A study by researchers at the North Carolina State University has dispelled the myth that gamers are anti-social.
“Loners are the outliers in gaming, not the norm,” said Dr. Nick Taylor, an assistant professor of communication at the university.
Taylor, along with staff from York University and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, travelled to 20 public gaming events in Canada and the United Kingdom to observe the behaviour of thousands of players and, took a detailed survey of 378 players.
The research was focused particularly on Eve Online and World of Warcraft players.
The resulting study found that, not only did gaming not eliminate social interaction, it supplemented it. “Gamers aren’t the anti-social basement-dwellers we see in pop culture stereotypes, they’re highly social people,” said Taylor.
The researchers tracked the online and offline behaviour of gamers, focusing on how they communicated with each other. “We found that gamers were often exhibiting many social behaviors at once: watching games, talking, drinking, and chatting online,” said Taylor.
The study found that gamers’ social behaviour was consistent, regardless of which games were being played and how the player behaved in the game. “For example, a player could be utterly ruthless in the game and still socialize normally offline,” he said.
The study is called “Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings” and is published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.
Source: Polygon
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Is it not the casual gamers are not loners? It’s more likely that the dedicated heavy fans (otaku types) are probably less social.
BTW antisocial refers to a trait of negative behaviours such as truancy, theft and lack of respect for other people and others’ property, and not asocial behaviour, as in people who are socially withdrawn.