From gaming addiction to healthy gamer: Dr K's story

Why is gaming addictive? How do you know if it's a problem? And what should parents do if they're worried about their kids' gaming habits? This week, psychiatrist and author Dr Alok Kanojia (Dr K) unpacks gaming addiction. Long before Dr K was the co-founder of Healthy Gamer, he had his own story of addiction — playing for 20 hours a day and failing out of uni. How did he turn his own struggles into a global online community supporting gamers? And what practical advice does he have for gamers (and the parents raising them) who want to find a balance? Guest: Dr Alok Kanojia (Dr K)PsychiatristAuthor, How To Raise A Healthy Gamer https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781761561023/Co-founder, Healthy Gamer https://www.healthygamer.gg/dr-alok-kanojia Credits: Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Roi HubermanMore information: Inside Perth's gaming addiction clinic — the first in a public hospital in Australia https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-11/video-game-addiction-clinic-fiona-stanley-hospital/105758590To explore more great episodes from the award-winning psychology podcast All in the Mind with host Sana Qadar, download the ABC Listen app (Australia) or search 'ABC All in the Mind podcast' wherever you get your podcasts. There you'll find more episodes on mental health, trauma, attachment theory, wellness hacks, and family relationships. You'll also hear interviews with experts like Esther Perel, Billy Garvey and Ethan Kross. All in the Mind is created for ABC's Radio National by specialist journalists and reporters at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:07Speaker 01

  Hey, Tegan Taylor here from Life Matters. When you think of grandparents, what comes to mind? Maybe a secret stash of lollies? Well, grandparents aren't just spoiling the grandkids anymore. They're raising them and paying the bills. This July on Radio National, The Grandparent Trap explores the joys and pressures of being a modern grandparent. The Grandparent Trap and much more on Life Matters. Search for Life Matters on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  They can see life passing them by. And the sand in the hourglass is like running out. And the really scary thing, I sort of felt that too, is as you start to feel worse about your life, there is one thing that helps you, that soothes that feeling, which is playing video games. And so that's the vicious cycle of addiction.

• 1:03Sana Qadar?

  If you are a gamer, you might know who Dr. K is.

• 1:06Speaker 04

  All right, guys. Today, we're going to talk about how Dr. K stays healthy. So I have a lot of responsibilities in life. I'm sure you all do too.

• 1:13Sana Qadar?

  Dr. Alok Knogia is his real name. And in addition to being a huge gamer himself, he is...

• 1:19Speaker 02

  A Harvard-trained psychiatrist who focuses on mental health in the digital generation. And we have a platform called Healthy Gamer, where we help people with tech addiction, media addiction, things like that.

• 1:30Sana Qadar?

  His audience is huge. More than 300,000 followers on Insta, 700,000 on Twitch and 3.3 million on YouTube.

• 1:41Sana Qadar?

  But 20-odd years ago, he was a floundering pre-med student addicted to gaming.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  I failed out of college because I was playing too many video games. And as I started failing, it became harder to go to class and video games became more of an escape. I was playing for 16 to 20 hours a day, basically seven days a week.

• 2:03Sana Qadar?

  Oh, my God, 20, up to 20 hours.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there were some days that I would sleep. I would go to bed at like 8:00 AM and I would wake up at noon and then I would continue to game. I would order fried rice in two-pound segments, one kg. And then I would, I would just fuel myself throughout the day by eating like fried rice. I think I started to become addicted to games when I was in high school. And then in high school, I had enough of like a structure around me to like keep me going to school and things. But once I had kind of the freedom of, of college and once I had unrestricted access to gaming, it just got really bad.

• 2:43Sana Qadar?

  Now, in his 40s and by all measures, pretty successful, Dr. K wants people to learn how to have a healthier relationship with gaming. Because gaming isn't de facto a bad thing or a waste of time.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Soldiers who play video games have a 20% higher fluid IQ than soldiers who don't. So gaming really does teach some degree of problem solving.

• 3:05Sana Qadar?

  But if you are a gamer who can feel sand filtering through the hourglass of your life, or you have someone in your life you're worried about, this episode is for you. Because we're breaking down what exactly makes video games so addictive.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  You have to understand that our brain is wired to reward things that help us survive.

• 3:25Sana Qadar?

  What to do when you have a problem and how to parent a kid who might have one.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  You can't be sober for someone else. So this is a big mistake that I think parents make.

• 3:36Sana Qadar?

  I'm Sana Qadar and from ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind.

