Review: Reconstructing Gaming Disorder: A Taxonomy by Registered Report (STAGE2)

I enjoyed reviewing this registered report and think the authors did well at implementing the suggested changes. I have added some minor comments below:

1)      Participants from groups A-C will provide frequent diary-like entries over multiple years. The mere act of monitoring one’s gaming activity may affect participants and their appraisal of their gaming. This is something that the data will be able to address, and it would be interesting to analyse and/or mention in the manuscript, given ‘thoughtless’ gaming may have distinct effects.

2)      The authors mention that “following our critical Bayesian epistemology, each discovered taxon will be established with a confidence level (0-1), and when evidence accumulates, confidence can decrease or decrease” (p. 14). It does not become clear whether these confidence intervals are based on data or on the subjective judgments of the authors. Arguably, the latter is insufficient to be termed “Bayesian”. In this case, the use of “Bayesian epistemology” is misleading, as it is traditionally used to refer to formal approaches of belief updating with high degrees of precision.

Moreover, the addition of a confidence level raises the question what level of confidence is acceptable. Please specify how these confidence levels will be used to guide later interpretation.

3)      Typo: “while 41.1 % think the Finns think gaming is harmful” (p. 23)

I think these revisions mostly look good.

The only exception is that the authors MUST have a SESOI (smallest effect size of interest) of minimum of r (or beta) of .10.  I think the authors misunderstood me here...this has nothing to do with hypothesis testing or sample size, only avoiding misinterpreting noise for "true" effects. There's a risk of noise being misinterpreted below effect sizes of .10, as there's a general "hum" of garbage results below that effect size.  This is true whether a study is exploratory or confirmatory.  The only issue about sample size is that if the sample size is small, it won't be powerful enough to detect effects that low anyway.  Again, please read Ferguson and Heene (2021) for an explanation for why this is critical.  But this is an unambiguous MUST for me to sign off on this registered report.  

The revised addresses all of our concerns well--I appreciate the opportunity to remain involved and very much look forward to your progress.

The attached copy of your tracked changes version includes a few more comments for slight changes to wording that could be considered.

Thank you again.

Michelle

Please see the attached file. 

I appreciated the opportunity to review this RR.  I have just a few comments below that I wonder if these may improve some of the ideas in here.

First, when mentioning the WHO "gaming disorder", it might be helpful to note the specific controversies around this.  Many scholars directly opposed the WHO (Aarseth et al., 2017) as did the APA and Psychological Society of Ireland's media psychology divisions in an open statement (https://div46amplifier.com/2018/06/21/an-official-division-46-statement-on-the-who-proposal-to-include-gaming-related-disorders-in-icd-11/).  The authors do a nice job discussing the wider controversies, but I think it's good to note specific criticisms of the WHO's decision.

Related to this conceptually, is the lack of interest (by the WHO and, frankly, most researchers) over the larger issues of behavioral overuse disorders...why is there so little interest in overeating, work, exercise, shopping or religion "addiction" (Griffiths, to his credit, has papers on dance and fishing "addiction".)  There's an important question about why we're always hyperfocused on technology (and I'm not convinced the answer is that technology is inherently more addictive than these other things.

This I think is also a practical issue for the paper...particularly given lack of clear guidance on what constitutes "gaming disorder"...responses by both clinicians and gamers may simply invoke societal moral panics in open response formats.  I'm thinking in particular of the clinician ratings here.  Given how easy it is to portray anything addictive...see the offline friends addiction scale (Satchell et al), I'd like to see a bit more attention to this.

I think the authors include a lot of good and important variables about gaming contexts and health, but I think it will be possible to find spurious correlations here, without controlling for other variables. I assume that T1 health/mental health data will be controlled.  However, particularly as we have some decent information to suggest that academic and family stress is causal for problematic gaming, I think some of these larger contexts would need to be measured and controlled.

The authors need to set a smallest effect size of interest (SESOI) for their quantitative analyses, otherwise they may inadvertently misinterpret "statistically significant" noise effects as hypothesis supportive when they should not be interpreted as such.  See Ferguson & Heene (2021) for discussion and guidance.

In conclusion, I support the authors' efforts here and hope my suggestions are constructive.

Signed,

Chris Ferguson