection of health, culture, and design.