Addiction or community? Research offers alternative perspective to gaming

If you’ve ever lost yourself for hours tending to your plot of land in Farmville or matching colorful confections in Candy Crush, fear not. Florence Chee, PhD, Loyola School of Communication professor and program director of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy, has good news. You’re not addicted, her research suggests: You’re participating in a community.

Chee started her research career working as a consultant for telecom companies and studying the social factors that make games addictive by hanging out in internet cafes in her hometown of Vancouver, Canada, and conversing with the regulars who were “eating, sleeping, breathing the games.”

“They would tell me what they got out of the community, and that directly fed into my anthropologist brain,” she says.

This research led Chee to graduate school and a career in game studies research. Over time, Chee noticed an extraordinary number of media articles on gaming addiction coming out of South Korea. But the focus on addiction struck her as odd. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is a really simplistic way of talking about game culture.’” Chee says. “I found this very disturbing as well because folks were talking about regulating online games like they would addictive substances—alcohol, cigarettes. The discussion of the actual gamer—the life, the culture—was largely absent.”

This led her to Korean PC bangs (internet cafes specifically for gaming), where she built relationships with the people who frequent them. In her latest book, Digital Game Culture in Korea: The Social at Play, Chee found that PC bangs could act as third spaces outside of home and work for people to come together.

“These game spaces provide a way for players to strengthen their social networks and their relationships,” Chee says. For example, in South Korea, gaming spaces offer an opportunity for men to reintegrate after they finish their compulsory military service.

“There ends up being a whole other reason for playing games socially,” she says. “People play games not because they’re addicted in the substance sense but rather because they’re trying to rekindle their social networks.”

Current mobile and online games have new and more powerful ways of gathering data as technology continues to become more sophisticated. Next, Chee is focusing her research on international governance in gaming as data privacy and generative AI continue to be major topics of conversation for governments and citizens alike.

“The way the games end up coming into our private homes and our devices is a very real difference in [data-gathering] capability,” Chee says. “Everyone is a stakeholder in these matters now.”

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