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Abstract

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) consist of many qualities that relate to the World Health Organization’s decision to identify Video Game Disorder as a defined mental health condition. While structural characteristics can determine the routine patterns of behavior a player may demonstrate, other factors are often involved in the discussion of why some elements within a game would appeal to certain players when compared to others. Open-ended gaming, such as what is found in many online games, is found in past research to lead to immersive experiences which could be perceived by mental health professionals as a tendency toward the developing an addiction around certain game types. The MMORPG genre can occupy extensive amounts of time in perpetuity, which then leads to interference in other life areas when a strategy for life balance is lacking. This study aimed to find ways personality theory could expand counselors’ understanding of motivational conditions involved in the play of online video games. For this purpose, participation involved the completion of a personality assessment tool (MBTI-M) and an assessment to measure specific motivation elements for playing online games (MPOGQ) by players of the specific online game targeted for this study: Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). Significant differences across many personality types were found in most gaming motivation categories. Findings suggest personality does have an impact on the manner in which MMORPG players seek to participate in their game of choice.
... While many MMORPGs currently exist, Final Fantasy XIV Online (FFXIV) (Square Enix, 2010) offers a well-supported and expanding gameplay for this genre. Understanding psychological responses for individuals playing FFXIV could provide actionable insights for the development of further positive impacts in games pertaining to player personality (Kaufmann, 2021;Vahlo & Hamari, 2019), gameplay motivations (Yee et al., 2012;Korkeila & Hamari, 2020;Vanderlei Fernandes et al., 2020), and flow (Andrade & Pontes, 2017). Thus, the current study utilized valid and reliable measure for personality factors, motivation for gameplay, and psychological flow to examine the impact of these player experiences. ...
Conference Paper
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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased involvement in video game related activities, including Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) (Nielsen, 2020). Specific to MMORPG’s, this genre of game can integrate with a player’s sense of self, and often reinforces continued play which leads to an experience of enjoyment and purpose due to elements of psychological flow which activate during gaming periods. Further investigation is needed on how personality theory and psychological flow expand multidisciplinary understanding of motivational conditions involved in online video game play.
... Online videogames have been explored from various disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to the field of education (Thorne and Black, 2007;Steinkuehler, 2012;Merchant, 2015;Patiniotis, 2018;and others), psychology (Song et al., 2009;Kaufmann, 2021), art (Rough, 2016;Hepdinçler, 2022), sociology (Swoboda, 2015;Sergeyeva et al., 2018) Communication, interactional practices, discourse strategies, and linguistic distinctiveness. All of them in one way or another relate to the aim of the present research and serve as a theoretical foundation for the analytical approach used. ...
Thesis
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More and more people are becoming interested in videogames not only in terms of leisure, but also because of their research potential. Videogames are being used as test sites for acquiring social, linguistic, psychological, and other types of data from millions of players every day. The present study aims at comparing the discourses of chat interactions of two largest gaming communities of World of Warcraft and League of Legends. The study employs mixed-method approach to data collection: observations and questionnaires. Gee's discourse analysis toolkit is used as a research method to process data acquired through observations (screenshots of chat logs) to elicit what social activities are performed with the help of the language used in the MMO discourses of two games. The findings of the present study are in line with the previous research on videogames as "third places", in that the interactions found within the analyzed games reflect specific social activities found outside of game worlds with the producers of the interactions manifesting multiple social identities simultaneously.
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