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Category: Project

Description: Gaming Disorder has been recently recognized as a diagnosable pathological condition under addiction disorders in ICD-11. However, this inclusion has been largely criticized due to the debated nature of the problematic involvement in online gaming, with adolescents and young adults being the most investigated populations. Many critics arose about approaches that directly translate concepts and problems from gambling or substance addiction to address surface problematic gaming signals. As an alternative approach, several authors conceptualized problematic gaming as part of a dysfunctional compensatory process, promoted by the interaction between psychosocial or emotion regulation difficulties and motivations to play videogames. Among these motivations, the need to "escape" or "escapism" emerged as a main reason to immerse in virtual experiences. Moreover, it emerged as a fundamental construct involved in maladaptive online gaming, possibly connected with dissociative process. Nevertheless, our understanding of escapism in video games is fragmented, and its relation to mechanisms of compensation and dissociation through play has only been hinted at and never systematized. This is particularly concerning given the wide employment of these concepts in the current literature on this topic. Thus, the present project aims at 1) Reorganize the knowledge about escapism and related process (e.g. avoidance, dissociation, relaxation, emotion regulation) along an hypothesized continuum between compensation and dissociation via online games; 2) validate a clinically sound measurement instrument based on this framework, and 3) explore research and clinical application of the new measure.