Researchers prove MMORPGs disrupt social lives, consume time
Science is a beautiful thing. After all, without its continual push to explore every facet of the human experience, the world may have never discovered that massively multiplayer online role-playing online games are time consuming. Thankfully, Joshua Smyth, a professor of psychology at the...
Science is a beautiful thing. After all, without its continual push to explore every facet of the human experience, the world may have never discovered that massively multiplayer online role-playing online games are time consuming. Thankfully, Joshua Smyth, a professor of psychology at the prestigious Syracuse University in New York, has definitively proven this phenomenon in a recent research study, reports the Associated Press.
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As for his methods, Smyth drafted 100 student volunteers and divided them into four groups. He then tasked each group with a different style of gaming--arcade, console gaming with Gauntlet: Dark Legacy on the PlayStation 2, PC gaming with Diablo II, and MMORPG gaming with Dark Age of Camelot. His findings indicated that those playing DAOC averaged 14.4 hours of playtime a week, more than twice as much as the second-highest group, Diablo II.
Smyth's results indicated that the MMORPG players reported "significantly lower overall health and poorer sleep and were more likely to find the games interfered with their studies and social lives." However, the MMORPGers also enjoyed their gaming time more and said made more friends, "presumably online."
Smyth chalks up the results to MMOGs creating the most "enthrallment" among gamers. He went on to note that said "enthrallment" could be both positive and negative, but did not go as far as to call MMORPGs addictive. His full paper will be published in the October issue of the psychiatric journal Cyberpsychology & Behavior.
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