A Vacation from Your Mind
Problematic Online Gaming as a Stress Response
There are a lot of stereotypes about those who play MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), but the dominant stereotype might be of a pockmarked young man hunched over a computer in his parents’ basement, unemployed, or working a minimum wage job, dedicating the late hours of the night to obtaining virtual prizes to escape the real world.
Though this is a pervasive cultural image, it does not reflect the diverse reality of those who play MMORPGs, which is made up of people from all walks of life, who are driven to play these games for many different reasons.
Researchers in the Department of Anthropology at Colorado State University found that players commonly seek stress relief online, which, though sounding like a good thing, can actually lead to both therapeutic and problematic gaming situations.
This research on stress relief and online gaming (which can be found here and here) suggests that those who have less stress in their offline lives are able to play the game therapeutically, that is, in ways that improve their lives and well-being. They report feeling better in both their online and offline lives because of games like World of Warcraft (WoW). However, playing for stress relief can also lead to so-called “addictive” or “problematic” play situations, where individuals game compulsively and lose control of their online existence to the detriment of their offline lives.
But why is this? Why do some situations of playing for stress relief lead to negative play, and others to more positive psychological results? This was the question Dr. Snodgrass and his team of student and other faculty collaborators asked in their research.
Escaping into the World of Azeroth
World of Warcraft now has approximately 8.3 million monthly subscribers, making it one of the largest subscription-based MMOs and virtual communities in the West, with significant player populations in East Asia as well. Central to this online reality is its quality of persistence: thousands of users interact in a world that persists independently of any single player. Individuals log out of the environment, but other players continue to compete and interact, advancing and changing the contours of the game-space. World of Warcraft’s massively multiple play spaces are also immersive. Software with powerful 3D graphics creates spaces that feel virtually real.
These persistent and immersive virtual spaces magnify the potential for gamers to sometimes play more than they might otherwise, and lose themselves too frequently by completing engaging tasks in a beautiful virtual world available on demand.
It is the perfect environment for one to get lost in, sometimes as means of positive entertainment, but sometimes also to the detriment of real world responsibilities.
Therapeutic and Problematic Online Play
It has been well-documented that stressful life events often lead to addictive and problematic Internet behavior in some groups of people. A divorce, for example, encouraged two brothers to escape into WoW for a whole summer, Dr. Snodgrass learned, rather than deal with their parents yelling. Losing a job can also encourage players to cling to virtual places where they have success, or feel they command high levels of respect.
However, online gaming can also provide therapeutic stress relief, as revealed in interviews:
“I mean if you just needed to get your mind off of something for a little bit, you need to help relieve the stress just, you know, I think there’s definitely a therapeutic aspect to a change of pace.… But I think when you’re unwilling to work on stuff that’s happening around you or in real life because you’re pouring a lot of time into the game then there you have a problem, it’s being detrimental.”
Another participant voiced similar concerns:
“I could definitely see how people would get addicted to playing [World of Warcraft]. Like I said, it’s kinda’ like a vacation from your mind, a little vacation from reality, even if things were stressful or complicated or anything else. The game, even it’s stressful, it’s still not as stressful, never as bad, as the things can be in real life.”
Essentially, online play follows what these researchers refer to as a “rich get richer” model of stress relief. Less stressed individuals manage to play WoW so as to enhance their offline lives (for more on this research, click here). By contrast, more highly stressed players further magnify the stress and suffering in their lives by playing compulsively and thus problematically, which is evidenced in statements like the following:
“[Playing WoW] took away from — everything else became not important. You know, you start rationalizing silly things, you just cut back, cut back, cut back, and pretty soon you just stop leaving your room, or your house, and you think it’s been a day or two and in reality it’s been a week… I know it impacted my work because there’d many times were I’d be just like ‘Last minute, last minute last minute, @*&*! Gotta go!’ or I would play it for so long I’d have like an hour of sleep and then you’re a space case like I am today.”
These discussions with this study’s participants tell a story about how success in WoW can lead players to devalue offline life related to friends and work, while the game becomes increasingly important, which can in the long run magnify life stress.
Cultural Dissonance and Problematic Play
When it comes to addressing why playing games like WoW for stress relief can both be positive and negative, it’s necessary to understand that players simultaneously inhabit multiple and conflicting cultural realities. This includes the lives they live on virtual gaming platforms, alongside their “real-life” ones.
Feeling out of place within society can create offline-online conflicts and psychological discomfort these researchers call “cultural dissonance.” For example, the more someone plays online, the more success they have in the game compared to real life, and the more such success validates their time in an online world. However, having too much success in an online compared to an offline world can lead certain players to further devalue their offline lives. Such devaluing does temporarily minimize the experience of online-offline conflict and thus psychological distress (called “dissonance”): In these situations, players rationalize to themselves that they are devoting their energies to more important online realities and play communities. But resolving psychological discomfort in this way can lead these players to further neglect offline problems, which typically compounds rather than relieves the overall stress in their lives.
“The Rich Get Richer”
Overall, these Colorado State University researchers found that problematic play (i.e., playing a game to the detriment of offline responsibilities) emerges in response to life stress. While many people play games in a healthy manner, feeling that the game enhances their real life by, for example, relieving stress, others game more problematically.
Some people can often experience both therapeutic and problematic play at different moments in their lives, depending on the stress levels in their lives. Largely, it is a case of “the richer get richer,” meaning that those who use online gaming to enhance already sterling offline lives garner further positive and therapeutic stress relief. However, gamers who are more distressed, be it from work or personal problems, are more likely to seek more permanent forms of escape in online worlds, which in turn throws their offline existence into greater disarray as they neglect it in favor of the virtual world of Azeroth.
Essentially, online play can render the minimally stressed even less stressed and the more highly stressed even more deeply distressed. Thus, from a psychological point of view, online games like World of Warcraft are not all good or all bad. It all depends on the identity of the particular gamer and the amount of distress they are experiencing in their lives.
For more information, please check out “A Vacation from Your Mind: Problematic Online Gaming Is a Stress Response” in Computers in Human Behavior, and “‘I Swear to God, I Only Want People Here Who are Losers!’ Cultural Dissonance and the (Problematic) Allure of Azeroth” in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
Dr. Jeffrey Snodgrass (https://twitter.com/GodfreySnorgyrs)is a cultural anthropologist at Colorado State University, where he specializes the cultural therapeutics of virtual and sacred spaces.
