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Project massive: self-regulation and problematic use of online gaming

Published: 29 April 2007 Publication History

Abstract

A longitudinal design was employed to collect three waves of survey data over a 14 month period from 2790 online gamers. Respondents were asked questions about their gaming activity, motivations, personality, social and emotional environment, and the effect gaming has had on their lives. Prospective analysis was used to establish causal and temporal linkages among the repeatedly measured factors. While the data provide some indication that a player's reasons for playing do influence the development of problematic usage, these effects are overshadowed by the central importance of self-regulation in managing both the timing and amount of play. An individual's level of self-regulatory activity is shown to be very important in allowing them to avoid negative outcomes like problematic use. The role of depression is also discussed. With responsible use, online gaming appears to be a healthy recreational activity that provides millions of people with hours of social entertainment and adaptive diversion. However, failure to manage play behavior can lead to feelings of dependency.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2007
    1654 pages
    ISBN:9781595935939
    DOI:10.1145/1240624
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 29 April 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. MMORPG
    2. addiction
    3. depression
    4. online games
    5. play motivation
    6. self-regulation
    7. social integration

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    CHI07: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 28 - May 3, 2007
    California, San Jose, USA

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    CHI '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 182 of 840 submissions, 22%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2024)Unpacking the Myth in the Associations Between Self-control and Gaming Disorder in Children and Adolescents: A Comparison Between Traditional and Random Intercept Cross-lagged Panel Model AnalysesInternational Journal of Mental Health and Addiction10.1007/s11469-024-01294-0Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
    • (2023)Digital Game Addiction and ChildrenHandbook of Research on Perspectives on Society and Technology Addiction10.4018/978-1-6684-8397-8.ch019(298-317)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2023
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