• 3:47Sana Qadar?

  Okay, so you're at this point where you're gaming up to 20 hours a week. You're eating fried rice.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  A day.

• 3:53Sana Qadar?

  20 hours a day. Oh, my gosh. That's why I freaked out at first and then I thought, wait, no, I misunderstood. It was 20 hours a week.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:59Sana Qadar?

  You're not sleeping when you're doing that.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Yes, but you're, you're, remember, you're like 18, 19. You can get by with four hours of sleep.

• 4:07Sana Qadar?

  Yeah, how was your mental health?

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Terrible. So I, I remember I had to game to the point of absolute exhaustion. Because if I tried to go to sleep and I was awake for even five minutes, I would get a flood of thoughts about how I was ruining my life.

• 4:24Sana Qadar?

  Oh, my God.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  And so I had to play until I was so tired that I would hit the pillow and I would like pass out.

• 4:31Sana Qadar?

  And how long did this level of gaming continue for?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I mean, so at least one year. I then got put on academic probation and I was going to get kicked out of university. In the second year, I was still quite addicted, but I was able to not fail every class my second year.

• 4:49Sana Qadar?

  The thing is, Alok knew within about a month of starting to game this hard, that he was in a bad place, that he was addicted. And his parents soon knew he had a problem as well.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so, you know, I think my parents were very good parents. They were very loving, very caring. They tried like tough love. They tried being like loving and supportive and like nothing was working. And so, you know, my dad, after my second year of college, and then he was basically like, look, this isn't working. So we got to try something else. And he said, you need to go to India. We had a very contentious relationship for those couple of years because I knew something needed to change and like something drastic because the addiction was really severe and I was not able to like get out of it myself.

• 5:37Sana Qadar?

  So Alok listened to his dad. He quit school and he went off to an ashram. And that's where he learned to notice his desires.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I was there for three months, was doing yoga and meditation for basically six to 12 hours a day, learned a lot, started studying, like understanding the mind from a yogic perspective and absolutely fell in love with it.

• 5:59Sana Qadar?

  How did your brain cope and adapt with like going from gaming non-stop to meditating and doing yoga?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  The first two weeks I was there were probably the worst weeks of my life because I was like crying every day, like deeply, deeply, deeply depressed. And then after about two weeks, I sort of got used to it. And then by the end of the month, I realized like, no one ever taught me like how I work. We have classes for chemistry and biology and mathematics, but no one ever teaches you, here are your desires, where, why can't we control our desires? Where do our desires come from? And I started to learn about myself in an incredibly satisfying way.

• 6:36Sana Qadar?

  At the end of his three-month stint, Alok thought, I want to become a monk too.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  And my teachers were quite wise. They said, becoming a monk is about giving up your life, letting go of your attachments. And they're like, you have nothing worth giving up. Go get a doctoral degree and then at the age of 30, if you still want to be a monk, then you can build something worth giving up and then give it up.

• 6:59Sana Qadar?

  That is wise. That's interesting.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:02Sana Qadar?

  This time, Alok listened to the monks. He went back to the States, went to med school, specialised in psychiatry and then addiction. And by the time that 30 hit, he no longer wanted to give up his whole life and become a monk. And around 2018, he had another idea.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was working as an addiction psychiatrist at Harvard and like basically there wasn't much going on with tech addiction. And I was also highly concerned about young men. And this is also back in 2018, right? So I think we now know that there's a problem with young men and the manosphere and, and all that kind of stuff. So I basically felt strongly that there's a generation of young men that are being like left behind or a generation of gamers, not, not just young men. And so I decided to start focusing on that around the time that I took a step back from my job. I was working in private practice and stuff. So I kind of shifted a little bit, beginning with nights and weekends, and I started just

• 8:01Speaker 02

  streaming on Twitch and trying to teach what I had learned about mental health to gamers on Twitch.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  So sometimes people focus on the actions and sometimes people focus on the outcomes. I think that gamers, because games sort of train our brain to do this, they, they care about the outcome, right?

• 8:19Speaker 02

  And so that just grew really rapidly, especially during the pandemic.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  And so tell me, Hayden, what, what are we talking about today?

• 8:27Speaker 05

  I'm pretty sure we're talking about me being an ins up.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Pandemic hit and then we were the fastest growing stream on Twitch for a few months.

• 8:36Sana Qadar?

  Were you already using Twitch before that point or like?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a gamer. Yeah, hell, yeah.

