shyness
Latest
MMOs and gaming psychology, part two: Interview with a researcher
Following yesterday's article discussing current research on psychology and MMOs, we have today our conversation with Dr. Rachel Kowert herself, the lead author on the paper that originally prompted these articles. Kowert, unlike many other researchers in her field, has established gamer cred; her earliest experiences were playing basic games on a Tandy computer with her brother, but the first game to really grab her was Super Mario Brothers. Her favorite game of all time is Final Fantasy 6 (Final Fantasy 3 in the US), and most recently she's played Banished and The Sims 4. Late in Kowert's Master's degree studies, her supervisor told her about an influx of parents expressing concern about their children's gaming habits. Finding information on the topic to help ease concerns proved difficult due to a severe lack of on-point research. This is what prompted her to switch her research focus to game studies.
MMOs and gaming psychology, part one: The research
Last month, Massively wrote a short article about research on the relationship between shyness and online game friendships. The topic is of interest to me not just because of the MMO connection but because I myself am someone who used to identify myself as shy but believe online games help me cope with and surmount it. Games are what I rely on to help myself meet new people as cultural and language barriers prevent me, an American, from making strong attachments in Japan, the country where I live and work. In preparing for this two-part article, I spoke to the research paper's lead author, Dr. Rachel Kowert, who helpfully provided me with a reader's digest version of recent research in this subfield of psychology. Tomorrow, we'll tackle our interview with Dr. Kowert herself, but today, we'll have a look at the research to bring us all up to speed.
For science! The relationship between shyness and online game friendships
It's a common stereotype that shy people flock to the internet to socialize without fear of rejection. But is it true? German researchers from the University of Münster have tackled that question. In a paper published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking this past summer, the scientists sought to determine the relationship between online video games and friendship. They surveyed German video game enthusiasts to measure their involvement with online games, their web of friendships online and off, and their emotional sensitivity -- a behavioral marker for shyness. After controlling for confounders like age and gender, they found that those subjects with high emotional sensitivity reported more online friends than offline when compared to those with low emotional sensitivity. High emotional sensitivity also correlated with online friendships that transformed into offline friendships. In other words, the shier you are, the more likely you are to make more of your friends in cyberspace than meatspace, at least if you're a self-identified gamer. As Gamasutra put it, "emotionally sensitive users are using the online gaming environment differently from their counterparts. As they are shy in face-to-face interactions which translated to fewer friends, but they were able to make more friends through online videogames which its affordances (i.e., asynchronicity, visual anonymity, etc.) paved a way for them to compensate or overcome their shyness." The full paper is behind an academic paywall, but the Gamasutra summary is worth a read.
The Guild Counsel: Can guilds and lone wolves coexist?
There are some things in life that naturally go together. Peanut butter and chocolate, peas and carrots, peaches and cream, the Captain and Tennille. But two groups that tend to not mix are guilds and shy players. I was inspired to write this column after seeing the comments in last week's column by reader McGuffin, who pointed out that not everyone wants to socialize in guild chat and share stories about life outside the game. He's right, but it raises the question of why such a someone would want to join a guild, since guilds are usually thought of as a social network of sorts. Many MMOs now have looking-for-group tools (and some even have raid finders), so in theory, there would be no need to join a guild at all if you aren't into the social side of it. But there actually are good reasons for guilds and shy players to team up, and in this week's Guild Counsel, we'll look at a few or those plus some ways for both groups to co-exist happily.
Gadgets blamed for making the world a shier place
Though we certainly feel as if we've had this discussion before, gadgets are yet again being blamed for an increase in shyness around the world. 'Course, we doubt you'd need any fancy degree to understand the cause, but a Harvard Business School researcher and psychologist has insinuated that the ease of communicating in roundabout ways (read: not face-to-face) has caused an increase in the amount of people that feel shy in public. Essentially, it was suggested that "technology is enabling us to opt out of difficult situations and causing people to become more insular," but hey, it's hard to argue how much easier life is with a little texting mixed in, no?[Via The Raw Feed, image courtesy of ABC]
