Stanley Pierre-Louis is acting CEO of the game industry lobbying group, the ESA.

How the ESA’s acting CEO views video game addiction

As general counsel of the Entertainment Software Association, Stanley Pierre-Louis was the top lawyer in the country for the trade group that protects the interests of the video game industry. He stayed out of the spotlight, but he had to stay sharp on a lot of legal issues affecting the largest and smallest video game publishers.

But after Mike Gallagher left the CEO job last October, Pierre-Louis was named acting CEO of the ESA. And now he is stepping into the spotlight. At the recent DICE Summit, the elite game event in Las Vegas last week, he gave a talk about the sensitive topic of video game addiction. Last June, the World Health Organization rained on the post-E3 afterglow by proposing to treat compulsive video game playing as an addiction, subject to treatment as a medical disorder.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.