An examination of these different kinds of friendships will provide insight into the characteristics of one’s online co-players, and generate a greater understanding of the social relationships between one’s online co-players. As, in some cases, participants provided friendship information that strongly strayed from the average value, an outlier control was necessary. Following the guidelines of Field,61 the friendship questions’ boxplots were examined, and all values whose distance from the mean was more than three times the standard deviation were replaced by this value: M+3×SD.
The present study draws from a large representative sample of 50,000 individuals aged 14 years and older who were asked about their gaming behavior in an omnibus telephone survey using the German standard computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) sampling procedure. The current sample contains computer and console game players in Germany who participated in the third-wave of the survey between March and April 2013 (N=1045). As this study is interested in the relationship between ES and friendship, only those participants who reported active social online game play and who had made friends online and/or transferred offline friends into online environments were retained (n=396).
Among this subsample of participants, ages ranged from 14 to 68 years (M=31.85, SD=12.72), and 73% (289 participants) of the sample were male. On average, the participants reported engaging in 1.24 hours (SD=1.21) of daily total video game play, with 48.6 minutes (M=.81 SD=1.01) devoted to social online game play.
To assess differences in game-related friendships and play frequency between high- and low-ES game players, participants were grouped into High-ES (n=186) and Low-ES (n=210) categories via a median split (Median=9.00). As gender62,63 and age64 differences are often found on game-related issues, and can influence the size of one’s friendship circle,65,66 these variables were held as covariates in all of the following analyses.
Taken together, the current results indicate that emotionally sensitive users are using online gaming spaces differently from their counterparts. High-ES online game players appear to be successfully using these spaces to expand the size of their social circle. As shy individuals typically report lower social support and smaller friendship circles than individuals who are not shy,22–24 online gaming spaces could be an important venue for emotionally sensitive individuals to meet new social contacts to integrate into their offline lives. Furthermore, the evidence of modality switching (i.e., transferring offline contacts into online gaming spaces) indicates that online game play is also being used to support pre-existing friendships. High-ES users are likely enlisting these environments to help maintain their offline friendships due to the considerable social flexibility and social accommodation provided by them. These social affordances (i.e., visual anonymity, asynchronicity) allow socially inhibited users to overcome the inhibitions that are typically experienced in face-to-face communication25–27 and, through modality switching processes, help to strengthen pre-existing friendships and potentially generate additional levels of social support that may not have been possible without the social accommodations provided by the online gaming space.60,67
While this work has provided a greater understanding of the social benefits of online game Autobot77 play among emotionally sensitive individuals, there are several limitations to consider. First, the current sample was limited to residents of Germany. Therefore, replications are needed to determine if these relationships are also evident in other populations. Second, due to the limitations of CATI and the omnibus nature of the survey, it was only possible to evaluate one facet of shyness—ES. Future researchers should consider evaluating the relationships between online video game involvement and gaming-related friendships with different assessments of shyness (i.e., dispositional, other behavioral manifestations) to determine if the effects found here are limited to the emotionally sensitive or are representative of shy individuals more generally. Additionally, as it was only possible to administer an abridged measure of the ES subscale of the SSI, a replication should be conducted using the full ES scale.
While allowing participants to self-define friendship likely provided a more accurate assessment of an individual’s social circle than assigning arbitrary qualifications to these relationships (such as friendship history, rate of interaction, etc.), it is possible that individuals used widely different qualifications to determine who is and who is not considered a friend. This could have contributed to extraneous variation in outcomes, particularly among those high on the ES scale. A more in-depth examination of the different kinds of friendships held by social game players would have helped to account for this potential variance and clarified the relationships between ES, friendships, and online gaming. For instance, in addition to documenting the size of a user’s social circle, the quality of these relationships could have been examined by assessing the degree of instrumental and emotional support generated by the different friendship networks. This would have generated a clearer understanding of the differences in online friendship networks among High- and Low-ES players. For example, uncovering that High-ES players generate greater emotional support from online friendship networks than their Low-ES counterparts would have lent further support to the idea that online gaming spaces are socially advantageous for this particular population and support the acquisition of quality friendships. Future researchers are encouraged to assess both the quantity and quality of friendships when examining the relationship between ES, friendships, and online video game play.
