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Philanthropic, prosocial players: How game-related charity events motivate unlikely donors
Abstract
Although we have long known that many different types of individuals play video games, the stereotypical “gamer” is often portrayed as a young male. Furthermore, research into questions such as violence and aggression, addiction or problematic play, and toxic gaming communities tends to frame gamers and gaming as anti-social. From a philanthropic perspective, then, gamers appear to be unlikely candidates for charitable giving. Following attendance at a fundraising game tournament for Gamers Outreach, a non-profit charity that provides video game systems to children’s hospitals, this research team conducted a survey of attendees. Our findings suggest that gamers are willing to support and monetarily contribute to a cause they believe in, but also that engaging potential donors through their preexisting interests and communities—in this case, games—can be a productive form of outreach. Finally, participants recognized and sought to combat gaming’s anti-social stereotypes, revealing a further motivation behind their charitable behavior.
India has become one of the world's largest gaming destinations, and in the last few years, the rapid rise of online gaming has led to the domination of fantasy sports gaming platforms. Very little is understood about how users on fantasy sports gaming platforms perceive and approach giving and what essentially matters to users before selecting or engaging with such fantasy sports gaming platforms. This study aims to predict user loyalty and repeat intention to donate towards fantasy sports gaming platforms by examining philanthropic actions, well‐being (WB) and flow experience (FE). A large‐scale research study on 2091 samples was undertaken by adopting three‐fold SEM‐ANN‐NCA (structural equation modeling‐artificial neural network‐necessary condition analysis) for establishing and empirically testing a comprehensive model by integrating philanthropic actions, WB and FE to predict user loyalty and repeat intention to donate towards online fantasy sports gaming platforms. The findings add depth to our understanding of philanthropic actions linked to fantasy sports gaming platforms and users' loyalty and donation intentions towards such platforms. The results of ANN indicated the normalized importance of the predictors of user loyalty and found that philanthropic action was the strongest predictor. Likewise, philanthropic actions, WB, and FE were necessary conditions (must‐have) to determine user loyalty during NCA. The findings would provide invaluable intelligence to fantasy gaming companies to oversee critical philanthropic decisions proficiently. In addition, the results would provide valuable insights to decision‐makers in philanthropic foundations and other entities, such as practitioners and online fantasy gaming companies, to devise effective marketing strategies to gauge user loyalty and shape donation intentions.
This paper presents a general model for identifying frames in texts or messages, and for delineating their characteristics and communicative structures. Integrating ideas and methods from qualitative content analysis, semantic network analysis, and thematic analysis, the model is based on an inductive approach to data condensation and abstraction; it enables the conceptualisation of issue-specific as well as generic frames. The analytic procedures entailed by the model are outlined using examples from a broader study of framing practices in charitable fundraising campaigns. Findings from the study are discussed to illustrate how the model can enhance the trustworthiness and generalisability of frame-based research. Further applications and potential limitations of the model are also discussed.
Charity streaming is a novel and increasingly popular form of fundraising where content creators stream content during a fixed period of time to raise money and awareness. Many charity streams involve people playing games for a prolonged period of time. In this study, we interviewed charity organizations about what this new form of fundraising means for them and how it is different from traditional fundraising efforts.
While the virtual environments of online games can foster healthy relationships and strong communities, some online games are also marred by antisocial and offensive behavior. Such behavior, even when relatively rare, influences the interactions and relationships of users in online communities. Thus, understanding the prevalence and nature of antisocial and offensive behaviors in online games is an important step toward understanding the full spectrum of healthy and unhealthy interactions and relationships in virtual environments. Extensive research has explored video game content produced by game developers, such as violence, profanity, and sexualized portrayals, but much less research has systematically examined potentially problematic content produced by players in online games. While potential effects of antisocial and offensive online game content are not well understood, a first step toward exploring this concern is systematic documentation of offensive user-generated content in online games. To that end, two large-scale content analyses measured a range of offensive user-generated content, including utterances, text, and images, from a total of more than 2,500 users in popular first-person shooter video games. Findings indicated that some content, such as profanity, was frequent among users who spoke during games. More offensive and potentially harmful content, such as racial slurs, was proportionally very rare, but frequent enough to be encountered often by regular players. Results of this initial investigation should be interpreted tentatively, do not suggest that relationships in online shooter games lack healthy elements, and should not be generalized to other online game communities until further research is conducted.* Note: This paper contains strong language which may be offensive to some readers.
