Is your child’s video game fun or a hiding place?

The same game can recharge a child or hide a pain they cannot put into words. Before banning it, it is worth asking who is in charge, what the screen is paying for, and who had a phone at the Sunday lunch table.

English edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.

If you have ever switched off the house wi-fi in the middle of a match and watched your child storm out of the bedroom shouting that you ruined everything, that his friends were waiting, that you understand nothing, you have probably asked the question Eduardo Casarotto, the creator of Virtology, says he hears most from parents today: is this addiction?

It is a fair question. But it usually comes before two others that help more. The first: if his best friend invites him to a birthday party on Saturday, does he go, or does he stay in the game? The second: at Sunday lunch, who had a phone at the table? In the book O Que Nos Prende (What Holds Us), Casarotto tells of putting these two questions to a mother who had switched off the router at half past eleven at night. She laughed, a little embarrassed, and answered: “Everyone, doctor. Me too.”

Before going on, two things need to be clear. This article is not against video games. Plenty of healthy children and adults play, and playing with friends can be one of the best moments of the week. And this article is not about blaming parents. Pride and selfishness, which come up later, are systems every human brain has: yours, your child’s and mine. The question here is a different one: when does the same game stop being fun and become a hiding place?

What medicine calls a disorder

Gaming disorder exists and has a name. In the ICD-11, the World Health Organization’s classification of diseases, it has the code 6C51 and sits in the same group as gambling disorder (Billieux and colleagues, 2024). For a diagnosis, professionals look at three things: loss of control over gaming, the growing priority it takes over the rest of life, and continuing or increasing to play despite the harm. The pattern has to seriously impair personal, family, social or school life, and it usually lasts at least twelve months.

And there is an important detail: screen time, on its own, does not define the disorder. The WHO makes clear that it affects a small share of people who play. A review that pooled studies from around the world arrived at a prevalence of 3.05%. When the authors kept only the studies with the most rigorous sampling, the figure dropped to 1.96% (Stevens and colleagues, 2021). That is a lot of people, and it is real. But it is a long way from “a whole generation of addicts.”

Casarotto agrees with both sides. Not every excess is addiction. A teenager who plays for four hours on Saturday with friends is not dependent. And, at the same time, there are people who have lost school, sleep and relationships to a screen. That is why the question he asks is not how many hours.

Who is in charge

His question is this: who is in charge? Does the person choose the screen, or are they pulled by it?

In practice, you can observe it. Can he stop when he agreed to stop, or does he “look up and find he’s already there”? When he goes without the game, does he feel a lack he can bear, or an alarm through his whole body? If the cue is giving the orders, the notification, the time of day, the invitation to a match, the behavior is no longer being chosen.

And there is a third sign, a subtler one: what the screen is doing to other people. When the flesh-and-blood friend loses out to the match, when grandma gets no reply while the stranger in the game gets one instantly, something is in charge more than it should be. The birthday question does not measure hours. It measures the place the game holds among people.

The same game in two bands

Virtology describes seven Evolution Bands, the degrees of maturity with which each person lives each area of life. And one of the most useful ideas for parents is that the same object can sit in different bands. The video game, on its own, says nothing. What says something is the place it holds.

Casarotto separates healthy fun from pathological fun. The pathological kind is the one a person uses to escape reality, pain, to forget they have a purpose. The healthy kind is something else:

He goes further. Real fun, for Virtology, is when life becomes playful: the person plays with what they are doing, whether it is a video game, a conversation or study, and it becomes a direct expression of who they are, with no mask, no proving and no demands. The video game is not the problem. The problem is the video game that has turned into escape, proof and pressure.

Those three words help you look at your child. Escape is when the game serves to not be somewhere: in the house where the parents fight, at the school where he is mocked, in the bedroom where he feels alone. Proof is when the ranking decides how much he is worth. Pressure is when losing a match becomes humiliation, and the anger at defeat is bigger than the defeat. A game that recharges leaves a child more available for life afterwards. A game that hides makes life afterwards harder to bear.

A screen designed to hold on

Underneath every compulsion, Virtology places what it calls the Lack: the background feeling of not being whole, which every human being has and each of us tries to cover in some way. A child who feels lonely, who does not feel seen, who does not know what to do with boredom, feels that hole more loudly. And Casarotto makes a distinction that matters for parents:

And it was designed to be a lid. In the brain there is a reward pathway that carries dopamine from the middle of the brain to the nucleus accumbens, a structure deep in the brain, below the forehead, that notes what is worth repeating. The neuroscientists Terry Robinson and Kent Berridge showed that dopamine does not produce pleasure. It produces wanting. With repetition, wanting grows stronger and easier to trigger, while liking stays the same or decreases. The person comes to want more and more of something they like less and less.

