polakovak

Title of the article and link

SEOK, S. & DACOSTA, B. (2014). Distinguishing Addiction from High Engagement: An Investigation Into the Social Lives of Adolescent and Young Adult Massively Multiplayer Online Game Players. Games and Culture. 2014;9(4):227-254. Accesible from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1555412014538811

About the authors

Soonwha Seok is a Korean university professor based in Seoul. She focuses on special education, learning disabilities and especially assistive technology evaluation. She tries to include functional evaluation, and support intensity scales implementing assistive technology for students with disabilities. Boaventura DaCosta is a member of the Solers Research Group based in Florida. His research is interdisciplinary, concentrated in the fields of computer science and instructional design, with a special interest in games and learning.

The research

The aim of the study was “to examine social aspects of South Korean adolescent and young adult MMOG players’ lives while clearly distinguishing between these addicted and those highly engaged.” (231) The authors decided to follow the Brown’s model as described by Charlton and Danforth (2007) which distinguishes between addicted and highly engaged players. They “proposed that mild criteria – cognitive salience, euphoria, and tolerance – should be seen as a nonpathological construct of high engagement, whereas strong (core) criteria – behavioral salience, withdrawal, relapse, and conflict (interpersonal and intrapersonal) – should be indicative of addiction”.

The authors chose Korean youth because of the reported widespread popularity of these games and excessive cases of addiction in the country. The respondents were to answer a 65-item questionnaire developed to measure the prevalence of online video game addiction. It consisted of three parts including a demographics part, gameplay information part and 5-point Liekrt-type scale statement part intended to examine a number of subscales as they apply to online gameplay.

A total number of 1332 people were given the questionnaire and therefore marked as respondents. Altogether 845 respondents were classified into one of the three groups – 36 participants (2,7 %) were classified as addicted; 42 participants (3,2 %) were classified as highly engaged; 767 participants (57,6 %) were rated as non-highly engaged.

Majority of the participants classified as addicted, highly engaged and non-highly engaged were male (84 %), 18 years old or younger (82 %). They predominantly came from household of 4 family members (51 %) and single-income homes in which the mother was the only one working (59 %). 57 % of the classified participants live in a home with one computer, 30 % with two computers.

As for frequency of gameplay, there were significant differences between non-highly engaged participants and both addicted and highly engaged participant, but the research showed no significant difference between the addicted and the highly engaged groups. The same applies to rating agreement with statement regarding social interactions and online gameplay.

Overall the study shows that even though the authors distinguished between addicted and highly engaged players, there were not significant differences in the answers from both groups. The authors themselves state that is probably because in the end the group of highly engaged participants may just be one step form being addicted.

My opinion

I chose this research because game addiction is something that interests me, and I was eager to learn whether and to what extent do groups of addicted and highly engaged gameplayer differ. I like that the authors distinguished not only between addicted and highly engaged players but also identified the rest of players as non-highly engaged.

What interested me was the fact that some researches identify neutral answer as a positive or negative endorsement of an item. I strongly agree with the fact that in this research the answer neutral was not classified.

Game addiction is a worldwide problem therefore it is a shame that this study only focuses on Korean youth. Thinking about this brings me to a question… Should the research be standardized, would we get the same results from different countries?