We are all thinking about how we can socialise without going outside at the moment. While this situation is new to many of us, there are th...
We are all thinking about how we can socialise without going outside at the moment. While this situation is new to many of us, there are thousands of people who make lasting and meaningful connections from their homes. They are doing this through the world of online gaming.
Gamers socialise with others online and create a sense of community and wellbeing. Most gamers value the socialisation aspects very highly. They are among the main motivations for playing, particularly when it comes to engaging in “massively multiplayer online games”. These games have large numbers of players, typically from hundreds to thousands, who interact and play on the same server – like World of Warcraft and Runescape.
I never could have imagined back when I started my gaming research over 30 years ago that gaming would evolve into what it has become today. Over the past three decades, gaming has become more and more social and many players develop good friendships with the people they meet with online.
Online gaming friends
I first became interested in the psychology of video games while I was doing a PhD on slot machine addiction in the late 1980s. I spent a lot of time doing observational research in amusement arcades up and down...
