Online Gaming And Its Affect On Friendships

By Franky Dominguez, Lance Mendoza, Matthew Tung

1. Introduction

Video games can provide countless hours of entertainment for those who consume them. Video game consumption can be quite drastic among young adults and children, but it is easy to find every generation enjoying them for entertainment. As society continues to evolve towards a more technologically efficient world, it’s likely we will continue to spend more time in the digital virtual environment and less in the physical world. This is highly evident as we spend countless hours in front of a computer either helping us in our job or partaking in simple pleasures such as playing video games. With the revolving idea of spending more time in the virtual environment, a question that comes to mind is, how do online games affect our social relationships in our lives?

For this study, we will be focusing on how online gaming affects social relationships among young adults. How does online gaming affect friendships? For gaming contexts, we will be studying specifically video games and their role in our social relationships. The social relationship for this study will be examined through the participants’ friendships where we’ll be looking at aspects of closeness between the participant and their friends. These closeness aspects include self-disclosure between friends, an initiative to socialize, and however else the participant chooses to define closeness with their friends.

2. Methods

The data we collected from our participants were data from semi-structured interviews using open-ended questions. We made sure to not ask leading questions so as not to affect participants’ output responses. In total, we asked participants to answer ten interview questions as well as a few follow-ups depending on their responses to the ten initial questions relating to how online gaming affects friendships. We collected both audios as well as visual data while collecting field notes on our subjects. We took notes on certain things we found fascinating about our interviewees’ visual and/or audio cues. For our interviews, we collected data by recording and transcribing audio voice. Lance used OBS to record audio, Matthew used Zoom to record and Franky used the available phone he had. Our interviews consisted of one on one interviews as group interviews were not ideal to have our participants open up to us about their private matters.

Below are a list of interview questions we asked our participants.

1. What kind of games do you play?

2. How many hours in a day/week do you play video games?

3. How do you identify/define friendship?

4. Can you describe your social interactions with your friends in-person?

5. Can you describe your social interactions online with your friends?

6. How significant or impactful are games in your life?

• Follow up: How do you balance social commitment with games and social commitments in real life?
• Follow up: What kind of aspects do you think makes your online social interactions meaningful?

7. How does playing video games affect your relationships?

• Follow up: Are there differences between your real life/online relationships?
• Follow up: How satisfied are you with your relationships in the online video game realm versus real life?

8. Does your online relationships influence the way you socially interact with people in real life?

• How so?

9. Does your real life relationships influence the way you socially interact with people online in-game?

10. Would you hang out with a friend you met online in real life? Why or why not?

The subjects we interviewed were young adults. In total, we collected a sample of four participants. We collected our sample participants at random as well as selected those we knew in some sort of capacity. We specifically did not know them too well, so our interviews were still random and not biased toward people who we knew very well to affect the data being collected.

To start our participant recruitment processes, we recruited our participants in a university setting where our participants were university students. Our recruiting techniques were a bit different from one another, but overall we believed that our sample population can reflect the general population’s view on how online gaming affects friendships. For example, Lance collected participants at random and asked the first people he saw if they wanted to participate in the study. Matthew was able to find someone he knew to be his participant and Franky recruited his participant through his cohorts.

To analyze our data we first used Otter.ai to transcribe the audio recordings and got together to identify common patterns as well as themes with our transcript recordings. Then we familiarize ourselves with the data we have. We followed the iterative coding process which involves deriving the code, reviewing the code, applying the code and adjusting the code. To derive the code we read through the data we had, wrote memos on things that were said and collapsed them to be analyzed. We talked about the codes amongst ourselves as three coders and adjusted our stance depending on what we found based on the derived themes. We removed other filler themes that were unnecessary to the main point of the study. We utilized the exploratory method of holistic coding, which applies a single code to each large unit of data to capture a sense of the overall contents and patterns throughout the data.

3. Results

3.1: Online Friends can become IRL Friends

This theme was made from data collected from all four participants which described that online friends are “similar” to IRL friends and in contexts where they’ve met up with their online friends IRL. Two of our participants have reported meeting online friends and all four have said that they are willing to meet online friends IRL. The reasons given for participants’ willingness to meet include: not seeing online friends as different from IRL friends; as long as they’re comfortable talking with them; and belief that closeness can be developed online.

