Key findings of the survey include:
Mood Enhancer: Does Game Playing Online Boost Your Mood? (% of Respondents) | ||
Boost mood? | Yes | No |
| 87% | 13% |
Source: WorldWinner Survey, July 2009 |
Peter Blacklow, president of WorldWinner and EVP of GSN Digital, concludes that "The state of the economy is affecting our leisure activities just as much as it's impacted our working lives and stress levels... our business is... a welcome break... "
Play Games Online To De-stress When Job Hunting (% of Respondents) | ||
Play to De-stress | Yes | No |
| 62% | 38% |
Source: WorldWinner Survey, July 2009 |
Importance of Competition | |
Reason for Competing | % of Respondents |
Thrill of winning money | 55% |
Forget worries, problems | 59 |
Keeps mind sharp | 44 |
Improve score | 36 |
Victory over skilled player | 44 |
Intensifies thrill | 25 |
Source: WorldWinner, July 2009 |
Reason for Playing Games | |
Reason | % of Respondents |
Currently unemployed | 12% |
Cutting back on other entertainment | 7 |
Inexpensive hobby | 28 |
Need extra money | 5 |
Relief from stress | 30 |
Boosts mood | 14 |
Source: WorldWinner, July 2009 |
For additional information from WorldWinner, please go here.
Of course this has all the usual weaknesses of self-reporting surveys administered to people engaged in a stimulus-reward loop.
Much more interesting would be a survey that assessed these factors obliquely. I.e., we know they think they're destressing, but are they? We know they think it keeps their mind sharp, but does it? We know they think it picks them up, but what if we discover that people who game are more depressed than those who don't?
Put another way: People rarely have insight with regard to their own relationship with drug of choice. Even (and perhaps especially) when they think that they do.
Can a person believe he is reducing stress without reducing stress?
A recent study does suggest gamers suffer from more depression:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/081709-study-adult-video-gamers-fatter.html?fsrc=netflash-rss
In 2006, we conducted a survey that found similar results, for example, of surveyed men and women ages 18 and over who play casual games, 64 percent do so as a way to unwind and 53 percent do so for stress relief.
Studies like these provide interesting data, but what I appreciate more is talking to customers in person about their experiences playing our games.
I love it when a mom of two tells me "I LOVE playing your games, its my way to relax for five minutes after the kids go to bed."
Comments like these give extra meaning to the work we do.
"Can a person believe he is reducing stress without reducing stress?"
Sure. Happens all the time.
One example: Suppose you're addicted to a drug. Withdrawal produces stress; you take the drug, and that relieves the particularly distressing aspects of withdrawal. But you could still be at a higher stress level than you would be at without ever having taken the drug, and you could have increased your stress level in other regards that offset the particularly present aspects of withdrawal (e.g., pain).
An analogy: People who drink, or smoke pot, often believe quite strongly that they're better drives after they've consumed their drug. Yet I'm not aware of a single study that didn't find exactly the opposite.
Anyway, my questions were rhetorical. My main point was that self-reporting studies like these are more or less useless for divining what's actually going on. As Nielsen likes to put it, with a self-reporting survey you get what people think they remember about what they think they did. A good ethnographer doesn't leave it at that -- s/he looks at what they're actually doing.
So until we can wire people up and look at actual data, this kind of self-reporting reportage is actually worse than useless, insofar as it leaves people thinking they know something about what gaming actually does for people.