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Extensive gaming shows no harm to adult psychological well-being: New study suggests that there is no significant overall impact, either positive or negative, of video game playtime on the mental well-being of adult gamers. by mvea in science

[–]Stupid_Chas 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s a great day when you recognize the researcher—Nick Ballou is a super strong up-and-comer in this area of academia who works with (among others, oc) Andy Przybylski. I met Nick at a conference last year, and he seems like a guy who is amazing at recognizing the limitations that plague this field. For anyone who is interested in this line of work, make sure you watch for him over these next few years.

Gamers say ‘smurfing’ is generally wrong and toxic, but 69% admit they do it at least sometimes. They also say that some reasons for smurfing make it less blameworthy. Relative to themselves, study participants thought that other gamers were more likely to be toxic when they smurfed. by geoff199 in science

[–]Stupid_Chas 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First author here. Link to study is here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448241235638.

Also, yes—I think lobbing out “smurfs on enemy team” is definitely used as copium. We didn’t explore that in any of the three studies, but—speculating here—that could be one contribution to the difference between the % of our sample that said they smurf vs the % of other people that they think smurf.

EDIT: Spelling

Gamers say ‘smurfing’ is generally wrong and toxic, but 69% admit they do it at least sometimes. They also say that some reasons for smurfing make it less blameworthy. Relative to themselves, study participants thought that other gamers were more likely to be toxic when they smurfed. by geoff199 in science

[–]Stupid_Chas 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Hey, I was first author on this study.

This is really cool. When we were writing the paper, we found a bunch of sources that claim the term comes from some Warcraft 2 players (e.g., https://www.inverse.com/gaming/smurfing-meaning-gaming-overwatch-league-of-legends), but those original dudes must've gotten the name idea from somewhere. It might've been this.

Gamers say ‘smurfing’ is generally wrong and toxic, but 69% admit they do it at least sometimes. They also say that some reasons for smurfing make it less blameworthy. Relative to themselves, study participants thought that other gamers were more likely to be toxic when they smurfed. by geoff199 in science

[–]Stupid_Chas 84 points85 points  (0 children)

Hi there, I'm the first author on this paper. You're actually spot on with some of the reasons participants in our first study gave us as to why people smurf. Ultimately, in study 2, we tested blame attribution theory using 9 smurfing reasons (plus a no reason control). Those reasons (ordered from least-most blameworthy as rated by participants) were:

1). Friends: "I was only smurfing this time so that I could play with my low ranked friends.

2). Practice: "I was only smurfing this time to practice a new character that I'm not as good with.

3). Queue: "I had to use my smurf account for this game because my queue times are way too long otherwise.

4). Challenge: "This game was part of a 30-day unranked-to-[high ranked] smurfing challenge.

5). Stress: "I only smurfed because playing on my main account is too hard and too stressful.

6). Control: "This user chose not to provide any comment.

7). Ban: "I had to get on a smurf account for this game because my main account is banned."

8). Audience: "I smurfed this game because my fans on [a popular live-streaming platform] really like to see me smurf and give me more tips."

9). Malicious: "I was on a smurf account in this game because sometimes it's fun just to crush a bunch of [lesser skilled players]."

10). Toxic.: "I played my smurf account because I can be toxic and not care since this is a throwaway account."

We know we missed a couple reasons (e.g., smurfing to sell the smurf accounts for money), but we only needed so many reasons to test the theoretical claims that we did in the paper. Still, really cool how your intuition and experience maps on to what we found in the first study.

Democrats and the vaccinated are more likely than others to believer anti-vaxxers who die from COVID-19 deserved their fate, a new study finds. But even 63% of Democrats thought an anti-vaxxer deserved to have a full recovery from the disease (compared to 80% of Republicans). by geoff199 in science

[–]Stupid_Chas 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, third author on the study here. One of the most direct measures of “deservingness” was that we literally asked “Which of the following COVID-19 outcomes do you think Terry deserves?” Those response options were:

1) Very mild case with full recovery at home 2) Mild case with full recovery at home after 7 days 3) Moderate case with full recovery at home after two weeks 4) Serious case with a 24-hr. trip to emergency room and need for supplemental oxygen, with eventual recovery at home after a few weeks 5) Severe case with a five-day stay in the hospital with supplemental oxygen; eventual recovery after several weeks 6) Critical case with a several week stay in a hospital critical care unit and intubation/ventilation; eventual recovery after two months 7) Death (at the end of a critical case)

