Abstract
Video gaming is an extremely popular leisure-time activity with more than two billion users worldwide (Newzoo, 2017). However, the media as well as professionals have underscored the potential dangers of excessive video gaming. With the present research, we aimed to shed light on the relation between video gaming and gamers’ psychological functioning. Questionnaires on personality and psychological health as well as video gaming habits were administered to 2,734 individuals (2,377 male, 357 female, Mage = 23.06, SDage = 5.91). Results revealed a medium-sized negative correlation between problematic video gaming and psychological functioning with regard to psychological symptoms, affectivity, coping, and self-esteem. Moreover, gamers’ reasons for playing and their preferred game genres were differentially related to psychological functioning with the most notable findings for distraction-motivated players as well as action game players. Future studies are needed to examine whether these psychological health risks reflect the causes or consequences of video gaming.
Highlights
Video gaming is a very popular leisure activity among adults (Pew Research Center, 2018)
Poorer performance in school was related to the potentially problematic use of video games. These results suggest that potentially problematic video gaming goes along with poor psychological functioning and vice versa
There was a weak connection between general psychological symptoms and all of the video game genres we investigated except strategy
Summary
Video gaming is a very popular leisure activity among adults (Pew Research Center, 2018). The amount of time spent playing video games has increased steadily, from 5.1 h/week in 2011 to 6.5 h/week in 2017 (The Nielsen Company, 2017). Video gaming is known to have some benefits such as improving focus, multitasking, and working memory, but it may come with costs when it is used heavily. By spending a predominant part of the day gaming, excessive video gamers are at risk of showing lower educational and career attainment, problems with peers, and lower social skills (Mihara and Higuchi, 2017). Video game use is widespread, and it may come with certain precursors as well as consequences. Little is known about the relations between various video gaming habits and psychological functioning. This study aims to shed light on these important relations using a large sample
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