Videogame play, or gaming, has gradually become a significant part of human life across cultures. As parents and policymakers keep asking what kinds of videogames should be played and how much, in 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed “gaming disorder” as a new mental disorder in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Next to gambling, videogames became the first and only cultural products with a diagnostic category of addictive use. Meanwhile, scholars across disciplines keep debating whether
technology use can be “addictive” to begin with—and if so, what would the lives of such addicts look like, as the empirical evidence consists primarily of surveys. The embryonic state of research is most evident in the experts’ persistent inability to differentiate passionate from pathological play. The emerging culture of “esports”, competitive gaming that is now being considered for an Olympic sport, further confuses psychiatrists and others who must repeatedly decide whether people who seriously commit to gaming are champions or patients.
The implications of the above do not concern gaming alone but represent a greater conflict between cultural and human development. As smartphones, social media, and streaming services like Netflix, among others, are all negotiating their contested role in the mental health discourse in particular, how can science address potential problems in intensive technology use, when intensive use is also globally integrated into healthy everyday living? To make genuine progress in answering this question, a fundamental understanding of what intensive use is should be pursued; however, this would require the paradigm to shift from confirmatory addiction models to explorative research with interdisciplinary tools. The present project aims to do exactly that by embarking a qualitative exploration of intensive gaming experiences across cultures. The project pursues a meta-phenomenological taxonomy of intensive gaming on three levels of lived experience: play, health, and design interaction. Clinical-phenomenological interviews and diary-like data are collected from ~240 participants in South Korea, Slovakia, and Finland longitudinally over three years, and the videogames in their lives are deconstructed with multiverse analysis.
For a long time, research on gaming-related behaviors and health has suffered from a lack of openness and proper reporting practices. A particular holdup has been the closedness of nearly all reported datasets on gaming-related health problems, which prevents the review of old analyses and the reuse of influential materials. To improve on this state, the present project will not only share its data for scientific reuse but also makes use of this process to advance a protocol that aids future qualitative scholars with related challenges. The project paves a way for progressing qualitative registered reports and seeking epistemic as well as technical solutions for qualitative data sharing. The efforts to advance meta-science in the qualitative methodological domain also concern design analyses, which will be organised for public critique and use. Finally, an extended cross-cultural duplication is planned: the project will partly cover expenses for teams willing to repeat the clinical-phenomenological interviews in countries that are marginalized or not well represented in the discourse. Successfully pioneering the global duplication pilot can open a novel methodological door for multicultural qualitative collaborations.
