Depression, Internet Gaming Disorder, and the moderating effect of the gamer-avatar relationship: an exploratory longitudinal study

Research into Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) literature largely uses cross-sectional designs and seldom examines gaming context-related factors. Therefore, the present study combined a cross-sectional and longitudinal design to examine depression and the gamer-avatar relationship (GAR) as risk factors in the development of IGD among emerging adults. IGD behaviors of 125 gamers (64 online gamers, Mage = 23.3 years, SD= 3.4; 61 offline gamers, Mage = 23.0 years, SD= 3.4) were assessed using the nine-item Internet Gaming Disorder Scale Short Form (IGDS-SF9; Pontes & Griffiths, 2015). The Self-Presence Scale (Ratan & Dawson, 2015) and the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) were also used to assess gamers’ levels of GAR and depressive symptoms respectively. Regression and moderation analyses revealed that depression and the GAR act as individual risk factors in the development of IGD over time. Furthermore, the GAR exacerbates the IGD risk effect of depression

Interactive effects of individual- and group-level variables on virtual purchase behavior in online communities

Focusing on social network theories, we examine the interactive influence of both group-level (i.e. community influences) and individual-level variables (intrinsic and extrinsic motivations) simultaneously as the drivers of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) players’ virtual purchase behavior. We demonstrate that several aspects of real-world behavior are reflected in virtual purchase behavior. Notably, normative interpersonal influences and community identity are critical drivers and moderators of virtual purchases. Moreover, clear advancement and enjoyment opportunities offer important triggers for virtual purchase behavior. This study provides insights for game developers to increase virtual purchases, and identifies domain-specificity of each gaming platform

User-driven role-playing in Final Fantasy XIV: immersion, creative labor, and psychosocial well-being

2019 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) give each user the starring role, drawing them into the game's story and world through their character avatar. Some, however, take role-playing (colloquially, "roleplaying" or "RP") further by constructing deep and complex narratives for their characters and pitting them against others in new and often spontaneous stories that emerge from collaborative efforts. This research looks at the RP community in the MMO Final Fantasy XIV in order to understand how and why RPers choose this form of play in a game already rich with activities. Specifically, I aim to shed light on the relationship between RP and psychosocial well-being. Drawing on perspectives from game studies, media fandom studies, and positive psychology, this research examines RP through a tripartite model of avenues towards well-being: play, flow, and sociality. A mixed-methods approach is used to gather ethnographic data through participant observation and interviews while also sampling broad patterns through a field survey. A cognitive anthropological "cultural models" consensus and consonance methodology allows for the culture of RP to be assessed in its capacity to reinforce and encourage positive experiences for its participants. Findings suggest that RP is a fulfilling activity because of its ability to enhance immersion and flow in the game world and the meaningful social connections that are forged through creative collaboration. However, RPers who are lonely or who become overinvested in the activity are more likely to have negative experiences if they cannot learn to play in an adaptive manner

Deconstructing who you play: character choice in online gaming

The major growth in gaming over the last five to ten years has been through the expansion in online gaming, with the most frequent gamers now playing more games online than with others in person. The increase in cooperative multiplayer online gaming, where players who do not know each other come together in teams to achieve a common goal, leads to interesting social situations. The research in this paper is focussed on the online multiplayer game Overwatch, in this game playable characters are grouped into a number of classes and characters within these classes. A player chooses the character at the start of a given round, and whilst they can change the character during the game round this is generally undesirable. In this research we were interested in how players go about selecting a character for a given round of the game, this is a complex interaction where a player has to balance between personal character preference (either a character they enjoy playing or is well-mapped to their playstyle and skill) and ensuring a team has a balance of player classes. The interaction is complicated by the online nature meaning it is difficult to reward a team-mate for selecting a character they may not wish to play or playing a character which may mean they will perform poorly but the team will win. We recruited over 1000 Overwatch players and surveyed them on how they make their character choices within the game, they were also asked to complete various psychometric tests. We found that a gamers player ‘type’ (i.e. Killer, Achiever, Explorer or Socialiser) was defined by their agreeableness and their gender. We also found that player’s choice of character class was related to their level of agreeableness and extroversion modulated by the player’s gender. We also found that those who rate highly in conscientiousness and agreeableness and are socialisers or achievers were more likely to choose a character in order to achieve a balanced team rather than personal preference. The research is unique in the scale and number of respondents, it also addresses a problem in co-operative gaming where players must negotiate the composition of a team. This negotiation is often performed without any background knowledge of other player’s skill levels, this is the first study at this scale considering this within the context of co-operative online gaming

Stillborn: The Libidinal Economy of Gadgetized Mediation in the Era of Socialization for Consumption; An Explanatory Political Project

This project captures an attempt to politicize one aspect of Western middle class youth’s everyday experience growing up and living in postindustrial consumer society—the replacement of experiential, material, and libidinal gratification with that of ideological satisfaction. The dissertation takes up problematic adolescent gaming as a site to interrogate the ways and means of technologically-backed consumer socialization, and draw out the implications for subject-formation and possibility of self-determination. Developing new ways to conceptualize politics of youth, the project re-reads existing academic research on youth and gaming. Its main goal is to create a theoretical framework that can sustain an understanding of the importance of consumerizing gadget-mediated self-self cultivation across the dimensions of political economy and its strict materiality, psycho-sociality and its relational concreteness, and the realm of the mind in which ideology meets consciousness. Under the guise of critiquing the banality of gaming studies, the project excavates ideas from various critical theory, phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions to raise political questions of social reproduction and clarify a concretely political path beyond the present circumstances. I am interested in exploring how it is that generation after generation young people born in the compromised consumption-rendered centers of global capital do not revolt against the seemingly repressive institutions shaping their lives. In this question, there is an intergenerational politics, a politics in which the question of youth and their otherness is crashed into the structuration of political economy and social reproduction within it. This is ultimately the theme of my inquiry. The present work is a study of gaming as a site where we should expect to see the manifestations of this kind of intersection, but instead what we see is a single-minded preference for celebrating the gaming industry and securing the ideologically soothing reproduction. I want to address the politics signaled by the changing role of play in advanced consumer economy, where in the site of gaming, through controlled bursts of traumatization and regularization, prediction of subjective experience is commodified into the global capitalistic circuits

Moving beyond “Us” versus “Them”: Social identities in digital gaming

This was an invited submission for a special focus issue on gender and gaming for the Psychology of Women Section Review (British Psychological Society)

Massively Multiplayer Online Gamers’ Language: Argument for an M-Gamer Corpus

The past few decades have seen a steady, and sometimes rapid rise in the production and consumption of Massively Multiple Online Games (MMOGs), spanning a global arena. Players from a wide variety of demographical, economic, geographical, cultural and linguistic backgrounds congregate under the banner of MMOGs and spend a considerable amount of time interacting and communicating with one another, in the context of playing and socializing through such playing. It is only logical then, to see such players become part of larger and extended socio-communal landscapes, wherein they may appropriate multiple roles in conjunction with their MMOG player roles, such as teachers, learners, family members and workplace cohorts. It is also equally logical for a curious mind to speculate the effects of the communication and language characteristics of such gamers on themselves, and the greater communities they may inhabit, investigate the realms of such possibilities, and appropriate knowledge garnered from such investigations to share. That is precisely what this study and paper is about. In this paper, I report the findings of an investigation of the communication and language characteristics of MMOG players, using 23 participants for interviews and journal writing, as well as multiple online documents. The findings suggest that MMOG players share some unique communication and language patterns, based on which they can be justifiably categorized as a sub culture with their own corpus. Additionally, researcher and practitioner implications are also discussed