Social capital, coplaying patterns, and health disruptions: A survey of Massively Multiplayer Online Game participants in China

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWe examined the relationship between social capital, coplaying patterns and health disruptions in a large sample of gamers in a popular Chinese Massively Multiplayer Online Game, Chevaliers' Romance 3. Partnering with the game operator, we fielded an online survey (N = 18813) in 2011. Social capital was measured by (1) psychometric measures of bridging and bonding social capital, and (2) core discussion network size using name generators, as well as the number of strong and weak ties within the core network. Controlling for sociodemographic variables, we found that bonding social capital was associated with lower odds of frequent or occasional health disruptions, but bridging social capital did not have any effect. Weak ties in the core network were associated with greater odds of health disruptions. Coplaying patterns also mattered -people playing with friends first met through CR3 were less likely to have health disruptions, while playing with existing friends and families tended to have the opposite effect.Overall, social capital and coplaying patterns appear to have significant health implications for participants in online games.

Exploring Network Measures of Social Capital: Toward More Relational Measurement

“…While goodwill is the substance of social capital, it comes from social relations built through everyday sociality (Coleman 1998;Lin 1999Lin , 2008Putnam 2000). Social capital has also emerged online throughout the digital era, which might influence civic engagement (Mandarano, Meenar, and Steins 2010) and health conditions (Pan, Shen, and Feng 2017;Shen and Chen 2015). Likewise, scholars from many disciplines have focused on different aspects of social capital, such as physical and perceived resources, social networks, institutions, and determinants and outcomes at the individual and collective levels (Adler and Kwon 2002;Lin, Fu, and Hsung 2001;Lowndes and Wilson 2001;Portes 1998;Van der Gaag 2005;Woolcock and Narayan 2000).…”

“…Node-level measures are useful for studying social capital as an individual asset. On the one hand, bonding and bridging social capital were conceived as factors in explaining political participation (Achbari 2015), use of employment services (Barman-Adhikari and Rice 2014), entrepreneurial orientation (Cao, Simsek, and Jansen 2015), loan repayment performance (Dufhues et al 2011), job searches (Gayen, Raeside, and McQuaid 2019), and health disruption (Shen and Chen 2015). These studies generally refer to bonding and bridging as effects and then analyze how the two explain the individual-level dependent variables.…”

A Scale Development Study: Motives and Consequences of Online Game Addiction

“…Online gaming addiction has an impact on the physical and psychological health of players. Social capital and co-playing patterns appear to have significant health implications in participants playing online games (52). Online multiplayer games create new social platforms, with their own etiquette, social rules of conduct, and ways of expression (53).…”

The Relationship Between Player’s Gaming Orientation and Avatar’s Capital: a Study in Final Fantasy XIV

“…Thus far, only social capital has been extensively studied in the context of virtual and game worlds (see e.g. [4] [12] [19] [28] [33] [36]) and studies on players' other forms of capital in virtual worlds that use quantitative methods are rare.…”

“…[23][27][33] and bonding and bridging social capital theory by Putnam and all articles listed here utilizeWilliams' (2006) popularized survey in one way or another[33][40].Even with the multitude of studies where capital and video games are discussed in unison, there has relatively little literature on player capital and especially in the area of quantitative research (see, e.g [4][40]).…”