Is it open season on video games again? The Mirror brings the shocking news that children who are hooked on TV, computer games and the web are at greater risk of getting cancer in later life. Except, as it turns out, the warning was actually about hours spent sitting down increasing early biomarkers for cancer. No one's getting cancer of the thumb from too much button-mashing.

Then there's the story of 23-year-old Xiao Feng in China, whose obsession with role-playing games apparently led his father to hire "online assassins" to kill his avatar repeatedly, so he'd give up and get a job. It didn't work. "I can play or I can not play, it doesn't bother me. I'm not looking for any job – I want to take some time to find one that suits me," Xiao was quoted as saying.

All this reminds me of one of the most compelling depictions of online gaming in popular culture: the South Park episode Make Love, Not Warcraft. It summed up every negative stereotype about hardcore gamers, as Cartman and his friends became fat, greasy-haired, acne-ridden slobs as they go through the endless hours of practice necessary to defeat an awesomely powerful player who was ruining the game for everyone.

While both the South Park episode and the Chinese family row are funny, the idea that there is such a thing as video game addiction is not. The term is often a symptom of lazy thinking by a generation that hasn't played games and can't see what all the fuss is about (or, as the great Douglas Adams put it: "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things").

To the historically minded, it's also amusing that the fears about games are couched in exactly the same terms that 18th-century parents once used about the danger of letting their daughters read novels: they're too isolating, too absorbing; it's not healthy to spend that much time alone feeling strong emotions about a fictional story.

The truth is that there's really no such thing as a gamer anymore. Most of us play games: 33 million Britons at the last count, almost half of them women. They do it for all kinds of reasons: relaxing, killing time on a commute, or socialising with friends in real life or online.

The best estimate of how many gamers are "pathological" about the way they play is just 3%, according to a 2011 meta-analysis of 33 studies. Even then, the researchers were keen to stress that it is hard to categorise what counts as problem behaviour and almost impossible to discern whether games are the cause rather than underlying mental health issues that could have manifested in any number of ways. Arguing with one's parents about when to turn off the Xbox may be far more normative and far less interfering than arguing with one's spouse about thousands of dollars lost in gambling, they note drily. Far more people have an unhealthy relationship with food than with video games.

But still, the word "addiction" sticks to online multiplayer titles, for the simple reason that it is possible to pour a staggering amount of time into them. It's estimated that it takes more than 600 hours to get to the highest possible level in WoW, and a 2009 study found an average single session of play lasted 2.3 hours (the longest recorded was a buttock-numbing 16 hours in one go).

World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs – such as Eve Online and EverQuest – are specifically designed to be constantly tempting: come on, they whisper. It's only midnight. Just one more quest. You'll get a snazzy pair of gauntlets! Unlike puzzle games, where the mechanic gets tiring after a couple of hours, they offer a dizzying range of activities. Even set-pieces like raiding parties become unique experiences because of the randomness of interaction with other players.

This cycle of small challenges and incremental rewards, set in a context of grander ones, is phenomenally attractive to gamers (and lucrative for their manufacturers: as of last October, WoW has 10 million paying subscribers). It is also creeping into non-gaming spaces: FourSquare, for example, attempts to gamify real life by making you feel like you've won something by having your morning coffee in the same place every day. BuzzFeed, meanwhile, offers spangly little badges for leaving a certain number of comments on its website.

To its credit, Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, recognise that its delights may be too alluring and offer parental controls to limit the number of hours that can be played in a day and when those hours are. It's a pity no one told Mr Feng that; he could have saved himself the expense of those assassins. Or, of course, he could have used the one sanction that parents from time immemorial have employed to make activities less appealing to their children: he could have joined the game himself. No one wants their dad trailing round behind them dressed as an Elf, after all.