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Individual tastes in games -- research completed! Thanks for participating!
MizzouSCN
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
About a year ago, many of you participated in an internet survey to help us understand different players' different tastes in games, and whether any of those were associated with more gaming problems, like losing sleep because of excessive gaming.
The research has finally been published, so I thought I'd post it to let you see what we were able to do with your help. It's at an open-access journal, so everybody is free to read the manuscript -- you don't need a subscription to read the article.
You can find the research here: http://www.frontiersin.org/developmental_psychology_/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00608/abstract with a download for the full PDF.
This research has been tremendous fun for me, as I've always struggled to understand why everyone's tastes in games aren't exactly like my own!
In short, our finding was that people who play games to escape their lives and problems have more problems because of their gaming habits. This is exciting to me, because it seems that problem gaming may not be so different from other addictions, like alcoholism or problem gambling. However, it also suggests that treating problem gaming may not be so easy as just taking away the XBOX, since those real-life problems will still persist.
We also found increased problem gaming among players who like to play with others and players who really like unlockables and achievements. It's possible that MMORPGs represent a "triple threat" for problem gaming, as players can escape into an immersive virtual world, develop online social obligations to their friends and guilds, and level up and grind loot forever.
One thing that I found exciting was that we were able to demonstrate that our measures really are related to peoples' favorite games. For example, stories are much more important to players who listed Bioshock or Mass Effect as one of their favorites, and less important to those who like Call of Duty or Super Mario. Similarly, Skyrim players love to grind skills and complete collections of every single item, while fans of the original Deus Ex think it's a waste of time.
I wanted to give everyone who participated my sincere thanks. I hope you find this research interesting, and I hope we can do more research again in the future!
p.s. if anyone has an "in" at NeoGAF please let me know -- I'd like to sample some data from there but their admin never got back to me. Also I think I cross-posted the survey in one of the other subforums back then but can't remember which one so whatever.
The research has finally been published, so I thought I'd post it to let you see what we were able to do with your help. It's at an open-access journal, so everybody is free to read the manuscript -- you don't need a subscription to read the article.
You can find the research here: http://www.frontiersin.org/developmental_psychology_/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00608/abstract with a download for the full PDF.
This research has been tremendous fun for me, as I've always struggled to understand why everyone's tastes in games aren't exactly like my own!
In short, our finding was that people who play games to escape their lives and problems have more problems because of their gaming habits. This is exciting to me, because it seems that problem gaming may not be so different from other addictions, like alcoholism or problem gambling. However, it also suggests that treating problem gaming may not be so easy as just taking away the XBOX, since those real-life problems will still persist.
We also found increased problem gaming among players who like to play with others and players who really like unlockables and achievements. It's possible that MMORPGs represent a "triple threat" for problem gaming, as players can escape into an immersive virtual world, develop online social obligations to their friends and guilds, and level up and grind loot forever.
One thing that I found exciting was that we were able to demonstrate that our measures really are related to peoples' favorite games. For example, stories are much more important to players who listed Bioshock or Mass Effect as one of their favorites, and less important to those who like Call of Duty or Super Mario. Similarly, Skyrim players love to grind skills and complete collections of every single item, while fans of the original Deus Ex think it's a waste of time.
I wanted to give everyone who participated my sincere thanks. I hope you find this research interesting, and I hope we can do more research again in the future!
p.s. if anyone has an "in" at NeoGAF please let me know -- I'd like to sample some data from there but their admin never got back to me. Also I think I cross-posted the survey in one of the other subforums back then but can't remember which one so whatever.
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