MMO addiction study
(Visited 17004 times) Game talk
Aug 222006
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.
19 Responses to “MMO addiction study”
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Over 35% of respondents said they missed meals because of gaming.
I’ve missed meals due to programming and other work-related stuff. 😛 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.
Interesting results, though.
Forgot to add a value to the link to the study, Raph. =P
[Roleplay and immersion] also do not show any link to engagement
I want to see what Abalieno has to say about that.
Over 35% of respondents said they missed meals because of gaming.
The rest eat at the computer. Duh.
I fixed the link.
I dunno, I think the MMO professional community better think harder about this. From my own experience, you can either work on an issue before government (and the media) gets involved or you can cope with trying to solve the problem with them afterwards. The difference is between creating your own design, or having it given to you without choice. And it will be dictated by people who don’t care about your organization or industry (or even user experience potentially). Lum has an earlier thread just from the weekend. My two cents.
I can honestly say I was addicted to a MMO but can it still be called and addiction when I am able to quit the MMO after massively major changes are made to the game?
When I first started playing SWG(my first mmo) I would wake up early and play tha game before I went to work. While at work I would constantly think about the game. I would leave work as soon as possiblre to head home and play the game till I fell asleep. I would even try to think of excuses to take time off of work to play.
After changes to the game were made,I have no desire to play it in it’s current form.
I would consider that an addiction(specially if you saw my house)and how bad I neglected it,lol.
Raph,is there any hope to gain back what we once had?
It takes a real man to confess his addiction, break free, then openly admit he was happier as an addict.
I know alot of people who are addicted to their hobbies…horseback riding, theater, dancing, body-building. All activties that require massive ammounts of time to master, yet are generaly considered respectable among society. Are any of these more constructive then MMO gaming? Mabye theater or dancing if its a preformance for the public…Does MMO gaming bennifit society?
Yes it does, in a spiritual sense and for some financial, educational. Its hard to compare with other activities such as music-playing which benefits society in a similar way.
I feel like addiction is a term we apply way too liberally these days. People will say that they’re addicted to something when really, it’s just something that they like and enjoy a lot. I just find it hard to believe in true addiction to an MMO (or anything that doesn’t qualify as a narcotic substance for that matter) because it’s really just a question of priorities and self-control.
I spend time on MMO forums while I’m at work doing decidedly non-MMO things. Does that make me an addict? Does that mean that the guys who are working on their fantasy football rosters right now are addicts? What about the ones who are reading about console video games? Planning their next fishing trip?
MMO’s aren’t any more addictive than spending happy hour at the bar with your buddies after work, or watching your favorite TV show.
From the article:
As with any respectable published work, the paper in question defines its terms, addiction and engagement, based on clear criteria from other established work (stop laughing graduate students). In skimming it’s looking at when certain specific strongly negative effects come into play (a trivial example might be not eating for several days). There’s certainly room for debate as to whether their criteria are valid, but no, they are not simply throwing the word around.
MMO’s aren’t any more addictive than spending happy hour at the bar with your buddies after work, or watching your favorite TV show.
That’s like saying marijuana isn’t addictive. And it’s not, chemically. The actual act of smoking pot does not addict you. But that doesn’t mean you’re not addicted or can’t become addicted.
Try this: 12 questions: Am I an Addict? Feel free to change “smoke pot” to “play a MMORPG”. It works remarkably well. I think #1 is rather to the point. Alternatively, an addict has this personal anecdote. Neither source is authoritative, but neither source is completely discreditable, either.
And I believe it’s possible to become addicted to TV or a TV show, but I don’t have any references.
Then he should be using “Negative effects” because clinically, morally, and socially “addiction” has subjective meanings and objective ramifacations.
The author, and I congratulate him for tackling this issue, and using Yee’s data, is right addiction as a term is used to often, because it sticks easy conceptually.
But there are problems with this.
Addictions can be qualified as diseases.