• 8:41Sana Qadar?

  So you're the perfect person to reach these people.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so, you know, someone said like, this is kind of crazy. You're like trying to teach people that video game addiction on a gaming platform? And they were like, it's like you're holding an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a bar. And I was like, where else do you want to hold it?

• 8:59Sana Qadar?

  That is interesting though, because watching some of your videos on YouTube where, you know, I don't really go on Twitch, but they have like a video game, like aesthetic in terms of when you watch other people playing video games on YouTube, they have like the, the section where those comments are scrolling through. You have the main section where like the, the video game action is happening and then there's another box where the gamer is. Like you've got that whole layout going on.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:20Sana Qadar?

  So you're trying to hijack the aesthetic for this purpose.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  I mean, so, so I, I think this was, you know, my experience and I think it's many people who are addicted to things, especially technology and video games. They can see life passing them by. And the sand in the hourglass is like running out. That's a really strong feeling for, for people who are addicted to video games. Is like, if you think about, you know, I, I played a bunch of games in high school. Now I don't know how to talk to girls. Now I'm in college and now I, I'm falling further behind. A lot of people start dating in college. I didn't date in college. Now I'm 25. I've never been on a date, you know, never kissed someone. And so like, it's, it's really scary how their, their life becomes like a light at the end of the tunnel that is like slowly disappearing.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  And the really scary thing, I, I sort of felt that too, is as you start to feel worse about your life, there is one thing that helps you, that soothes that feeling, which is playing video games. And so that's the vicious cycle of addiction.

• 10:23Sana Qadar?

  On that point, on addiction, have you ever wondered what exactly is it that makes games so addictive? Like, what kind of psychological buttons they push? Turns out, a lot of them.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Why is a game fun?

• 10:38Sana Qadar?

  Are you asking me?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:39Sana Qadar?

  Oh, God. It's interactive. There's little challenges. I don't know. I literally haven't gamed since I was like 12, playing Mario Kart with my younger brother.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Okay. Okay. So let me ask you a different question. This is annoying because I'm a Socratic teacher and I'm a psychiatrist. Okay. So why is anything fun?

• 10:58Sana Qadar?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  So like, think about like, you know, when you were a kid, or if you see a kid playing, like, why have human beings evolved fun?

• 11:05Sana Qadar?

  It's connection.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Okay. So animals also have fun, right? When animals play, what are they doing?

• 11:13Sana Qadar?

  They're interacting with each other. Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  And what kind of interaction? When two kittens are playing together, are they like focused on forming social bonds?

• 11:22Sana Qadar?

  No, it's kind of, it's not necessarily, there's a goal in mind. They're just kind of improvising, I guess.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if we look at like, the basic goal of fun, it's actually to train the skills that we will need to survive.

• 11:36Sana Qadar?

  Ah, okay.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Right? So like, a cat will like, pounce on you?

• 11:40Sana Qadar?

  Right.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Right? So if we look at a simple game like tag, what's the evolutionary advantage? And you can look across all cultures across the globe. Everyone plays tag.

• 11:49Sana Qadar?

  This is so funny. I have a six-year-old who's constantly playing tag with me, and I've never thought about the evolutionary function of tag.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Right. Why does he like tag? Right? So it's fun.

• 11:57Sana Qadar?

  Yeah.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  But what is it training him to do?

• 12:00Sana Qadar?

  Run away from danger.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And also to chase things. Right? So this is really important to understand. If you want to understand why games are addictive, you have to understand that our brain is wired to reward things that help us survive.

• 12:15Sana Qadar?

  Right.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  And what happened with video games is people stumbled into all of the different dimensions that are important for survival.

• 12:23Sana Qadar?

  Wow, okay.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  The reason video games are more addictive is because they are slowly activating more circuits in our brain. I wrote a book called How to Raise a Healthy Gamer, and I kind of explained this because I think it's really important for parents to understand why your kid is addicted to video games. And we basically have all of these psychological needs. So one example of a need is mastery. Human beings like to get better at stuff. It is intrinsically satisfying to be good at something. Connection, right? So we like connecting with other human beings. So what's happened is video games used to be addictive because, sure, you could master the game, but then along came a game called World of Warcraft. And

• 13:06Speaker 02

  now, in order to play this game, you had to band together with 39 real human beings and take on a challenge that a single human being cannot win. So over time, what's happening with games is that they activate the different circuits of our brain that are important to us. They give us a sense of challenge. They give us a sense of mastery. They give us a sense of identity. So I may have been failing out of college and a loser in college, but when it came to the Warcraft III North American ladder, I was one of the best 100 players in North America.

