Browsing by Subject "World of Warcraft"

As playing video games or gaming has become a growing hobby worldwide, so too has research into “gaming addiction” received more scholarly attention. While the field of “gaming addiction” research is somewhat fractured and researchers disagree on how to define and measure the phenomena that some people seem to play too much video games, or lose control over their gaming habits, the MMORPG-genre of video games have consistently been found to be over-represented when studying players with addiction-like symptoms or problematic gaming behaviour. Using a social constructionist perspective and Critical Discursive Psychology tools for analysis, this thesis aims to analyse how World of Warcraft-players, a popular MMORPG, discuss and construct gaming addiction on a forum focused on the game. Even as gamers used different ways to construct gaming addiction, either allowing it to exist or not, most of the discourses identified in the forum discussions work to shield gamers or gaming as a hobby from the negative connotations inherent in the word “addict” or “addiction”. Thus, this study aims to contribute to the nascent field of studying “gaming addiction” from a social sciences perspective.