As qualitative research becomes increasingly recognized and valued, it is imperative that it is conducted in a rigorous and methodical manner to yield meaningful and useful results. To be accepted as trustworthy, qualitative researchers must demonstrate that data analysis has been conducted in a precise, consistent, and exhaustive manner through recording, systematizing , and disclosing the methods of analysis with enough detail to enable the reader to determine whether the process is credible. Although there are numerous examples of how to conduct qualitative research, few sophisticated tools are available to researchers for conducting a rigorous and relevant thematic analysis. The purpose of this article is to guide researchers using thematic analysis as a research method. We offer personal insights and practical examples, while exploring issues of rigor and trustworthiness. The process of conducting a thematic analysis is illustrated through the presentation of an auditable decision trail, guiding interpreting and representing textual data. We detail our step-by-step approach to exploring the effectiveness of strategic clinical networks in Alberta, Canada, in our mixed methods case study. This article contributes a purposeful approach to thematic analysis in order to systematize and increase the traceability and verification of the analysis.
Online video games can be a toxic environment for women. A survey assessed women's (N = 293) experiences with general harassment and sexual harassment in online video games, including frequency of harassment, rumination about the harassment, perceptions of organizational responsiveness (i.e. efforts the gaming company made to address harassment), and withdrawal from the game. Women reported coping strategies to mitigate harassment, including gender bending or gender neutralization through screen name or avatar choice, avoiding communication with other players, and seeking help or social support inside and outside the game. Both general and sexual harassment predict women's withdrawal from online games. Sexual harassment, but not general harassment, leads to rumination and subsequent withdrawal. The path from sexual harassment to withdrawal was also mediated by organizational responsiveness, indicating the video game industry plays a key role in whether women continue to participate after harassment occurs.
The Parental Mediation Model (PMM) was initially designed to regulate children’s attitudes towards the traditional media. In the present era, because of prevalent online media there is a need for similar regulative measures. Spending long hours on social media and playing online games increase the risks of exposure to the negative outcomes of online gaming. This paper initially applied the PMM developed by European Kids Online to (i) test the reliability and validity of this model and (ii) identify the effectiveness of this model in controlling problematic online gaming (POG). The data were collected from 592 participants comprising 296 parents and 296 students of four foreign universities, aged 16 to 22 years in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). The study found that the modified model of the five-factor PMM (Technical mediation, Monitoring mediation, Restrictive mediation, Active Mediation of Internet Safety, and Active mediation of Internet Use) functions as a predictor for mitigating POG. The findings suggest the existence of a positive relation between ‘monitoring’ and ‘restrictive’ mediation strategies and exposure to POG while Active Mediation of Internet Safety and Active mediation of Internet use were insignificant predictors. Results showed a higher utility of ‘technical’ strategies by the parents led to less POG. The findings of this study do not support the literature suggesting active mediation is more effective for reducing youth’s risky behaviour. Instead, parents need to apply more technical mediations with their children and adolescents’ Internet use to minimize the negative effects of online gaming.
Although video gaming is becoming a more widespread activity beyond its historically core demographic of young males, participation in competitive gaming remains largely male dominated. Addressing this issue, this research examines the experience of female players in one of the worlds most popular games, League of Legends. Two studies - one qualitative (with 15 participants) and the other quantitative (with 16,821 participants) - confirm that although female players accrue skill at the same rate as males, there remains a dearth of female players in this community. Moreover, those females who play with a male partner are less confident in their skills and often focus on supporting their partners advancement, not their own. This work suggests that one way to address the gender gap in gaming is to better understand and improve the social dynamics within popular games.
On game forums, players often discuss the positive impact of video games on their lives.
We collected 964 messages from top ranked game forums (via Alexa.com) and analyzed
them using a coding scheme based on an existing taxonomy about the impact of the
arts. This directed qualitative content analysis resulted in an exploration of how players’
talk about the impact of video games reflects broader cultural rhetorics. By analyzing
players’ positive experiences using a theory-based coding scheme that is attentive to
the wide array of effects that have been ascribed to the arts, this study offers a broad
perspective on the attributed impact of video games.
