Video games and the social effects that they inflict upon society and the individual have been a highly debated subject. While studies have been made in regards to several social issues and their connection to video games, there was little research in regards to physical game gatherings like LAN-parties, as well as larger game gatherings like Dreamhack, and what the social effects of having physical contact with other people are at these gatherings. The goal with this study was to answer the question: “What are the social effects for the individual when participating in physical video game gatherings?”. This was done through a qualitative study by conducting five semi-structured interviews at the physical game gathering called Umeå Game Night that was located in the Umeå cultural center Klossen at Ålidhems Centrum. Four of the participants were male and one female. “Snowball-sampling” was used to gather the participants for the study through Game Night’s Facebook group. However, this sampling was unsuccessful when no participants were gained from it. Instead I had to take direct contact with people at the game gathering. The interviews were all done during the game gathering in their facility and were then transcribed for analysis with two types of methods; an inductive analysis that was backed up by a deductive analysis in the form of Activity Theory using Engeström’s model of Activity Theory. The results of this study showed that physical game gatherings helped to overcome some negative social effects that the participants thought surrounded online game as well as other social problems that they brought up during the interviews, like toxic behaviour, discrimination, and the feeling of not being welcome. There was an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the participants when being at the game gathering. Being able to socialize with other people proved to be the main motivation. However, even though physical game gatherings showed to improve negative social effects surrounding game, the learning process was still difficult to overcome for new players, and participating in these game gathering may even have negative results in keeping the new players interested in wanting to play as well as participate at the physical game gatherings. This was mainly because of the skill disparity between the experienced players, who were the majority at the game gathering, and the new players, who would feel potentially frustrated from seeing the experienced players being much better than themselves. However, the less experienced female participant in the study indicated that this issue may still be overcome, but more research needs to be done to see how big the issue surrounding the learning process when playing games at game gatherings actually is, and if there are ways to solve it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-122913 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Nyström, Kenn |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för informatik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Informatik Student Paper Bachelor (INFSPB) ; SPB 2016.31 |
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