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MMO addiction studyAugust 22nd, 2006 |
Another day, another study. Today it’s “Addiction and the Structural Characteristics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games” over on Gamasutra (the full study is available here (PDF). [Edit: link fixed.] It looks to use Nick Yee’s work as a starting point. Key findings:
- First off, it split things into “addiction” (based on a few standardized definitions and questionnaires) and “engagement,” which was viewed as less harmful.
- Seeking PvP advancement was a significant predictor of addiction or engagement, but more so for engagement than addiction.
- Belonging to raiding guilds or guilds with a bigger emphasis on hardcore goal-oriented play showed a tendency towards addiction.
- Playing with real life friends, engaging in side activities, and belonging to social guilds was related to engagement instead.
- Lacking real life friends in the game didn’t increase your odds of addiction.
- Players who were addicted showed a propensity towards manipulating other players (scams, stealing, and dominance games). But this isn’t a predictor of addiction in itself.
- Speaking of which, the graph of number of players who engage in that sort of “negative valence” behavior showed a classic power law curve.
- Roleplay and immersion show no link to addiction.
- However, they also do not show any link to engagement, which seems counterintuitive to the author of the study. I might hypothesize here that engagement comes from actual emotional contact with others, rather than from roleplayed relationship.
- The individualism of the player in question was unrelated to addiction.
- If you prefer raid guilds, you always like social guilds. However, if you like social guilds, you may or may not like raiding.
- As we’ve seen before, most of the female players in the study (maxed out ones, in this case) started because their significant other introduced them to the game: 41.2%. Friends accounted for another 23%.
- Interestingly, women tended to have either many maxed out alts, or very few.
- Older women (over 36) with lots of alts was an interesting finding. There were more women in this bracket with over ten maxed out alts than there were men — even though there were twice as many men in the age bracket!
- “Engaged” players self-reported their play time as higher than addicted players.
- Over 35% of respondents said they missed meals because of gaming.
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I’ve always attributed this to my geekish tendency to hyper-focus on some task at hand. Perhaps this is more an expression of that tendency than anything else? I’m not a researcher, so it’s just a thought.
[...] Game Addiction Media Crisis Grows - Where is the Industry Response? ESA, NCSoft, Sony, Microsoft, EA, NetEase, Nintendo, where are you? While I understand that you may be a bit fatigued by fighting the annoying Violence in Games bills, these addiction studies are equally threatening… especially to the high growth online gaming portion of the industry. So far, the industry has sat silently by while a range of “experts” whose qualifications seem mostly in their ability to be available for newspaper interviews and fronting their “game addiction support groups” have defined the issue. The only person who has said anything from the industry perspective is Jason Della Rocca: “People are reluctant to point a finger at themselves,” said Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association. Excessive use “is a reflection of friction in that person’s life. They shouldn’t use the game as a scapegoat.” - The Washington Post Thank you Jason. First, The Washington Post has a sizeable article on Game Addiction, then our own Gamasutra posts a Master’s Dissertation (in Communications, mind you) on Game Addiction. The main expert, who had an interview in the Washington Post, was Dimitri Williams - an Assistant Professor in the Speech Communication Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Williams did not claim to be an expert on addiction and, for a change in the current media climate, actually spoke rather sensibly on the issue. It is a pity that he wasn’t cited in the main article. The article itself focused on a couple of anecodotal cases, including a tragic suicide, but did not seem to provide any information that was not supportive of the Game Addiction theory. The Online Game Addiction Anonymous web site rated 125 million hits and over 2000 members (i.e., emails, probably) in 4 years. Raph Koster’s website has probably done as well - by the way, Raph has a good discussion going on the Gamasutra article. The “study” cited in Gamasutra was from a student in Communications. I do not claim to be an addiction expert or a psychologist or other mental health professional, but I suspect there is a huge danger in surveys of behavior related to addiction due to the increasing tendancy to “psychnologize” everything in our culture. At a minimum, people routinely use the language of addiction to discuss many ordinary situations. Personally, I think most of this is “hooey”. There is certainly going to be a portion of the population with addiction problems that will manifest through online games (or alcohol or TV or gambling or golf or drugs or MySpace). I can count fewer than 10 incidents in the past several years where someone has died in a manner closely tied to an online game - and that is not just in the US. Considering the millions and millions of game players, that number is quite low. But is it an impending social crisis? It may be for the industry, if it doesn’t start responding to these articles and getting in front of the issue - cut Dr. Williams a check or two to do some real studies in this area…. get some good PR for a change. The real danger is that these ideas are pernicious and spread vigorously. There have been dozens of articles in the past several months based on the Game Addiction Clinic in Europe. People start quoting previous “assertions” as facts in subsequent news stories and suddenly, they become the accepted truth. So, industry leaders and associations in the US, Korea, and China, if you want to protect your business, start speaking out before we all face another Jack Thompson.. if you are lucky or Hillary Clinton, if you are not. Continue reading “Game Addiction Media Crisis Grows - Where is the Industry Response?” Posted by SecurePlay in Game Industry, Game Culture, Policy, Law, and Politics, Game Addiction and Usage Controls at 05:35 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) [...]
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