A study has found that excessive gaming may be a temporary phenomenon stemming from growth or changes in living environment. It also pointed to the need for evidence-based policymaking that moves away from approaches that have viewed gaming through a pathological lens and treated it as an object of control and regulation.

According to the "2025 Gamer Panel Planned Study (third cycle)" report recently released by the Korea Creative Content Agency, a five-year tracking survey of gamers from 2020 to 2024 found that many respondents initially in an at-risk group showing problematic game behavior tended over time to shift naturally into a comparison group or general user group.

This suggests that problematic behavior during gaming may be a temporary phenomenon depending on children and adolescents' growth process or the living environments gamers face at different life stages. It means social and psychological factors, rather than the game itself, may be expressed through gaming.

A clinical medicine cohort study conducted over the same period also found no clear evidence that gaming use itself causes anatomical structural or functional damage. Instead, negative indicators fell across all groups, while positive indicators such as intelligence improved during growth and development.

The study aimed to build longitudinal data that can be used academically and for policy through interdisciplinary collaboration, in order to scientifically identify the effectiveness of gaming and factors influencing its impact by tracking gamers over the long term.

In a preliminary survey for the third cycle, it secured a sample of 1,812 people, excluding parents, from second-cycle panel participants and new participants. The continuing panel from the second cycle consisted of 303 people: 102 middle school students, 100 high school students and 101 in an adult-entry group. The new sample comprised 903 student-household participants and 604 adult-household participants.

Survey items included gaming patterns such as frequency and time spent and games played; psychological and emotional characteristics such as self-control, self-efficacy and life satisfaction; social relationships such as parent and friend relationships, social support and in-game interaction; game, media and financial literacy; perceptions and control methods regarding children's gaming; and parenting attitudes.

The agency said the study sought to provide basic data for evidence-based policies that move away from regulation-centered game policy and enable more active use of the positive functions of games in education, medical and industrial fields.

Games have recently become core cultural content and taken a central place in daily life, but discourse to date has defined games as a deviant culture of youth and has mainly focused on pathological phenomena such as "overuse" or "addiction", treating games as objects of control and regulation. Critics say this approach has limitations in explaining the diverse experiences and multilayered effects seen in recent game use.