Quantifying Addiction in World of Warcraft

Someone recently remarked to me regarding the paucity of quant studies on video games. I think this hole is slowly filling as researchers figure out what, exactly, to measure in regards to gaming. Efforts that have taken place so far have focused on simple things to measure like caloric consumption and glucose levels in the brain while playing. More troubling has been the focus on gaming as an “addiction,” with little regard for properly differentiating between video game overuse with chemical dependencies.

I found a paper by Nicholas Hunter over at MIT recently which focuses on the issue of “addiction” in World of Warcraft. Hunter served as lead programmer for Revolution, a social studies serious game set in Colonial America about which much has been written. In Spring, 2005, Hunter wrote a class paper on addiction in World of Warcraft. He sums up the paper from his portfolio page thusly:

Games, and in particular MMORPGs, have a history of being called “addictive.” So I thought I’d take a quantitative approach to the problem by developing a model for player consumption habits, conducting a survey of WoW players and then performing a regression analysis of the data collected. As part of my model, I propose a new way to evaluate opportunity cost (a core principle of economics) and determine that WoW players are addicted, but without enough data to determine what kind of addiction.

Although the paper has not been published (as far as I can tell), it has been made available through MIT’s Open Courseware project. It’s well worth the read, and can be downloaded here. Hunter seeks to apply “rational addiction” to Warcraft, theoretically assuming consumption leading to additional consumption equates addiction. The key question is whether the addiction in question is negative or beneficial. Obviously, a negative addiction is one leading to harm, such as smoking or alcoholism. A beneficial addiction would lead to positive aspects, such as a habitual exercise regime or developing an appreciation of fine music.

Hunter collected his dataset through random interviews with 30 WoW players, who were asked a series of questions regarding their gaming use. Follow up surveys were conducted a month later. The last question asked was, “Do you believe that you are addicted to WoW? If so, do you think playing WoW has a negative impact on your life?”

Although Hunter was able to show a statistical indication of addiction to WoW based on his dataset, he was unable to determine if it would fall under the negative or beneficial labels. He has released his dataset online, and has some additional information regarding the paper here.

In each posting on video game addiction, I’ve mentioned my preference to consider video game overuse a separately defined entity from chemical addictions. I was therefore happy to find this tidbit on Hunter’s portfolio page:

Note: In retrospect, I made a tactical error when writing this paper by overusing the term “addiction.” In economics, addiction means that prior consumption increases the amount you consume now (counter to diminishing marginal utility). As I explain in the paper, there are two kinds of addiction: Beneficial and Negative … You can read the paper for a more formal explanation of how these two types differ, but the reason for this edit is that the word “addiction” carries with it all kinds of meaning in the usual English language that does not always apply when discussing the term in economics.

References

Hunter, N. (2005). Rational addiction and MMOs: A case study of World of Warcraft. [Online.] Available: http://web.mit.edu/nhunter/www/wowresearch/wowaddiction.pdf