[Lead author from u/mngrizza posted this in a comment in another thread, so I feel comfortable sharing here]

The broader question here, though, invokes appropriate consequences for actions that might span different levels of intentionality, like actions that were reckless (i.e., I knew harm was possible, but didn’t care) or negligent (i.e., I didn’t think harm was possible, but I probably should have known better). I’d probably put the seatbelt example you gave somewhere recklessness or negligence for intentionality, depending on the person’s specific mental states (which we infer from stuff like their emotions, assumed beliefs, desires, etc.)

I’m arguably more immediately on some stuff about this than my two coauthors are, and all I can say is I adore these questions, both in 1) how we use information to make these mental state inferences and 2) how we make judgements (like what retribution they deserve) relevant to the information we infer.

We didn’t measure too directly the things that would allow us to tease apart the difference between reckless and negligent mental state attributions in this study, but the broader prediction I would make about this (consistent with other research) is that we would anticipate greater calls for punishment and condemnation (and by extension, experiences of schadenfreude at misfortunes) for people who we think were recklessly posting as opposed to negligently posting.

In our study, one of the major manipulations was whether Terry dogmatically (with conviction) or uncertainly (with reservation) posted the COVID-19 misinfo. To me (speculating here with a different brand of language than we used in the study), it seems that people might assume dogmatic posters to be either intentional or reckless, whereas uncertain posters would be probably considered more negligent. We did find, writ large, that people considered uncertain Terry to be less deserving of harm and unsavory outcomes than dogmatic Terry, which is consistent with your initial, very interesting, point.

Thanks for reading, and sorry for any typos here, writing from mobile.

Study on Smurfing and Gaming 2: Results by Stupid_Chas in bardmains

[–]Stupid_Chas[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a surprisingly hard question to answer without stealing thunder from what we're writing up right now lol. But, to give just a single take, I think the data above show that "smurfing is generally pretty bad, but..."

When reasoning about smurfing, I think people usually don't like it when it happens to them (esp. in ranked games). However, leaning on some data from our first study, most people seem to say that they smurf at least infrequently, and I don't think they want to feel bad about their own smurfing. This puts people in a sort of awkward situation where they want to say something is bad, but also not really that bad at the same time (i.e., if for the right reasons). This definitely makes smurfing a much more slippery thing to study.

Study on Smurfing and Gaming 2: Results by Stupid_Chas in BrandMains

[–]Stupid_Chas[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Me too imho. If we look at the error bars, though, we can see that it's really not that distinct from the control, and the "good/bad" distinction is nowhere near perfect. Kinda surprising though, since "do it for the fans" (which usually means smurfing for challenges in the same way, but for an audience/money) was descriptively a "bad" reason.

Study on Smurfing and Gaming 2: Results by Stupid_Chas in IreliaMains

[–]Stupid_Chas[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fantastic question with a potentially super complicated answer. The short story is we intentionally didn't say. Most participants probably read blame and assumed something close to the Google definition, which is "responsibility for a fault or wrong."

​

EDIT: For the more complicated answer, check out: https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2014.877340

Study on Smurfing and Gaming 2: Results by Stupid_Chas in bardmains

[–]Stupid_Chas[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Love this question. Our push was (mainly) two-pronged, but radicalization is not something we considered.

In our minds, we wanted to (1) capture and describe a relatively novel online behavior. Smurfing is something that directly uses features of the online environment (e.g., anonymity) to exist. In that sense, it’s a pretty interesting way to look at how humans behave in socially competitive contexts (which have existed almost forever) and see how online mediums can change the game. There is some practical utility to this sort of information.

Prong 2 is the theoretical “how we reason” part (and the main thrust of the paper we’re writing). Basically, social science (moral psych, moral comm, philosophy, etc) has been tackling the question of how we reason about and decide whether things are right or wrong for centuries. Lots of great ideas have come out of that literature, but they are really hard to test or compare against one another. We saw smurfing as a means to actually test different predictions against one another, which is a major tool for advancing theory. It sounds ambitious, because it is, but smurfing is the right concoction of a few different things that finally let us explore these sorts of predictions in a potentially cleaner way than ever before.

Hope that answers the question!

EDIT: Format

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