Glitches in diagnostic boundaries: Reframing gaming disorder through context, vulnerability, and meaning

This commentary builds on King et al. (2025) to distinguish benign gaming from harm, framing gaming disorder as a rigid narrowing of experience marked by relational costs, inflexibility, and loss of alternatives. We introduce a concentric three-layer model-subjective symptoms, gaming's symbolic functions tied to vulnerabilities, and its sociocultural context-to guide assessment and treatment as dynamic meaning-making processes. Emphasizing stable functional impairment, loss of alternatives and markers of suffering over temporal cutoffs, this approach calls for interventions centering personal narrative, restoring agency, relatedness and belonging, and recognizing gaming's existential roles within individuals' life trajectories and social ecologies of play.