Online donation platforms, albeit a recent phenomenon, are becoming more important for human
service nonprofits, allowing them to reach a broader target population of donors at relatively little cost.
In developing countries such as India, internet use is flourishing, and this has allowed fund-raisers to
reach a population hitherto difficult to reach. A cross-sectional research design was utilized to survey
donors of one online donation programin India (n = 479). This researchwas exploratory, investigating
the factors that influence people’s willingness to donate online, including the socio-demographic
characteristics of donors. Results show that gender, perception of the organization, and influence from
others are variables that influence the likelihood of donating online. Further research and implications
for human service nonprofits seeking to undertake online charitable campaigns are discussed.
This paper highlights the results and future implications of a project aimed at understanding how the combination of game mechanics and a large-scale public installation might affect an individuals' willingness to donate to a charitable organization. The research attempts to determine if the use of an interactive public installation is an effective tool for educating the general public and inciting individuals to give to a worthy cause.
Globally, charities are under increasing pressure to find alternative sources of funding. Although charitable gaming has long been considered a viable source of revenue for charities, opponents of gaming have raised concerns about the potential negative consequences associated with gambling. The current paper examines a unique form of charity gaming–the charity super lottery (CSL)–that offers a number of fund-raising benefits to cash-strapped charities. Results from a preliminary study of CSL ticket buyers suggest that the CSL may be both a virtuous and viable source of fundraising. Interviews revealed that CSL consumers (1) viewed the ticket purchase as a donation rather than gambling, (2) were unlikely to be involved in other forms of gambling, and finally (3) perceived the CSL purchase as a complementary rather than supplementary form of charity support behavior. Implications for the fundraisers of charitable organizations and directions for future research are discussed.
The increasing popularity of computer gaming as a contemporary leisure activity, together with the use of PCs and games consoles as leisure technologies are evidence of the increasing convergence of new technology and leisure practice. The size and popularity of the games industry stands out in contrast to the lack of understanding of computer gaming as a serious leisure activity. Previous research on computer game playing has tended to focus on the negative aspects of gaming such as aggression, addiction, and social isolation, rather than viewing it as an activity which forms an important part of many people's leisure lifestyles. This paper presents a very different image of gaming and gamers. It investigates computer gaming as a serious and competitive leisure activity. The paper looks at the gendered use and negotiation of leisure spaces by gamers in the context of the expansion of gaming into space and place outside the traditional domestic contexts and which blur boundaries between domestic and public leisure spaces. As such it assumes a perspective on computer gaming in which the activity is seen as part of the everyday leisure routines of gamers rather than a spectacular and notable stimulus or event. The paper argues that although certain aspects of computer gaming involve technological mediation and disembodiment, the changes in gaming texts and contexts have not radically improved the leisure constraints associated with gendered space and technologically-mediated activities. To this end, the paper draws on the existing gaming literature and preliminary ethnographic research of public competitive gaming
The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of race, gender, and marital status on giving and volunteering behavior. A second purpose is to examine these effects across different survey methodologies. Using data from Indiana households, a multimethod, multigroup research design was used to compare giving and volunteering across eight. different survey methodologies. Results indicate important differences in philanthropic behaviors by gender, race, marital status, and survey methodology-even when controlling for differences in income, age, and educational attainment. These results highlight the importance of looking specifically at human and social capital variables, and survey methodology, when making assumptions about and interpreting the measurement of philanthropic behavior.
Tax deductibility has been recognized as a motive for charitable donations. This article considers charitable donations as purchases that consumers make, and it examines the effects of changes in the tax deductibility (i.e., the price of donating) on charitable donations. The meta-analysis includes approximately four decades of estimates of the price elasticity of charitable giving. The authors discuss implications for policy makers and the marketers of charities.
Charities and researchers have begun to adopt a much broader view of support; one that transcends traditional forms of consumer charitable support behavior (CSB) such as donations and volunteerism to include cause-related marketing (CRM), charity events and charity gaming. The current article builds upon this expanding view of charity support by introducing a typology of CSB that encompasses the breadth of consumer CSB. In doing so, the article provides direction for charities seeking to garner additional support from current supporters, as well as a means of attracting new supporters by using non-traditional forms of charitable support.
