Dr. John Charlton on Video Game Addiction

I have received a reply from Dr. Charlton regarding yesterday’s post on gaming addiction and autism. Please email me if you want to read the documents for yourself.

In The Playing of Online Games: Addiction, Engagement & Personality, Dr. Charlton and his colleague wrote:

Personality factors may play a substantial role in the development of addictions to playing MMORPGs.

People with a tendency towards MMORPG addiction might be characterized by Asperger’s syndrome-like personality traits: on non-clinical samples, scores on indices of Asperger’s syndrome are positively correlated with neuroticism (the opposite of emotional stability), and negatively correlated with extraversion and agreeableness¹¹ (although only the difference for emotional stability was significant in our study, directions of differences in means were consistent with this).

Future research

Longitudinal research would overcome dilution of personality differences between groups.

Investigation of the present trichotomy using qualitative methods: research might focus upon differences in motivations for playing, phenomenology while playing, and perceptions of the benefits derived from playing MMORPGs.

Conclusions

The data is reasonably supportive of the distinctions between core and peripheral criteria and between engagement and addiction. Ignoring these distinctions is one factor which can; (a) lead to over-estimates of the number of people addicted to computer-related activities^1,2 and, (b) lead to the use of psychometric instruments that constitute inadequate measures of addiction⁶.

And in a qualifying statement on the possible link between autism and excessive gaming, Dr. Charlton writes:

…We were suggesting that MMORPGs MIGHT be particularly addictive to people with Asperger’s given the properties of both this type of game and the psychological characteristics of people with Asperger’s (and in interviews that I did – which included one with the Daily Mail – I did stress the ‘might’). So we were saying that people with Asperger’s might find the games attractive BECAUSE of their personality characteristics (other psychologists have pointed out that because of their characteristics people with Asperger’s tend to be misunderstood by people in face-to-face situations and this can lead them to have low self-esteem, be anxious, introverted, etc., and to some extent these characteristics matched what we found for the players who most closely approximated to our addiction criteria). It has also been said that because they have such difficulties in everyday life, people with Asperger’s can seek to escape into fantasy (and the game that we looked at would provide just such a fantasy environment).

I did emphasize that we collected data from Asheron’s Call players in general and that we did not target people with Asperger’s or seek to classify any of the games players as having Asperger’s. I also said that it would be necessary to conduct specific studies to test whether people with Asperger’s syndrome are over-represented in the population of MMORPG players and whether they are more likely to be classifiable as addicted than other players.

Tags: Addiction, Asperger's Syndrome, Autism, compulsive computer gaming, compulsive online gaming, computer games, Dr. John Charlton, gaming addiction, MMORPG Addiction, online gaming addiction, Video Game Addiction, virtual worlds