The screen is the perfect cue machine, the cue being the signal that triggers that wanting. The notification, the little sound, the red dot in the corner of the app. And short videos never end, because there is always another one. The brain never gets the signal that says “enough.” In games, the peak is the win: leveling up, appearing at the top of the ranking, getting the rare item. The brain learns fast, because the device is one gesture away all day long. Phone in hand comes to mean relief. A match won comes to mean being somebody.

Many games also sell loot boxes: the player pays without knowing what will come out. It might be the rare item, it might be nothing. Casarotto calls this betting in different clothes. It is the same logic as the slot machine, which I explained in The “almost won” that keeps you betting. According to the TIC Kids Online Brasil 2025 survey, 21% of internet users aged 11 to 17 in Brazil have spent money in online games to advance a level or get items. Among 15- to 17-year-olds, 24% (Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil; Cetic.br, 2025). It is the entry door to the logic of betting before the age of 18.

Science outside Virtology is currently debating how much the screen causes and how much it only reveals. For Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, a hyperconnected childhood is causing an epidemic of mental disorders (Haidt, 2024). The researcher Odgers replied in the journal Nature that studies find null, small and mixed associations, and that perhaps young people who are already suffering use social media more, rather than the other way round, although she agrees that the crisis is real and that platforms need to change (Odgers, 2024). Casarotto sums it up: Haidt sees the strength of the lid, Odgers sees the pain that was already underneath, and clinical practice brings the two together. In Brazil, 26.1% of students aged 13 to 17 feel, most of the time, that nobody cares about them (IBGE Educa, 2026). The pain came first. The screen was made to hold it.

What the game pays him for

Virtology maps 51 human needs. Looking through them, you can see why games take hold so well in some children. They pay, at the same time, for several needs that may be going hungry:

• Competition and Importance. Beating the other player, having your name at the top of the ranking.
• Fun and Experiencing Emotions. The adrenaline of the match, the laughter with the group.
• Companionship and Co-presence. Friends in the headset, the voice on the other side at two in the morning, which for many teenagers is the only company they have.
• Control. In the game, he knows the rules and he decides. In real life, he often does not feel that.
• A Change of Environment. In there, he leaves the house where the parents fight, the school where he is mocked, the bedroom where he feels alone.

And the screen even imitates more mature needs. Leveling up imitates the need for Accomplishment, Achievement, Bringing Plans to Fruition, and Legacy: it gives a feeling of progress without going anywhere. The avatar imitates Individuality: I choose who I am, with a filter.

But the peak does not cover the Lack. He wins the match, and at school he is still the boy nobody calls. The next day, he does not really feel recognized, or welcomed, or important. So he goes back to the game, and the brain, which recorded one more pleasure, already knows the way. For parents, the most useful question may be this one: which of these needs is my child not finding outside the screen?

Before learning to wait

Casarotto describes the path of every addiction in three stages: the entry door, the peak and the escalation. With screens, the entry door sometimes appears before a child can talk. It is the tablet that calms the baby at the restaurant, the cartoon on the phone so the mother can finish her lunch. There is no judgment here of the tired mother. The point is what the brain learns: when I cry, when I am frustrated, when I am bored, the screen comes and it passes. Before learning to wait, the child learned to be soothed by a light.

Then comes the first phone, the class group chat, the first online game with school friends. And the peak arrives: the first match won in front of everyone, the first “you’re really good at this” from a stranger.

And then the escalation. The match that came after homework takes the place of homework. The game with school friends becomes a game with strangers at three in the morning. The ten-minute video no longer holds attention, and it has to be fifteen seconds, one after another. Money appears, in loot boxes. Sleep goes, and with it mood, grades and the patience of the whole household. And when the device is taken away, there is irritation, an explosion, a punch at the wall. That has a name: it is withdrawal. It is not bad manners, and more shouting does not solve it.

The whole household is on the screen

In Virtology, pride and selfishness are two systems in the brain, the SNO and the SNE (the Portuguese acronyms are kept in the English editions), which arose for survival and which everyone carries. I explained both in SNO and SNE: two systems at the root of neurosis. On screens, pride shows up when likes, follower counts or the ranking come to decide the worth a person gives themselves. Selfishness shows up in the other person who disappears.

And the other person who disappears is not only the teenager’s. It is the mother who does not hear her child because she is on her phone. It is the father who is at lunch with his body and in the work group chat with his head. It is the teenager who replies to the stranger in the game and not to his grandmother. When Casarotto teaches Selflessness, he proposes a sentence to be written down and practised: if my daughter calls me while I am on my phone, I will put the phone down before I answer. And he points out a detail. The sentence is not for the teenager. It is for the adult.