There is a long history of using videogames in a therapeutic capacity, including rehabilitation for stroke patients, people with traumatic brain injuries, burns victims, wheelchair users, Erb's palsy sufferers, children undergoing chemotherapy, children with muscular dystrophy, and autistic children. This chapter briefly examines a number of areas including: (1) videogames as physiotherapy and occupational therapy, (2) videogames as distractors in the role of pain management, (3) videogames and cognitive rehabilitation, (4) videogames and the development of social and communication skills among the learn-ing disabled, (5) videogames and impulsivity/attention deficit disorders, (6) videogames and therapeutic benefits in the elderly, (7) videogames in psychotherapeutic settings, (8) videogames and health care, and (9) videogames and anxiety disorders. It is concluded that there has been considerable success when games are designed to address a specific problem or to teach a certain skill. However, generalizability outside the game-playing situation remains an important consideration.
In this paper, we introduce the concept of a "Hegemony of Play," to critique the way in which a complex layering of technological, commercial and cultural power structures have dominated the development of the digital game industry over the past 35 years, creating an entrenched status quo which ignores the needs and desires of "minority" players such as women and "non-gamers," Who in fact represent the majority of the population. Drawing from the history of pre-digital games, we demonstrate that these practices have "narrowed the playing field," and contrary to conventional wisdom, have actually hindered, rather than boosted, its commercial success. We reject the inevitability of these power structures, and urge those in game studies to "step up to the plate" and take a more pro-active stance in questioning and critiquing the status of the Hegemony of Play.
This article examines the form and function of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) in terms of social engagement. Combining conclusions from media effects research informed by the communication effects literature with those from ethnographic research informed by a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning, we present a shared theoretical framework for understanding (a) the extent to which such virtual worlds are structurally similar to “third places” (Oldenburg, 1999) for informal sociability, and (b) their potential function in terms of social capital (Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 2000). Our conclusion is that by providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new “third place” for informal sociability. Participation in such virtual “third places” appears particularly well suited to the formation of bridging social capital—social relationships that, while not usually providing deep emotional support, typically function to expose the individual to a diversity of worldviews.
Despite an abundance of survey data on charitable giving, researchers have not analysed these data asking the kinds of theoretical
questions and employing the kinds of multivariate statistical techniques that would advance our understanding of the social
processes leading to charitable behaviour. This article reports the authors' first findings from their continuing efforts
to develop and test such a multivariate causal model of the social, demographic, economic and motivational determinants of
individual charitable giving. The first section outlines ouridentification theory of charitable giving. In the second section we discuss the data and how we operationalise our variables. The third
section examines whether there is broad quantitative support for major tenets of the model developed if applied at the household
level. In the fourth section we enquire about which factors are most strongly related to giving behaviour. We conclude with
a discussion about the centrality of communities of participation for inducing charitable giving and about the practical implications
for fundraising.
The authors present an overview of the academic literature on charitable giving
based on a literature review of more than 500 articles. They structure their review
around the central question of why people donate money to charitable organizations.
They identify eight mechanisms as the most important forces that drive charitable
giving: (a) awareness of need; (b) solicitation; (c) costs and benefits; (d) altruism;
(e) reputation; (f) psychological benefits; (g) values; (h) efficacy. These mechanisms can provide a basic theoretical framework for future research explaining charitable giving.
This study tested the hypothesis that violent video games are especially likely to increase aggression when players identify with violent game characters. Dutch adolescent boys with low education ability (N=112) were randomly assigned to play a realistic or fantasy violent or nonviolent video game. Next, they competed with an ostensible partner on a reaction time task in which the winner could blast the loser with loud noise through headphones (the aggression measure). Participants were told that high noise levels could cause permanent hearing damage. Habitual video game exposure, trait aggressiveness, and sensation seeking were controlled for. As expected, the most aggressive participants were those who played a violent game and wished they were like a violent character in the game. These participants used noise levels loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage to their partners, even though their partners had not provoked them. These results show that identifying with violent video game characters makes players more aggressive. Players were especially likely to identify with violent characters in realistic games and with games they felt immersed in.
