How about playing chess 5 hours per day? Is that a disorder, too?
If you spend 5 hours a day playing chess even though you know it's ruining your life then, yes, it's a disorder. If that becomes common enough that chess is often associated with people ruining their lives, then it's reasonable for the WHO to recognise it.
This isn't complicated.
You can be an alcoholic when you only ever drink one beer per day, as long as it's either a compulsion to do it and/or it affects your life negatively.
While this may be a theoretically sound definition of "alcoholism", to me this sounds weak/ not anchored in real human perception. I argue that if it has no significant negative effect on your life, it's not addiction/ disorder.
One might feel a desire to have a few after work on Friday, and it might even be a weekly habit. But if you can just as soon not to, then you don't have a compulsion.
> and continuation or escalation of [...] despite the occurrence of negative consequences.
These seem fairly clear to me.
There was also rule about it being long-term.
So, are you about to loose job because of that chess? Are you failing the school despite being previously good student because of that chess? Are you increasingly isolated from everyone, increasingly angry and frustrated and yelling on people that you could communicate just fine before playing that much (e.g. if you hated each other before that too, then it does not count)? Are you increasingly fearful of social contact and increasingly clueless in conversation? Or rather does it stays the same?
Did you ceased to care about yourself due showering taking too much time off chess in your point of view? It is less about absolute time spent with activity and more about impact on you or your direct environment.
I absolutely think it's a double standard, where only activities perceived as morally bad (video games, but not reading books, for example) get labeled like this.
Just about only difference is that such addiction on books happens less often to neurotypical people. And since you was negatively affected by pretty much everything that went around, it seems to be of personality prone to addiction thing.
That being said, playing games is not labeled anything. As the material itself says, only minority of players are diagnozable as majority of players dont have those symptoms.
Because I don't think it's a meaningful diagnosis or disorder, and that it is inherently a puritanical value judgement. How many people have their lives negatively affected by working excessive hours, by focusing on sports instead of academics, or any number of other things that will never get their own label?
The things you mention have derogative terms in culture. And focusing on sport instead of academic is not nearly at level of symptoms described here.
Frabkly, the discussion whether x is meaningful diagnoses makes sense only if you bother to read actual diagnosis - and surrounding text to see whether there are similar diagnoses nearby.