The World Health Organization just added "Gaming Disorder" to its list of diagnosis.

Image Source: World Health Organization

People are not happy about it.

Let's start with the facts of the news and then my opinion so we can get this discussion going:

For starters, this is a big deal, the WHO has not introduced revisions to its International Classification of Diseases (ICD) since 1992, that's a long time, and with this new one, the ICD-11, "gaming disorder" has been added with the following criteria to identify it:

From the World Health Organization through Polygon:

Gaming disorder is characterized by a pattern of persistent or
recurrent gaming behavior (‘digital gaming’ or ‘video-gaming’), which may be online (i.e., over the internet) or offline, manifested by:

1. impaired control over gaming (e.g., onset, frequency, intensity, duration, termination, context);
2. increasing priority given to gaming to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests and daily activities; and
3. continuation or escalation of
   gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.

The behavior pattern is of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning. The pattern of gaming behavior may be continuous or episodic and recurrent. The gaming behavior and other features are normally evident over a period of at least 12 months in order for a diagnosis to be assigned, although the required duration may be shortened if all diagnostic requirements are met and symptoms are severe.

So, this is not in effect and it won't be until 2022 but still, many sources say the evidence on this disorder is still very inconclusive. I think we can all agree there can be instances of videogame addiction and some of us might even have seen it in someone we know or maybe in ourselves (I usually can't stay for that prolonged amount of time paying attention to one single thing, maybe a couple of days binging on a game? Yes. But months? I believe that's very difficult to get around to, personally) but it's also not something we encounter commonly. That degree of addiction doesn't seem to be prevalent enough in people for medical experts to conclude it's a full-on disorded and treat it as such, however let's explore a bit what has been researched so far:

The American Psychiatric Association added Internet Gaming Disorder to their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013, but only as a condition to be further studied, nothing conclusive yet. Jane Barnett and Mark Coulson's Virtually real: A psychological perspective on massively multiplayer online games. journal article expresses concern over how the gaming community and gaming in general is understood and how that created fear and exaggerated responses towards the issue and Richard Wood's paper for the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction named: Problems with the Concept of Video Game “Addiction”: Some Case Study Examples talk about how equating videogame addiction to gambling or similar issues is approaching the subject poorly and might inflate estimates by grouping different things together.

However many governments around the world view and treat this issue as severe and endangering, leading to pressure from them on medical organizations to create ways to deal with it. The WHO has denied any pressure from anyone and they state that their decision was based on thorough review of global evidence.

So what are your thoughts on the matter?

PUBG will debut Event Passes

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Image Source: PUBG Corp.

PUBG will finally add an Event Pass system that allows players to track their progression, complete missions and move forward by completing specific goals.

There are a lot of different missions, split into Daily, Weekly and map-specific, and the event will run for about a month and the details of the system are as follows:

From PUBG's Steam page:

"The Event Pass is designed to reflect the opinions of players who wanted a trackable progression-related system, and at the same time allows you to unlock new content in PUBG in a way that is different from the crate and key system.

Just like the crate and key system, you’ll be able to get rewards in the Event Pass system regardless of whether you made a purchase. If you haven’t paid for the pass, you can temporarily unlock many of the items (and earn one special item permanently). However, you can also permanently unlock a ton of exclusive reward items by paying to unlock the pass and completing certain missions to “level up” your pass. If you’re hesitant about buying the Pass, but want to play the missions, you’re free to do that. And your mission progress is always tracked, so you can buy the Event Pass late in the event and still get all the rewards you’ve earned."

The pass hits on Friday as well as the new map: Sanhok so be sure to check it out!

Rocket League will ALSO debut passes.

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Image Source: Psyonix, Rocket League

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Psyonix's Rocket League will also debut Rocket Passes that unlock rewards as you progress through the game based on XP earned, without affecting the regular XP progression system that's already in the game.

From the Rocket League Rocket Pass page:

"Rocket Pass is a brand new, time-limited progression system that will give you several ways to earn new content in Rocket League. Our goal is to offer several Rocket Passes every year, with an emphasis on new, unique content for each Pass. This will not replace the current XP-based progression system and we’ll have more news on those XP plans and changes later this week."

There will be two types of pass: Free and Premium, and the Free one comes with automatically unlockable rewards, the Premium one will have even more content for $9.99 or the regional equivalent.

Tiers are unlockable as you level up during the pass event, but you can also buy them to level up and unlock the Tier content, and once you've earned all possible Tiers you'll start earning Pro-Tiers with custom versions of the previous Tier rewards.

The Rocket Pass is coming later this year with no definitive date yet.

And that is it for now but be sure to be on the lookout for our articles, thank you very much for reading! See you next time~

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