As I continue developing my project, I’ve found a need to revisit literature that initially guided me, to both straighten out my flow of thinking and explore new potential avenue for testing.
Revisiting the Problem
One of the first areas I explored in understanding this subject was in social anxiety, particularly how online games can be temporary measures for alleviating social anxiety. Cole and Griffiths (2007) described MMORPGs as “highly socially interactive environments” where players can express themselves in ways they might shy away from in real life, often due to social anxiety or concerns about their physical appearance or social standing (p.575).
While the escape to an online world is liberating, it also comes with a downside. The comfort of online spaces often reinforces avoidance behavior in offline environments. As Gioia et al. (2022) highlighted, socially anxious individuals frequently turn to online gaming to escape the stress of face-to-face interactions. This provides temporary relief from social anxiety, but it can also lead to problematic gaming behavior, where individuals become overly dependent on virtual worlds for social interaction, further alienating themselves from real-world experiences (p.33).
The Need for Reflection
Initially I considered guiding people towards therapeutic methods, like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) wrapped up in the skin of tabletop roleplaying games, which provide the opportunities of exposure therapy, behavioral experiments, and social skills training. However, from my previous testing, I understood that not everyone needs or wants to follow this path. Instead, more informal practices could provide a meaningful way to help individuals bridge the gap between their online and offline selves.
As I revisited literature, I became interested in how reflective practices can potentially help individuals bridge their online and offline gap. For instance, Carlson (2013) discusses how blind spots in self-knowledge can occur when individuals are unable to accurately assess their own behaviors and nonverbal cues. It was explained that people often lack “the visual perspective necessary to detect their own nonverbal behavior,” leading to over or underestimations of what their inner states are to others. Carlson also argued that self-knowledge involves the understanding of one’s pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving, as well as knowing how others perceive those patterns (p.174). For gamers, this could mean reflecting on how they communicate effectively and build relationships in online games, compared to how they approach these same activities in real life. By putting these two behaviors side by side, individuals should be able to gain insight into their strengths and weaknesses across contexts.
References
Carlson, E. N. (2013). Overcoming the barriers to self-knowledge: Mindfulness as a path to seeing yourself as you really are. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), pp. 173-186.
Cole, H., & Griffiths, M. D. (2007). Social interactions in massively multiplayer online role-playing gamers. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10(4), pp. 575-583.
Gioia, F., Colella, G. M., & Boursier, V. (2022). Evidence on problematic online gaming and social anxiety over the past ten years: A systematic literature review. Current Addiction Reports, 9(1), pp. 32-47.