• 13:40Sana Qadar?

  Wow.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  So gamers will have a sense of identity. That becomes their sense of identity, becomes their sense of pride. And having a sense of identity is like, important for human beings. Does that kind of make sense?

• 13:51Sana Qadar?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what video games basically do is they satisfy our psychological needs in an artificial way. And that's why they're so addictive. So a lot of parents don't understand is, when a parent sees their child playing a game, it's not a game. It's the way that I interact with my peers. It's the source of my social connections. It's the source of my self-worth. It's the one thing that I can be good at when the rest of life is hard. So games are fundamentally addictive because they basically satisfy our psychological needs.

• 14:25Sana Qadar?

  Right. That is really fascinating. Like, that's the most comprehensive kind of explanation I've heard. So my obvious follow-up to that is what your advice to parents would be. But before I ask that, actually, what I want to know is, how then can parents assess whether their kid's gaming is at a normal, fun, okay, level, or whether they should be concerned about how much their kid is gaming?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if it causes a problem, it is a problem.

• 14:50Sana Qadar?

  Okay. But then I guess it's going to be different for every family, if certain parents are more strict about it. Right, yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  So I wouldn't say strictness of the parents. I think you're correct. Parents may think it's a problem, but if we look at the psychiatric definition of addiction, or any illness, it's impairment of function. So is it interfering with their school? Is it interfering with your professional life? Is it interfering with your relationships? Is it interfering with your physical health? Is it interfering with your mental health? So if it's causing problems in any of those dimensions, it is a problem.

• 15:20Sana Qadar?

  And so then what is your advice to parents who are like, oh, yeah, these are issues with my kid. How do I claw this habit back?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So first thing, I learned this the hard way, after five years of epic failing, you can't be sober for someone else. So this is the big mistake that I think parents make. And it was beautiful in your question, how do I claw it back? How do I make my child not addicted?

• 15:47Sana Qadar?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  So my whole approach is like, there's usually antagonistic relationship between parent and child. And as long as they're fighting you, it's not going to work. So I'm a big believer in teaching restraint, not restriction.

• 16:01Sana Qadar?

  Okay.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  And so a big part of how you do that is to understand why your child is playing the game. If the game is my source of social connection, it's going to be really hard to get me to quit while I don't have social connection anywhere else. So what I encourage parents to do is, first of all, talk to their children about what is so appealing about the game. Understand which psychological needs it's fulfilling, and then start building alternatives to those needs. Because most people who are addicted to video games don't want to be. Right? So if I feel embarrassed about the person I am in real life, let's say I'm an overweight teenager with acne, and I don't like the person I am in the real

• 16:45Speaker 02

  world. It's nice to retreat into video games. The solution to that problem is, your kid wants to be in shape. They want to be physically attractive. They want to be able to hold up their head up high. And when you support that goal, and you're like, okay, well, if you don't like the way that your body is, like, what can we do about that? Let's go to martial arts. Let's learn how to defend ourselves. Like, let's get in shape. And it's amazing how much the addiction just sloughs away, once their needs are being met elsewhere.

• 17:15Sana Qadar?

  I can imagine there might be some parents who hear that and think, you know, that's easier said than done. I've tried to pull them away and do other activities in the real world, and they're extremely resistant, and I'm at the end of my tether, I don't know what to do. What would you say to someone who's feeling like that?

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's a huge part of How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. So there's a whole chapter on dealing with resistance. Parents are usually pretty good at understanding their kids, but parents need a new skill set to compete against the multi-billion-dollar corporations that are trying to addict your child. And so parents are outgunned. The good news is that there's a lot they can do if you learn how to adopt a stance of curiosity. So asking what questions? What do you think about gaming? Like, what do you enjoy about gaming? Because most kids, you know, think that you're there to take their game away, so they're going to kind of clam up. And if you stop trying to get them to change, they will open up. So this is, this is one of these like, weird Eastern

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Zen kind of things, right? Where it's like, the harder you squeeze water, the more it runs out of your fist. So this is one of those things where, where if you stop trying to push the kid, and you become a safe harbor for their concerns, they will start to volunteer the problems that they have with games. And this is where you have to do something really important as a parent. The moment your kid says, yeah, I don't want to play so many games, you're tempted to take that ammo loaded into the chamber and be like, ha ha! So let's stop. No. What you want to do is, oh, so you don't, so you don't like playing games? What do you want to do about that? Right? You make them responsible. And that's

• 18:56Speaker 02

  because what parents end up doing is, the more responsibility they take for fixing the problem, the less responsibility your kid takes.

