Hey there everyone, Panzer told me that when all was said and done I should post the results of my research for my Psych class. I’m proud to say that the results are in and you all failed! yay!

Anyways, I did my research on the topic of “Positive Vs. Negative Effects of MMO Gaming”. If that doesn’t sound like something that interests you, back out slowly now.

If you’re also the type of person to not like long ass reports on graphs, P-values, Z-graphs… Statistics in general, get out now.

Research Project Summary

Jared Williams

March 16th, 2012

Preliminary Belief

Video games in general, but more specifically MMO’s, are constantly misrepresented or attacked within the media by politicians, reporters and late night “Investigative Reports”. Just as often as they are attacked, they are also promoted to be tools by which people develope many skills. I was sick of hearing conflicting reports from the news and random web articles and decided to research this topic to answer my questions about it. I saw how friends who played acted, read news articles as well as taking from my own personal experience of playing it, and thought that in the end it would be more positive than negative. Nevertheless I wanted to research just what was and wasn’t true about the effects of playing MMO’s.

Summary of the Systematic Review 

This systematic review aims at taking all of the data gathered recently, as

well as some new data in an attempt to figure out if there is anything positive or negativeto be gained by playing MMORPG's (or MMO's for short). In

it's conclusion, it shows throughout all it's evidence that there are so many variables and differences between each person, that it is impossible to

tell if MMO's themselves lead to anything specifically. "The results suggest that Internet use and game play have significant nuances and

should not be considered as monolithic sources of effects."(Pg. 2, Abstract) They list thatthe probability levels of predicting pschological outcomes

from components of Internet use are as follows:

"**p < .05. ***p < .01. ****p < .001."

The achievement motivation was related to less loneliness
 (β = –.04, p < .001) 
and better family communication quality (β = .06, p < .001)" 
(pg. 15)

Both the message frequency and the network size were positively associated with

loneliness (β = .04, p = .002; β = 06, p < .001), while message frequency also predicted

more sense of community online 
(β = .05, p < .001) 
(pg.17 MMO Use)

Strengths and Weaknesses in the Body of Literature

This is a new field of research. As a result, there is a ton of data, with not a whole lot of back-tracking (meta-analysis/systematic reviews). Nevertheless, there is no shortage of test subjects, testing facilities, funding or researchers. As my third article put it: the Internet is a rising form of communication and a social norm. If you aren’t using it, you’ll be left behind. Just like with the internet itself however, the field of research into the effects of online gaming can be posted without much cause for speculation, since they can post it in whatever journal or organization they want. Sifting through these articles to find the ones that work from an unbiased and empirical stand-point can be difficult.

Citation:

Shen, C., & Williams, D. (2010). Unpacking Time Online: Connecting Internet

and Massively Multiplayer Online Game Use With Psychosocial Well-Being.

, 1-27. Retrieved February 18, 2012, from Google Scholar

http://129.105.161.80/drupal/sites/default/files/Shen_Williams_2011.CR_.Unpacking_time_online.pdf

Important points from the Research:

• The number of variables to figure into the research makes it nearly impossible to tell how it will affect any one group. (For instance, to take merely low-income subjects alone, you must still account for low-income individuals from the ages of 11-83 year old. If you want to break up those numbers, you could say 18-25 yr olds with low-income. You would still not be accounting for culture, background, education etc.)
• In addition to the above point, MMO’s themselves have many variables. Some people engage in Player Vs. Player (PVP) while others fight against “bosses”, Player Vs. Environment (PVE) (Cit. 2 Unpacking)
• Research for this field is only about 15 years old, around the time the first MMO came out.
• In investigating the social aspect, achieving goals, progression and possible effects on outside social life, the most commonly used graph format was shown with P-values taken from Random Sampling.
• Because anyone from the community could participate, and only those playing the MMO would be a part of the community, there was no real way to cause any bias or corrupt any of the data by getting any trends.
• When researching the amount of social interactions within World of Warcraft, they actually found that more of the game is spent alone rather than socializing. (Cit. 1, Alone)
• When researching Facebook, EVE and online communities, they showed that while the game might be designed in a way to get it’s user to give up more time to accomplish goals within the game, there was no data to support the claim that it caused people to be less productive or more productive. (Cit. 2 and 3.)