Escaping in digital games: The relationship between playing motives and addictive tendencies in males

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Abstract

Problematic playing behaviour in terms of addiction is well known to be associated with specific traits (e.g., self-esteem) and weak social settings (e.g., negative relationships). What remains unclear is the impact of playing motives on addictive tendencies. We investigated how playing motives were related to problematic playing behaviour. Using ratings indicating explicit motives and response latencies indicating the activation of implicit motives, we investigated Yee’s (2006) three main playing motives: social interaction, achievement, and immersion. All three implicit motives were found to be highly activated among problematic players while only explicit immersion was judged as less important by non-problematic and excessive players. In addition, implicit immersion together with explicit immersion and playing hours were found to be strong predictors for problematic playing behaviour. We discuss motives, especially immersion, as possible risk factors for addictive tendencies when motives become internalised and therefore automatically activated by thoughts about digital games.

Highlights

► We studied implicit and explicit playing motives and problematic playing. ► Only problematic players internalised all three implicit playing motives. ► Immersion as implicit playing motive was only activated in problematic players. ► Non-problematic and excessive players rejected immersion as playing motive. ► Immersion as playing motive was a strong predictor of problematic playing.

Introduction

Digital games and their possible positive and negative influences on adolescents and young adults are still discussed in the media and in research. Especially digital game addiction has come into focus of these debates. Game addiction is often compared to gambling addiction due to its similarities (Griffiths & Wood, 2000). However, debates do not further focus on its existence but instead emphasize diagnostic instruments (Byun et al., 2009), treatments (Yellowlees & Marks, 2007), or causes of this pathological behaviour (Byun et al., 2009).

Playing time is still considered as main diagnostic value as it was found to be strongly connected with problematic playing behaviour (Hellström, Nilsson, Leppert, & Åslund, 2012). Of course, behavioural addicted persons show more of the concerning behaviour than non-addicted persons do. Therefore playing time cannot be seen solely as the risk factor per se (Hellström et al., 2012). Risk factors have been found among traits and social settings such as, for instance low, self-esteem (Collwell and Payne, 2000, Niemz et al., 2005) and loneliness (Lemmens et al., 2011, Whang et al., 2003). Some researchers found a bi-directional connection between these possible causes and problematic gaming behaviour (Gentile, 2009). Only a few studies focused on the motives for game playing and their role in explaining the relationship between real life problems and addictive tendencies concerning digital games (Hellström et al., 2012). Thus, the aim of our study was the investigation of implicit and explicit playing motives and their role in game play addiction.

Section snippets

Traits, social settings, and further psychological problems

As regards players’ traits, recent research focused on personality traits, demography, social settings, and psychological problems (Yang & Tung, 2007). Gender and age were found to reinforce problematic playing behaviour (Chak and Leung, 2004, Niemz et al., 2005). Boys were found to be more endangered than girls (Gentile et al., 2011) and adolescents tended more to neglecting their duties concerning work and/or school than adults (Gentile, Lynch, Linder, & Walsh, 2004). Moreover, intelligence

Participants and design

A 3 × 3 mixed design was chosen, combining playing behaviour (non-problematic vs. excessive vs. problematic) as between-subjects factor and playing motives (social interaction, achievement, immersion) as within-subject factor. We only searched for male digital game players and recruited male players by mailing lists from the University of Cologne. In addition, we contacted hosts of computer game parties and asked them for help. We visited the parties we were invited to and asked male players to

Implicit playing motives

We analysed the response latencies in milliseconds per character using a 3 (playing behaviour: non-problematic vs. excessive vs. problematic) × 3 (implicit playing motives: social interaction vs. achievement vs. immersion) mixed ANOVA, with repeated measures on the last factor.

The main effect for playing behaviour reached significance, F (2, 87) = 13.66, p < .001, ηp2 = .24. Participants with problematic playing behaviour (M = 91.91, SD = 18.28) responded faster than participants with excessive playing

Discussion

While the impact of traits and social settings on digital game addiction is well investigated, the role of playing motives is still unknown. Recent research suggested that Yee’s (2006) three playing motives are connected to problematic playing behaviour (Hellström et al., 2012, Klimmt et al., 2009). However, these studies only assessed explicit playing motives while the influence of implicit motives might be even stronger concerning addictive tendencies.

Our study focused on implicit and

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