issue 1 09 - APS Member Groups - Australian Psychological Society

Excessive Videogame Playing70belonging through teamwork and competitivepursuits, (d) there is personal investment interms of players spending long periods of timeto acquire in-game rewards, and (e) there is arich language and symbol system within videogames that players develop and use (this papercould not formally address these in detail butthere were many examples of video gamerelated‘jargon’ in the transcripts). These arenormal and healthy features of groupmembership; however, these characteristicsalso provide useful units of analysis forcommunity psychologists in dealing withexcessive players of video games. Forexample, excessive video game play may becharacterised by an intense personalinvestment in the video game. The difficultyfor the player in reducing time spent playing isreconciling the personal dilemma that spendingless time in the game enables more free time inthe real world, but time spent away from thegame means fewer video game-related rewards(i.e., abandoning a large personal investment).Some players appear to form a strongrelationship or bond with the video gamemachine. Selnow (1984) referred to thisattachment as “electronic friendship” (p. 155).At its extreme, excessive players may prefer toplay the game over spending time with real lifefriends because it is easier than managinginterpersonal relationships and helps to forgetfeelings of social loneliness. The implicationof ‘electronic friendship’ is players who reducetime spent playing video games are, for allintents and purposes, reducing time spent witha ‘friend’. This perspective offers a sensitiveinsight into the player’s negative mood state(that may be termed ‘withdrawal’ in clinicalpsychology) that may accompany a decrease orcessation of time spent playing a video game.Sarason (1974) conceptualised socialbelonging as an acknowledgedinterdependence with others, and a willingnessto maintain this interdependence by giving ordoing to others what one expects from them.The problem of electronic friendship is that amachine has no shared values, no emotions,places no expectations on the player as a friend,and offers no social rewards. The implication isthat community psychologists may need toassist the excessive player in understanding thequality of the attachment that has been formedwith his or her video game machine. A possiblestrategy to reduce the player’s dependence onthe machine is to integrate the person into newsocial networks that can gratify needs for socialbelonging.Player motivation appears to be heavilyinfluenced by the variable-ratio or fixed-intervalreward delivery systems in video games. Interms of the nature of rewards, participantsreported to prefer video game goals that are nottoo easy or difficult to obtain.Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) theory of optimalexperience, termed ‘flow’, states that peoplereach a motivational peak when engaged in achallenging task that is optimally difficult. Thisstudy identified male players who do not seekout optimally challenging video gamesituations, and instead use ‘grinding’ tactics,which involves performing an easy andrepetitive series of actions in a game in order tomaximise reward payout. These participants didnot always enjoy the process of grinding but feltit was necessary to satisfy a personal sense ofachievement or completion. Video games withconcurrent reward schedules that do not havedefinitive endpoints may also condition theplayer to think that no amount of time spentplaying is ‘long enough’. These findings are inline with research that has shown that gamblerswill continue to gamble even when they arebored by or no longer enjoy the activity, andreport irritation on winning because it sustains asession of play (Blaszczynski, McConaghy, &Frankova, 1990). Helping an excessive playermay involve education about the never-endingnature of some video games and how this caninfluence motivation to play for periods longerthan intended.Rather than adopting a traditional, personfocussedtherapeutic approach aimed ataddressing various intra-psychic deficits of theindividual, such as depression or anxiety, it mayThe Australian Community Psychologist Volume 21 No 1 June 2009