We examine how charitable giving is influenced by who in the household is primarily responsible for giving decisions. Looking first at single-person households, we find men and women to have significantly different tastes for giving, setting up a potential conflict for married couples. We find that, with respect to total giving, married households tend to resolve these conflicts largely in favor of the husband's preferences. Bargaining over charitable giving, rather than letting one spouse take charge, is estimated to reduce giving by at least 6 percent. When the woman is the decisionmaker, she will still make a significantly different allocation of those charity dollars, preferring to give to more charities but to give less to each. Our results give new insights into both the demographics of charitable giving and the costliness of household bargaining.
This study implies that taxes affect the level of contributions by way of a price effect and an income effect, each of which has two components, a transitory one and a persistent one. The findings suggest that persistent shocks in incomes have a larger impact on charitable donations than do their transitory counterparts. The most important behavioral aspect for considerations of tax policy is the persistent price effect, since transitory effects are passing. Through this effect tax reforms can have a long-lasting influence on charitable giving.
In 2012, video gaming culture saw an interesting, paradoxical divergence. On one hand, game journalists and trade organizations testified that gaming had significantly diversified from its masculine roots, with women comprising nearly half of all gamers. On the other hand, gaming spaces witnessed increasing, public incidents of sexism and misogyny. Gaming Sexism analyzes the video game industry and its players to explain the roots of these contradictory narratives, how they coexist, and what their divergence means in terms of power and gender equality. Media studies scholar Amanda C. Cote first turns to video game magazines to assess how longstanding expectations for “gamers” are shifting, how this provokes anxiety in traditional audiences, and how these players resist change, at times employing harassment and sexism to drive out new audience members. She follows this analysis by interviewing female players, to see how their experiences have been affected by games’ changing environment. Interviewees reveal many persistent barriers to full participation in gaming, including overtly and implicitly sexist elements within texts, gaming audiences, and the industry. At the same time, participants have developed nuanced strategies for managing their exclusion, pursuing positive gaming experiences, and competing with men on their own turf. Thus, Gaming Sexism reveals extensive, persistent problems in achieving gender equality in gaming. However, it also demonstrates the power of a motivated, marginalized audience, and draws on their experiences to explore how structural inequalities in gaming spaces—and culture more broadly—can themselves be gamed and overcome.
Background and objectives:
The COVID-19 pandemic and control measures may have increased the risk of abusing addictive substances as well as addictive behaviors.
Methods:
We present an initial online survey in 6416 Chinese about the relation between the COVID-19 pandemic and addictive behavior in China.
Results:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, 46.8% of the subjects reported increased dependence on internet use, and 16.6% had longer hours of internet use. The prevalence (4.3%) of severe internet dependence rose up to 23% than that (3.5%) before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, and their dependence degree rose 20 times more often than being declined (60% vs 3%). Relapses to abuse from alcohol and smoking abstinence were relatively common at 19% and 25%, respectively. Similarly, 32% of regular alcohol drinkers and 20% of regular smokers increased their usage amount during the pandemic.
Conclusion and scientific significance:
These three coping behaviors (internet, alcohol, and smoking) during this COVID-19-related crisis appear to have increased the risk for substance use disorders and internet addiction. (Am J Addict 2020;00:00-00).
Online trolling as a form of overt racism forces sociologists to reexamine contemporary understandings of racialization in a color-blind era. In this article, I demonstrate how men of color construct meanings about their experiences of racist hate speech, referred to as trash talk, on an online gaming platform. Analyzing semistructured interviews, I show that respondents cope with this form of racism through a process of desensitization. This strategy is mediated by respondents’ peer socialization on how to effectively manage this racism as men, and their stigmatization by others who do not view these experiences as “real” racism. Strategies to cope with racism in this domain are thus gendered in ways that encourage men of color to remain silent in the face of repeated hate speech. This study further demonstrates how individual strategies developed to navigate racism online are tied to broader, collective understandings of the meanings of race, racisms, and masculinity.
