Common man assumes that the purpose of the game is “entertainment” and that games are played in leisure time when one is tired from the daily activities of life. But the number of time that people spend playing games and their negative consequences revealed by the
Studies have revealed that online games are replacing other life activities like study, job, social life, family events, and normal daily functioning like watching television and sport. Excessive game playing disrupt the school, work, and real-life social contacts.
Problematic Online Gaming
Van Rooij defined game addiction as: “A loss of control over gaming, leading to significant harm”. Problematic gaming has been defined as “When the excessive gaming starts interfering with the daily life functioning it became problematic gaming or addiction”.
Problematic use of online gaming can be viewed as a special case of the broader concept of Pathological Internet Use (PIU). Problematic internet use is considered as a multidimensional syndrome that is comprised of cognitive, emotional and behavioral symptoms. Most of the studies conducted on problematic gaming have used the Brown (1997) component model of addiction as theoretical framework for explaining video game addiction. This model states that six core features must be present for a significant period of time in order to indicate addiction i.e., salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict and relapse.
• 1. Salience. This occur when playing video game become the most important activity in a person’s life, dominating the thoughts (preoccupation and cognitive distortions), emotions (cravings), and behavior (deterioration of normal behaviors).
• 2. Mood modification. This refers to changes in person’s mood state that occur as a result of playing video games, such as increase in physiological arousal or a tranquilizing feeling of calm.
• 3. Tolerance. This refers to the process whereby increasing amounts of video game play are required to achieve the former mood-modifying effects. This means that players gradually increase the amount of time they spend engaged in video game playing.
• 4. Withdrawal. These are the aversive mood states and /or physical effect that occur when video game play is suddenly discontinued or reduced. Psychological withdrawal symptoms include frustration, irritability and flattened affect.
• 5. Relapse. This refers to the tendency for the player to make repeated reversions to earlier patterns of video game play.
• 6. Harm. This refers to the negative consequences of excessive video game play. Harm includes conflicts between the addicted video game player and other people (family members and friends), other activities (job, school, social life, hobbies and interests), and from within the addict themselves (psychological distress).
Playing time is also considered as one of the most important criteria for identifying gaming addiction. A study identified the time of 41 hours per week as criteria for addiction (Griffiths, Davies, & Chappell, 2003). Online gaming is very popular in Pakistan as in all other countries of the world. Gaming zones are working in every city, opens 24 hours a day and full of gamers. The popularity is increasing day by day. According to Gametracker website almost 2000 people from Pakistan play games at each online gaming database. There are more than 200 hundred Pakistani online gaming servers for different online games.
In the west, research has demonstrated negative effects of multiplayer online gaming; thus known by “problematic online gaming”. It is a need of time to explore this phenomenon in Asian countries, establish the theoretical foundations of the construct and to understand its prevalence and causation. As Information Technology sector of Pakistan is progressing rapidly so are the online video games. Present research is an effort to take up the start in this new area of research. In the present study, problematic online gaming will be explored in the gaming population; whether this phenomenon exists in Pakistan or not.
Written by
Muhammad Owais
