The effects of user involvement in online games, game-playing time and display duration on working memory

Abstract

College students spending too much time on online games every week tend to suffer from worsened learning ability, concentration problems, poor academic performance, and decreased interactions with other people. This study's author conducted a questionnaire-based survey to examine how many hours college students from central Taiwan spend on online games per week, in order to find out their average daily involvement in such games. Using proportionate stratified sampling, the survey respondents were selected to examine the weekly involvement in online games among college students from central Taiwan, who were divided into low-, medium- and high-involvement groups in a cluster analysis. Results of the survey were tested using a self-developed evaluation system based on working memory and response time. Totally 36 college students, or 12 students from each of the low-, medium- and high-involvement groups, were randomly selected from the population to test how involvement in online games, game-playing time and display duration affected their working memory. Findings from this study include: I. The low, medium and high levels of online game involvements are defined as an average 1.34 hours, 4.84 hours and 10.27 hours spent on online games every day. 30.9% of the survey respondents said they spent more than 4 hours on online games, which suggests that online games may be the reason why college students stay up all night so often. II. This testing discovers that the levels of involvement in video gaming (p<0.05), display duration (p<0.05), and the interaction of the two factors will all have an impact on visual working memory (p<0.05). © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.