Forsyth, Susan R.; Chesla, Catherine A.; Rehm, Roberta S.; Malone, Ruth E, It Feels More Real: An Interpretive Phenomenological Study of the Meaning of Video Games in Adolescent Lives; Advances in Nursing Science (ANS), Oct-dec2017; 40(4): E1-E17.(17p)

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This article looks to understand how gaming affects identity among todays adolescents. It uses data collected from interviews that asked participants about their experiences of playing games, how they use games, and how playing games has affected their real world selves. The results of these interviews showing that games are often played to provide stress relief, practice multiple identities, to provide feeling of competence, relaxation, and to interact with others. The article discusses the complex social arenas found within games that are used by players to hone their own individual identity, and that it is false to consider virtual game worlds separate from reality.

The data the article uses is taken from interviews with adolescents age 13-21, from a large west coast metropolitan area (N=20). Participants self reported playing video games at least 2 hours a day most days during the past year. 75% of participants were male.

Three themes about the effects of video games identified through the interviews are; 1. A feeling of being in a new world. 2. Gaming as a way to hone and practice personal identity. 3. Gaming as liberation and freedom from the 'real' world, a form of stress relief.

Participants in the interviews would talk about game world as a place they would "go". Game worlds described by participants were to have fun, to have new experiences that they otherwise could not, to relieve stress, to socialize, and gain skills. To these players, Immersion is a big factor to their enjoyment of games. A quote in the article from one of the participants reads; "When I play the game I feel like I’m part of the game itself, you know. Instead of a character in the game, it feels more like I’m part of the game trying to be able to advance more of the story line. So when the person in the game shoots someone, I feel like I shoot someone. And when a player in the game gets shot, it just feels like I get shot and as the game progresses it just makes me feel more part of the game itself rather than being in this world".

Participants felt that games helped practice and hone personal identity. The game world acts as a "practice world" to develop skills, identities, attitudes, and characteristics that players can take outside of the game, and applied to real life. Games give the ability to create a virtual self to match our imagination, and not necessarily a match to our physical bodies. This allows players to experiment with self identity, and even gender norms. According to participants, their characters in games were often a reflection of their personal aspirations. Their characters often had greater skills, better personalities, and better bodies than that of themselves, which some saw as something to personally strive towards.

Agency in games was shown to be very important to the participants. Participants described gaming as a way to do things that they could not do, or not really want to do in real life. For some, games allow control over characters, to bend to the players will, giving a god-like feeling of power. Stress relief was a common theme among participants. In games that contained violence to progress in the game, participants found often the most powerful form of stress relief. When players "Felt stressed, they could enter the game world, kill game characters, and feel a release of tension".

(Thomas)

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