Children do not learn what their parents say. They learn what their parents do. If the dinner table has four phones on it, the child has four phones, not just the teenager’s.

What to ask before banning

Before any new rule, it is worth observing calmly for a week or two. These questions help separate a game that entertains from a game that hides:

• Does he still go to his friend’s birthday party? Or has the game started winning against flesh-and-blood people?
• What does he feel just before picking up the game without having decided to? Boredom, loneliness, shame, anxiety, anger after an argument?
• Who does he play with, and at what time? With school friends on a Saturday afternoon, or with strangers in the small hours?
• How does he come out of a match? Recharged and available, or hollow, irritable and wanting more?
• Is money involved? Loot boxes, items, a card used without permission.
• And the rest of his life? Does he sleep, eat, go to school, see friends away from the screen?
• And the household? At Sunday lunch, who has a phone at the table?

If the answers point to fun, good. The game can stay in his life, with agreed rules like anything else. If they point to a hiding place, the question changes. It is no longer “how do I take the game away” but “what is the game covering.” And here a sentence Casarotto writes about adolescence is worth keeping:

Three practical precautions go with this. Do not use the screen as punishment and reward all the time, because that only increases its value in the child’s brain. Agree on rules that apply to everyone in the house. And do not take everything away at once, in anger, because that usually makes things worse. Cristiano Nabuco de Abreu, who coordinates the Technology Dependence Group at the Institute of Psychiatry of the University of São Paulo, said that “the main goal is not to make people get rid of technology” (Moura, 2017). With screens, the goal is not to stop forever. It is for the person to be in charge of the device again, and not the device in charge of them.

The virtues, in the order of the Pyramid

When the game has become a hiding place, a teenager’s virtue work is done with a professional, alongside treatment when treatment is needed. Virtology warns that demanding from a child a virtue their stage of life cannot yet hold does not educate. But parents can understand the logic, because their part is to show it through the way they live. And the logic is always the same: no virtue works alone, and the order follows the Pyramid of Virtues.

Humility and Selflessness open the way, as a pair. With screens, Humility means no longer needing likes and rankings to be worth something. When the hunger for importance eases, the number at the top of the screen loses its appeal. Selflessness brings the other person back: putting the phone down when your child calls, looking in the eyes of whoever is at the table. Notice that, in both, the parents go first.

The rest of the Treatment Foundation comes along. Acceptance of life without a filter, of boredom, of a body that is not the one in the photo. Forgiveness, for those who were exposed, mocked or humiliated online, and also for those who did that to someone. Responsibility, which gives back bedtime, sleep, homework and commitments. The State of Certainty, for the anxiety of missing out on something while offline. Perseverance, to get through the first weeks when everything seems dull. And Individuation, to discover who I am without the profile and without the avatar.

Only then comes Development. Gentleness, which first requires a minimum base of Humility, Acceptance, Selflessness, Responsibility and Individuation, creates the pause between the phone vibrating and the hand that reaches for it. I wrote about what shows up in that pause in What boredom is asking you to notice. The Pursuit of Improvement, which depends on Humility, Forgiveness and Perseverance, trades the level in the game for the level in life: the instrument, the sport, the study, the craft. And Usefulness, which first requires Selflessness, Responsibility and Perseverance, works on exactly what Virtology calls hedonic uselessness: the scrolling, the series watched on autopilot, the hollow feeling of having filled time without having lived anything. It gives a destination to the time that is left over.

And the horizon is the Top: Love of Neighbor and Helping Others, which only find their footing after the Foundation and Development. Casarotto describes the teenager who starts teaching his younger brother, helping his grandfather with his phone, joining a school project. The screen is still there. But now he has a “what for.” Nobody finds their purpose scrolling a feed.

A week before any rule

For seven days, the task is not to change anything in your child. It is to see what the screen is doing in your home.

A teenager who has someone to talk to, and someone who sees him and says out loud what he does well, needs far fewer than two hundred likes. The game can stay in his life. What changes is the place it holds: from a hiding place he runs to, it becomes a place he goes to play and comes back from whole.

Some signs are not a screen-time issue. If your child talks about dying or disappearing, if you notice he is hurting himself, if he has stopped eating, sleeping or leaving his room for days, seek help today: contact your local emergency services or a crisis line, and look for the child and adolescent mental health services where you live. If taking the device away leads to violence, with things broken or someone hurt, do not try to settle it by shouting in the middle of the crisis. Protect the people in the house first, calling local emergency services if someone is being attacked or is in danger, then plan the reduction with a professional. And watch out for hidden spending on games or betting.

Continue with SNO and SNE: two systems at the root of neurosis, Pride is not what you think, or the 12-Step guided trail.