• 19:04Sana Qadar?

  Yeah, right. Okay. God, parenting is so hard. I feel like the longer I do this show, the more I'm like, oh, my God, this is tricky.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, it's only hard because we don't learn how to do it. So we have a lot of instinct going for us, but just like anything else, like, what's the difference between something that's easy and hard? You know, it's changing a tire hard?

• 19:24Sana Qadar?

  I mean, I don't know how to do it, so yes, but if you learn it, yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:31Sana Qadar?

  Okay, I also want to ask about if there's someone listening who is themselves a gamer, you know, I'm thinking a 20, 30, 40-year-old. If someone recognizes themselves as being a bit addicted to gaming as they are listening to you talk, what can someone do for themselves? Like, what's the first step they can take to start curbing that addiction?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  I would say the most important, well, I mean, there's so many first steps. So I'm going to kind of give you two answers. So the first is to understand why you game, right? Really think about what is it about this that makes it so easy for me to do? Because I'm a big believer in like self-understanding. And now I'll give you, I think, the better answer for a 30-minute show. The skill that most gamers lack is the tolerance of boredom. So you know how like when you feel hungry, that's tied to a physiologic signal? Like, if your blood sugar is low, you feel hungry.

• 20:31Sana Qadar?

  Yep.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Feeling bored is your brain's craving of dopamine. So people don't realize that when your brain has like low levels of dopamine transmission, because if you think about it, when I feel hungry, I get attracted to eat things, right? So when I feel bored, I get attracted to a device, which will then activate my dopamine circuitry. So boredom is actually dopamine withdrawal. If you want to resist gaming, if you want to conquer gaming, the most important thing is to learn how to be bored.

• 21:01Sana Qadar?

  This feels very applicable to social media as well, I suppose.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 21:05Sana Qadar?

  Is there, like, is all the advice for gaming pretty much the same for social media, or does it differ in any main way?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  So I think there is a large portion of advice that is shared between all technology addictions, and all addictions for that matter. But what's really interesting is there are unique effects on your brain from social media versus video games. So a good example of this is, social media usage leads to way more body dysmorphia, leads to way more like concern about your appearance and your identity, whereas video gaming usually doesn't lead to body dysmorphia. So there are specific things. So there are certain like meditation practices and things like that that I teach for people who are addicted to social media that have to do with resolving our ego, conquering our ego. Those are sometimes less important for gamers.

• 21:59Sana Qadar?

  Now, one thing we haven't acknowledged yet is that while the strategies that Alok, Dr. Kay, mentioned a moment ago are all things you can try on your own, on yourself or with your kids, sometimes what you need is real, serious, clinical intervention. But in Australia, unless you can afford private treatment, there is only one dedicated public gaming disorders clinic. It's at the Fiona Stanley Hospital in WA. And that's a problem because research from Macquarie University that was published in 2022 found that about 3% of Australian kids can be classified as having gaming disorder, and about 10% meet

• 22:39Sana Qadar?

  the criteria for hazardous gaming. But there's another group that Alok is increasingly worried about, not just for gaming addiction, but for screen addiction in general.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  I actually think there's an epidemic of gaming addiction in the elderly that they don't realize.

• 22:56Sana Qadar?

  Oh, tell me about that.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is really interesting. So if you talk to people who are, you know, have young kids now, oftentimes their experience when they visit grandpa and grandma is that they're on the iPad.

• 23:07Sana Qadar?

  Yes, I've noticed this among grandparents in my life. They're on the phone a lot, yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like tech addiction in the elderly, like, so, you know, I kind of tried to sound the alarm back in 2015 about gaming addiction. And now I'm telling you that we're gonna, in the next 10 years, we're gonna see that the elderly have a severe tech addiction problem.

• 23:29Sana Qadar?

  Yeah, the boomer of social media scroll addiction is real.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely, right? It's scary because the elderly generation really has no tech literacy. So I think, you know, the people who are millennials were sort of like the best off, because we started using technology before it was super, super, super addictive. And then we kind of had, like, we sort of know, we have insight into like how addictive things have gotten.

• 23:54Sana Qadar?