3.2: Defining Friendship

This theme emerged from participants describing what friendships mean in their personal lives. Three participants defined friendship as a connection where both parties are able to talk to one another. One participant believed friendships revolve around trust and being able to be open to one another. Another participant valued authenticity in a friendship, citing “no fake politeness” or for a lack of a better term, an individual who is your acquaintance that you engage in small talk with because it is deemed appropriate and polite. Additionally, one participant emphasized spending quality time with each other.

3.3: Games as a medium to strengthen friendship

This theme comes from all four participants who have expressed using online gaming to socialize with friends they’ve met IRL. All four participants have stated that they regularly have conversations while gaming that doesn’t pertain to the game. These conversations are usually about daily-life topics or catching up with one another. These conversations were described as “enjoyable” by one participant. Another participant has explicitly expressed that gaming online together with friends has had a positive effect on them and their relationship with their friends.

3.4: IRL Affects Relationships with Friends within the Online Gaming Space

This theme was developed from three participants who revealed that their IRL friend’s relationships impacted their relationships online when playing games. Two participants noted emotional connections from IRL relationships that influenced their online gaming spaces; one of these participants reads the mood of his friends and adjusts his online behavior accordingly. One participant reported that games felt more engaging when knowing the friend beforehand.

Figure 1: Sample responses from participants.

4. Discussion

In relation to our research question, how online gaming affects friendships, our results give insight into how the online gaming space positively facilitates friendships. The themes made from our data in the previous section highlight the different ways the facilitations are expressed and are complementary to one another.

Theme 3.2 provides a base understanding of our participants’ definition of friendship which serves as values to look at friendship development within other themes. Friendship values such as sharing aspects of their lives with one another, authenticity, quality time spent, and comfortability in conversing were prominent in the data. This can provide an explanation and why participants were open to meeting someone they’ve only engaged with online (theme 3.1) as these friendship values are not exclusively developed IRL. In fact, these values seem to be necessary factors in getting someone to meet their online friend IRL as shown in one of our participants where they had an online friend who shared they were performing in a music venue nearby and both decided to meet that night. This meeting seemed to be possible because of the sharing of their lives with one another during their conversations online while gaming.

Themes 3.3 and 3.4 show that online gaming as a medium to facilitate social interactions has had positive effects on our participants’ relationships. For this study, this positive effect is seen in two ways: (1) online games as an interaction space to do activities together and (2) online games as an interaction space to express social support. Online gaming was said by one of our participants to be more enjoyable with friends, especially with certain games (in this case, the participant was referring to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game that has a system that relies on your friends within the game). Something more prominent that was unanimous with our participants was the enjoyment of the quality time online gaming provides with friends. Touched upon in the previous paragraph, participants not only talk about the game itself while playing, but aspects of their lives. This provides an avenue for the intimacy of a friendship to grow by providing social support when called for. One participant mentioned when gaming with a friend he knows is in a bad mood, he’d tend to be more supportive in-game and in-chat rather than being a troll in-game and bantering.

The results of this study can shed a light on a few avenues for future work. The themes mentioned above can be employed to further explore the impact of games on friendships such as looking into collocated vs un-collocated gaming settings and friendships, and the specific aspects of online gaming that foster friendships. We hope this work can help support future research that examines the relationship between online gaming and friendships.

Figure 2: Grouping themes from participant interviews.

As researchers, it is important to identify our biases, values, and personal backgrounds that shape our views on the research being conducted. Interpretations and connotations of what friendships entail and how they’re formed vary from person to person. Also, the relationship between online gaming and friendships can be viewed through multiple lenses depending on personal experience. In addition, regarding the project structure, the variety and amount of participants were also constrained by the time allocated for this research study. With additional time, more research would have potentially allowed for new insights and more comprehensive themes.

5. Conclusion

In our study, we wanted to explore the impact of online gaming on friendships. We created a protocol, asking participants about online gaming, friendships, and the relationship between the two. From our 4 semi-structured interviews, we gathered and categorized the data into four central themes that were prominent in all interviews: Online Friends can become IRL Friends, Defining Friendship, Games as a medium to strengthen friendship, IRL Affects Relationships with Friends within the Online Gaming Space. These themes gave us an understanding of a baseline definition of friendship from our participants and the landscape of how online gaming provides avenues for developing friendships. We further discussed possible future research that can be explored through collocated vs. uncollated gaming and specifically exploring what qualities foster friendships in online gaming space.