Extensive research has examined the prevalence and potential effects of potentially harmful video game content produced by game developers, such as violence, profanity, and sexualized portrayals, but much less research has systematically examined the large range of potentially problematic content produced by players in increasingly popular online games. This player-generated content may actually be of more social concern than content programmed in the games, as it is largely undocumented and unaddressed by industry ratings and consumer advisory groups. While potential effects of such antisocial and offensive online game content are not well understood, a first step toward exploring this concern is systematic documentation of offensive user-generated content in online games. To that end, a pair of large-scale systematic content analyses documented a range of offensive user-generated content, including utterances, text, and images, from a total of more than 2,500 users in popular first-person shooter video games. Findings indicated that some content, such as profanity, were frequent among users who spoke during games. More offensive and potentially harmful content such as racial slurs was proportionally very rare but frequent enough to be encountered often by regular game players. Implications for further research and practice are discussed. Results should be interpreted tentatively based on this relatively unprecedented systematic investigation, should not be interpreted as evidence that online shooter games are harmful or lack healthy elements, and should not be extrapolated to other online game genres and communities until further research is conducted.
New forms of youth social and political participation have been termed ‘Slacktivism’ – low-cost online forms of social engagement that decrease subsequent offline participation. Previous experimental work has provided support for a ‘Slacktivism effect,’ but it is unclear if this theoretical model applies to youth media sharing on social networking sites. This study uses a novel sharing simulation paradigm to test the effect of publicly vs. anonymously sharing a social cause video on subsequent willingness to engage in offline helping behavior. Results show that publicly (as compared to anonymously) sharing a selected video on one’s own Facebook wall led to a greater willingness to volunteer for an issue-related cause. Participants’ existing use of social media for engagement in social issues/causes moderated the effect, such that only participants low in use of social media for social engagement were susceptible to the sharing manipulation. Implications for reconceptualizing media sharing as a unique form of online participation beyond ‘Slacktivism’ are discussed.
Video gaming: it’s a boy’s world, right? That’s what the industry wants us to think. Why and how we came to comply are what Carly A. Kocurek investigates in this provocative consideration of how an industry’s craving for respectability hooked up with cultural narratives about technology, masculinity, and youth at the video arcade. From the dawn of the golden age of video games with the launch of Atari’s Pong in 1972, through the industry-wide crash of 1983, to the recent nostalgia-bathed revival of the arcade, Coin-Operated Americans explores the development and implications of the "video gamer" as a cultural identity. This cultural-historical journey takes us to the Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, for a close look at the origins of competitive gaming. It immerses us in video gaming’s first moral panic, generated by Exidy’s Death Race (1976), an unlicensed adaptation of the film Death Race 2000. And it ventures into the realm of video game films such as Tron and WarGames, in which gamers become brilliant, boyish heroes. Whether conducting a phenomenological tour of a classic arcade or evaluating attempts, then and now, to regulate or eradicate arcades and coin-op video games, Kocurek does more than document the rise and fall of a now-booming industry. Drawing on newspapers, interviews, oral history, films, and television, she examines the factors and incidents that contributed to the widespread view of video gaming as an enclave for young men and boys. A case study of this once emergent and now revived medium became the presumed enclave of boys and young men, Coin-Operated Americans is history that holds valuable lessons for contemporary culture as we struggle to address pervasive sexism in the domain of video games-and in the digital working world beyond. © 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
This is the second of two articles in which we present a comprehensive review of the multidisciplinary academic literature on philanthropy. In this article, we identify the following predictors of charitable giving by individuals and/or households: gender, family composition and income. For each predictor, we discuss the evidence for the mechanisms that may explain why the predictor is correlated with giving. We conclude with a brief agenda for future research.
This paper examines the mechanisms for giving by investigating the psychological and values differences between men and women's motivations for giving. We explored two of the eight mechanisms for giving developed by Bekkers and Wiepking as a framework for why people give—principle of care and empathic concern. Are there differences in these motives for giving by gender, and can these differences in values and the psychological benefits that people receive when making donations explain gender differences in charitable giving? Are women more likely to give and give more than men because of their higher levels of empathic concern and principle of care? We used two US national data sets to test our hypotheses. Our results for both data sets indicate significant differences in motives by gender, as well as differences in the probability of giving and amount given by gender, even after controlling for empathic concern and principle of care measures. Our findings are discussed in terms of the importance of viewing charitable giving through a gender lens as well as practical implications for practitioners. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An exploratory survey was undertaken about the appeal of playing video games at a Local Area Network (LAN) event where personal computers are linked in order to play both face-to-face and online. First, we wanted to know who the visitors of a LAN event were, because there is hardly any research available about this class of gamers. Second, we wanted to know why they participated in a LAN event. The survey showed that LAN gamers were almost exclusively male, with a mean age of 19.5 years. They devoted about 2.6 hours each day to gaming. They were motivated by social contact and a need to know more about games. The competition motive was third in the total sample. A subgroup of heavy gamers obtained a higher score on competition. This article emphasizes the importance of the social context of gaming and interprets its results as a nuance of the stereotype of the solitary, adolescent gamer.