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm petrified of adding any more social media things to my repertoire, because I'm like, no, one is enough.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Whereas if you, if you talk to one of your grandparents, they may be scared about all kinds of things. But I don't think that they think social media is going to be damaging to them.

• 24:11Sana Qadar?

  Yeah, yeah. The other question I wanted to ask, you mentioned how in 2018, when you were sort of at the beginning of Healthy Gamer, you were worried about young men and the manosphere, which was in a much earlier phase back then. As the manosphere has gotten more intense in the years since, have you found it harder to reach young men with your content, or they're more resistant? Or like, what have you noticed has evolved in that time since 2018?

• 24:36Speaker 02

  So, actually, I found it's way easier. So I think the appetite, so I know people are bleak, but, you know, I think our growth has been pretty large. And I think that people are starting to realize that kind of the toxic manosphere is like not working. So there are, there are lots of young men looking for guidance, and they don't necessarily want to go the toxic route, you know? So if there is an alternative, then people are more than happy to engage with it. So I think the manosphere used to be like very anti-therapy, now it's very pro-therapy, right? Now it's like, okay, if you're having relationship problems, like, you need to work on yourself first. So it's been quite actually heartening

• 25:21Speaker 02

  to me. I think things are moving in the right direction, interestingly enough.

• 25:26Sana Qadar?

  And so what is your relationship with gaming now? How many hours a day or a week do you game?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  It depends on the week, but anywhere from like 2 to 20.

• 25:35Sana Qadar?

  Okay, hours a week, not a day?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a week. So I mean, I play video games with my kids. But usually, you know, I think gaming is a source of recreation. And it becomes a problem when it stops being recreation. When it becomes the way that I manage my anxiety, when it becomes the way that I, you know, feel good about myself, when it becomes the way that I numb myself, then it's a problem.

• 25:58Sana Qadar?

  What are you playing?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Right now, I'm playing Monster Hunter Stories 3 and Total War Warhammer and Dota 2.

• 26:07Sana Qadar?

  Right, a whole different language to me.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are, these are like real nerd games, like this is like true gamer.

• 26:14Sana Qadar?

  And what do you play with your kids?

• 26:15Speaker 02

  So I'm playing Monster Hunter with my kids. They're 8 and 10. So one really interesting thing is I use games to teach them parenting and life skills. So this is something that I kind of stumbled into. But, so my kids have recently been getting into fights. And so one of the things that I taught them was like, in a video game, like, when you cooperate with people, your abilities get stronger. So now I'll ask them, you know, when they make like a comment, like a cutting comment, what do you think that does to your kinship? So kinship is the statistic in the, in the game, that the higher your kinship goes, the stronger your abilities become. And it's really interesting how using games

• 26:55Speaker 02

  as an analogy, like, really helps them understand. I had them play a cooperative game called Split Fiction, and it was really beautiful to see. At the beginning of the game, they're fighting, but then they have to learn how to cooperate.

• 27:09Sana Qadar?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  And then they get better at communication. It's very interesting.

• 27:12Sana Qadar?

  And so, yeah, I guess as a final message to, you know, people who might be listening who are like, oh, God, I never want to deal with my kid being addicted to gaming. My plan is just to never let them go near it, or, you know, be very firm about it. What would you say about, like, what are the potential benefits of gaming versus how to watch out for the harms?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  So there's a really interesting study that the United States Department of Defense did in 2015, that found that soldiers who play video games have a 20% higher fluid IQ than soldiers who don't. So gaming really does teach some degree of problem solving. Nowadays, it used to be that parents would be like, like, my dad was like, Alok, you need to do studies, not to play with time playing games. If you need to have a job one day.

• 27:56Sana Qadar?

  I can imagine him perfectly.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and the scary thing is like, the, one of the most lucrative careers you can have now is to be like an esports professional.

• 28:05Sana Qadar?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  So gaming is now a career, right? So that argument doesn't work. I think that the biggest advantages, I think, are sort of like if you play with your kids, I'm pretty sure that you'll learn a lot about them and about the potential benefits.

• 28:25Sana Qadar?

  That is psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia, better known online as Dr. Kay from Healthy Gamer. Now, if you want to see more All in the Mind, not just hear it, we've been clipping up parts of our interviews on social media. You can find them on the ABC Health Instagram, at ABC Health, or my own Instagram, at Sana underscore Qadar. And you can also head to YouTube and search All in the Mind on the ABC Science page. That is it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr, senior producer James Bullen, and sound engineer Roi Huberman. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.