How gaming is all work and no play (Marcgh 14, 2006) is a summary of a study by two Brunel University academics about online playing on RuneScape. Simon Bradford and Nic Crowe explain their findings from their 3 year study in the BBC story:
The stark fact is that many young people spend as much time playing video games as they do doing their homework.
Concerned parents reading these statistics may have a sharp intake of breath. To them, this is proof that their children spend too much time being “anti-social” in front of a screen.
It is not that simple. Having researched gamers for three years, we have found that it is far from an anti-social activity.
Some quotes:
We noticed was that, rather than forfeiting existing friendships, teenagers logging into the game environment are actually adding to their group of friends.
This was because they meet different groups in different, virtual, meeting spaces.
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The most interesting factor we found among the gamers involved the other aspect of their online lives – work.We noticed how they divided their time between work and play – an activity that is largely managed for schoolchildren and is often first learned with the independence of university education.
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This is how she generates income with which to buy the things she needs in the RuneScape world: armour, food, clothes and so on.
These work locations, particularly mining areas, often attract many users so she seeks quieter places to chat or wind down from the stresses of work, in the same way she might do after school or work in the material world.
The study showed that players use the virtual world not only to recreate the real world, but to explore all sorts of experiences that would otherwise be closed to them.