This is the first of two papers in which we present a comprehensive review of the multidisciplinary academic literature on philanthropy, identifying the predictors of charitable giving by individuals and households. For each predictor, we discuss the evidence for the mechanisms that may explain why the predictor is correlated with giving. We conclude with a brief agenda for future research. In this first paper we present the evidence on the relationship of giving with religion, education, age and socialisation.
In recent years, a ‘professional’ digital gaming industry has emerged in North America: this interconnected series of organisations and leagues host competitive gaming tournaments (often televised) in which young, mostly male participants compete for increasingly lucrative prize money and sponsorship contracts. Taking up Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter's (2005) challenge to confront the ways girl gamers are rendered ‘invisible’ by gamers, researchers and designers, this paper maps the various ways women participate in a set of practices around the organisation, promotion and performance of competitive gaming, framed as the exclusive domain of (young, straight, middle class) male bodies. Mothers flying their sons' teams to events all over North America, female players participating in tournaments or promotional models operating sponsorship booths, the women who participate in competitive gaming tournaments negotiate different expectations and carry out different kinds of embodied work. Each of these ‘roles’, however, is tenuously maintained within a community that most commonly reads female participation in sexualised terms: mothers at events describe themselves as ‘cheerleaders’, female players risk being labelled as ‘halo hoes’ and promotional models become ‘booth babes’.
An increasingly popular form of raising funds in the nonprofit sector is the special event that involves some form of physical activity. This paper describes a study that tracked 50 events over nine months in order to explore the phenomenon of physical activity events, their function as a solicitation strategy and as a public awareness/relations tool, and to gauge how these events met the needs of participants who donated their money and energy to a cause. Data were collected by means of participant observation at 12 events and interviews with 12 participants and 12 hosting organisations. Using a social marketing framework and diffusion of innovations theory as an approach to making sense of the data, the results suggest that events serve two main purposes: celebrating a cause and offering an event that satisfies the physical activity interests of participants, and that events appropriately act as fundraising and publicity tools. Implications for adopting a social marketing orientation so that nonprofit organisations can hasten the diffusion process by tailoring events to meet the needs of participants, and for further research are discussed. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications
Recent decades have witnessed a rapid increase in charitable gaming. Some have suggested that this means that conventional donations to charity will fall. In this paper, we use a rich Canadian data set to examine the relationship between direct contributions to charities and those made indirectly via charitable games. We find that individuals consider these two ways of giving as complementary to each other. Rather than leading to a reduction in conventional donations, direct donations may increase with the increase in charitable lotteries.
We develop a model that recognizes interdepence between individuals' charitable cash donations and volunteer labor. Using survey data, we estimate giving functions jointly, allowing a binding non-negativity constraint in one giving equation to affect the form of the other. The tax price of money giving is significant in all equations, with estimated elasticities of -1.7 for money giving, - 2.1 for women's time, and -1.1 for men's time. The complementarity between volunteer labor and cash donations suggests that the effect of tax policy on philanthropy is understated by considering monetary donations alone.
Video games have become one of the favorite activities of American children. A growing body of research is linking violent video game play to aggressive cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors. The first goal of this study was to document the video games habits of adolescents and the level of parental monitoring of adolescent video game use. The second goal was to examine associations among violent video game exposure, hostility, arguments with teachers, school grades, and physical fights. In addition, path analyses were conducted to test mediational pathways from video game habits to outcomes. Six hundred and seven 8th- and 9th-grade students from four schools participated. Adolescents who expose themselves to greater amounts of video game violence were more hostile, reported getting into arguments with teachers more frequently, were more likely to be involved in physical fights, and performed more poorly in school. Mediational pathways were found such that hostility mediated the relationship between violent video game exposure and outcomes. Results are interpreted within and support the framework of the General Aggression Model.
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Confronting toxic gamer culture: a challenge for feminist game studies scholars
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Ice bucket challenge" donations for A.L.S. research top $41 million. The New York Times
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