The NHS is now treating video game disorder as a mental health issue – here’s what treatment can entail.

The best games have always kept players hooked: from Space Invaders guzzling down billions of quarters in the early ’80s, through to League of Legends clocking 125 million hours in Twitch views last month. If a new release is branded “addictive” in a review, it’s a form of high praise – its gameplay making it impossible to put the controller down.But for some unfortunate gamers, they experience addiction in the clinical sense. Gaming disorder is now classed as a mental health condition by the World Health Organization. Sufferers experience impaired control over their gaming to the extent that they prioritise it over everything else – badly impacting their personal, social, school, work or family life.