“I'm Attached, And I'm a Good Guy/Gal!”: How Character Attachment Influences Pro- and Anti-Social Motivations to Play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

After a rather short wait, our research team of Nick Bowman (West Virginia University), and Daniel Schultheiss and Christina Schumann (Technological University of Ilmenau) are please to announce the publication of our article "I'm Attached, And I'm a Good Guy/Gal!”: How Character Attachment Influences Pro- and Anti-Social Motivations to Play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games" in CyberPsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

The study abstract:
One's feelings of intimacy and connectedness with distal, fictional media characters are referred to as parasocial interactions. Video games have challenged this concept, as the distance between game players and characters is greatly reduced, if not completely removed, in virtual environments. Games encourage the internalization and psychological merging of a player's and a character's mind, a multidimensional concept known as character attachment (CA). Data from our study suggest that dimensions of CA are useful in understanding both pro- and anti-social gaming motivations. Pro-social gamers feel a greater sense of control over their characters, while anti-social gamers are more likely to suspend their disbelief of the game environment and not take responsibility for their virtual actions. Pro-social gaming was more prevalent in older gamers, and younger male game characters were motivated by anti-social reasons.

We blogged about this study in an earlier post(here), and you can also view our presentation slides from NCA New Orleans below:

"I’m attached, and I’m a good guy!": How character attachment influences (pro-soci`l and anti-social) usage motivations

View more presentations from West Virginia University - Department of Communication Studies