How does Online/Video Gaming affect its Players and Society?
North Carolina State University. “Online gaming augments players’ social lives, study shows.” ScienceDaily. 27 Mar 2014. Web. 21 Jul 2014. The new research shows that online social behavior is not replacing offline social behavior in the gaming community. Instead, online gaming is expanding players’ social lives. This article shows several tracking results to prove this point. “Gamers are not the antisocial basement-dwellers we see in pop culture stereotypes, they’re highly social people,” says Dr. Nick Taylor, an assistant professor of communication at NC State and lead author of a paper on the study. “This won't be a surprise to the gaming community, but it’s worth telling everyone else. Loners are the outliers in gaming, not the norm.” Indeed, in recent years, a lot of players of massively multiplayer role-player games such as War of Warcraft (WOW) took an in-depth survey about their offline social lives. At the same time, researchers tracked the offline behavior of these players. The result showed that most of these players had high social skills both online and offline. It means online gaming do not affect players’ offline social behaviors, however, online gaming can even improve players’ social ability. As a WOW player, I do absolutely understand reasons of this situation. First, massively multiplayer role-player games almost create real social environments to let players talk, drink and chat online. It is just like communicating with people in a coffee bar but not face to face. What’s more, when players fight with the boss as a team, social skills become more important. In WOW, every player’s unsociable will always lead to the destruction of the whole team. Therefore, a correct way of playing online gaming will undoubtedly improve your social skills.
University of Jyvaeskylae. “How Does