Diseases have psychological and clinical interventions
When a disease has psychological and clinical interventions those are apt to face policy scrutiny and regulation, especially ifbased upon consumer usage.
Can your industry be taxed? (i.e. How deep are its pockets?)
Is it a consumer based industry?
Does it lend itself to a disease process effecting society? (Addiction)
These are not far fetched conceptual leaps, ask the Tobacco, Alcohol industry, or Television industry
Example:
As far as policy formulation all it takes is a clinician, say a psychiatrist studying clinical depression as it relates to say withdrawl from video games (his grant for this work wont be comming from the video game industries lobby I can assure you) well the research is still fairly thin on the subject, hard scientific data mostly lacking, but what is available frequently uses “addiction” in terms of games. So what results is a “hard” scientific study by a clinical specialist, citing papers by non clinicians using the term “addiction” and the subjective meaning now takes on an objective intervention, “addiction” enters the lexicon clinically, addiction to video games becomes a disease process. Policy therby has an impetus to solve this:
(congressional soundbite, just prior to the video game tax being implimented)
“troubling issue of Americas youth being clinically addicted to violent, time consuming, unhealthy and obiesity causing video games”
(Read: widespread, disease, causing violence, wasting time that could have been better spend at school, missing meals, and not getting exercise, caused by video games)
And will concerned parents disagree? (nevermind they bought the console or game during the holidays)
(Im being facious here…)
And from there all it takes is one congressman, who’s pissed off because Jr. who wants to make games decided to go to graphic design school rather than law school, to hold a hearing.
Addictions require interventions, interventions cost money, and require programs and breaucracies to administer them, who’s breaucracy and who’s money?
And so my point is this, because I’ve worked in health care policy, be careful what terms are used to describe the effects your industry has on its consumers, especially in terms of research. Policy wonk’s, and surely congressmen looking for the “next big issue for political traction” wont read this entire study,but a passing glance at its title is damning.
Grad students and researchers need to be aware of the policy ramifacations of thier terminology and how it enters the clinical and political lexicon.
Think about the policy outcome your work is supporting.
Im not sure, is it easier to find research on the negative effects of video games? If it is the video game industry might consider founding a think tank that promotes research showing the positive effects of video games on players and society. This is another reason people should support the efforts of those games for change folk’s even if they disagree with what they’re games political bent is, objectively there is a positive impact by creating awareness of issues.
Just my observations for what they’re worth having been in the political healthcare policy trenches.
Please check out my comments in a similar vein to Adam MacDonald since trackback didn’t seem to work.
If the industry continues to ignore this “Game Addiction” problem that the media has stirred up, it is going to have another big problem on its hands. This meme has been growing like mad since early this summer.
It also shows how disconnected ESA is from the online game industry in the US… which is bad since there a slew of issues that online games face – age verification, jurisdiction, community standards for obscenity, etc.
I would posit that it is because most MMOs are crappy roleplay spaces, where it’s impossible to realize sufficiently complex in-character relationships and maintain an adequate level of drama to become properly engaged by that particular facet of your game experience. MMOs really do not have a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio, or a coherent enough narrative, for roleplaying engagement to kick in. The thing that engages (and yes, addicts) people when they are playing roleplaying MUDs is usually the soap-opera-like characteristics of the experience. What kind of story are you following when your character raids the same three dungeons every week?
Allen (#11) —
Wouldn’t this be better solved if there was an information campaign to educate parents on the realities of video games? Instead of carefully wording scientific studies (I assume it’s scientific; I haven’t read it) to be politically neutral?
People can and do get addicted to MMORPGs. Denying it doesn’t make it false. Just because this fact, and it is a fact, can be taken by some jerk with surplus clout to effect damaging policy doesn’t make it less true.
Negative effects? To whom? For what? It’s a nonsensical term that says absolutely nothing. For what is apparently being measured, addiction is the appropriate and most accurate term.
[…] 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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