Gaming social capital and civic involvement among Russian MMORPG players

Limitations

This paper has some limitations resulting from the chosen method and sampling strategy. The first limitation is that my online survey can be completed only by those respondents who have the Internet access. The second limitation of this paper is that I surveyed only Internet users in forums and social networking sites, so these users can be considered as those who are somehow more active in the community and, thus, highly motivated to complete my survey. I tried to deal with this limitation by asking respondents to leave the contacts of other players who could also become respondents in my survey and used this information to send a survey to these new contacts. Such limitations can be overcome by applying the stratified quota sampling method. For example, the university can use my survey on the students through the online tools and then recruit some of them based on the proposed strata. The next step should be the establishment of quotas on age, gender, etc. to make the sample match with the distribution of variables reported by the country's official census bureau.

The third limitation is that the game genre of MMORPG is becoming less popular nowadays, and almost all online games can be played collectively. Some of my respondents also noted that some MMO or MOBA games can be treated as MMORPGs. My guess is that the borders between the game genres are getting blurred, but the contribution is best visible when only one genre is exposed. Comparing these results with those of MOBA players, taking into account the overlap of users, is a possible next step in this research. Moreover, the research can be widened to the study of all Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs), not just MMORPGs.

Future work

There are some avenues for future work in this field of study. Causal or time order relationships can be measured with the help of collecting more generalizable panel data. Moreover, it can be interesting to study and to compare different age groups as their civic and social attitudes and gaming social capital can be very different from one another. For example, young people can just start their civic life but have more experience in online gaming while older respondents may be more involved in the life of their community or country because they have a more fruitful and experienced background. What is more, different motivations for the game play can be analyzed from the civic engagement perspective. Various activities in the multiplayer online games could also provide players with different environments, and the deeper involvement in such activities may lead to dissimilar outcomes. In the future work, I suggest first measuring the frequency of various kinds of activities within the game and then predicting civic engagement with the collected data about players' experience. Also, other researchers can focus on the non-civic engagement of players and measure this variable from different aspects of life, even taking into account the consumer engagement of players.

Conclusion

In conclusion, despite having some limitations, my study can be used for the future work in the online gaming field. It also shapes some attitude towards online games as an environment which can unite players, help them to socialize, provide them with skills of teamwork and collaboration and facilitate new social ties. These results can be used in civic learning and for spreading better and more frequent civic engagement. Moreover, the research can be used for re-thinking the civic engagement variable as it appears to be related to the people's social bonds and the extent of their collective activities and work. This finding can hopefully lead to the development and proliferation of studies which focus on online games from the perspective of civic engagement with a view to building more participatory communities of players that care about the state of affairs of their neighborhood and the country.

References

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3. Castronova, Edward, Mark Bell, Robert D. Cornell, James Cummings, W Emigh, Matthew Falk, Michael Fatten, Paul LaFourest, and Nathan Mishler. 2009. `A Test of the Law of Demand in a Virtual World: Exploring the Petri Dish Approach to Social Science.' IJGCMS 1 (April): 1-16.

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5. Griffiths, M.D. and Davies, M.N.O. 2005. `Videogame addiction: Does it exist?' In J. Goldstein & J. Raessens (Eds.), Handbook of Computer Game Studies. pp. 359-368. Boston: MIT Press.

6. Gordon, Eric, and Jessica Baldwin-Philippi. 2014. `Playful Civic Learning: Enabling Lateral Trust and Reflection in Game-Based Public Participation'. International Journal of Communication 8 (0): 28.

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Appendices

The questionnaire

Figure 1. Comment of the respondent from the community “EVE Online”

Figure 2. Comment of the respondent from the community “EVE Online”

Figure 3. Comments of the respondents from the community “EVE Online”

Figure 4. Comment of the respondent from the community “The World of Warcraft”

Visualizations and figures

Figure 5. The distribution of respondents' sex

Figure 6. The distribution of respondents' age groups

Figure 7. The distribution of top 5 respondents' cities of residence

Figure 8. The distribution of respondents' hours of playing MMORPGs per week

Figure 9. The distribution of respondents' gaming experience (in years)

Figure 10. Top 5 most-played MMORPGs among the respondents

Figure 11. The distribution of respondents' answers on the question “How well the Russian government copes with the spread of COVID-19?”

Figure 12. Polychoric correlation for civic involvement index variables.

Figure 13. Polychoric correlation for non-civic involvement index variables.

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