Adults enjoy playing video games a lot as a form of recreation (Pew Research Center, 2018). Video game play time has consistently increased, from 5.1 hours per week in 2011 to 6.5 hours per week in 2017 (The Nielsen Company, 2017). While it is well established that playing video games can help with focus, multitasking, and working memory, excessive use of them can also have negative effects. Excessive video gamers run the danger of demonstrating lower educational and occupational performance, issues with peers, and lower social skills because they spend the majority of their waking hours playing video games. On the one hand, playing video games is very common and may have both benefits and drawbacks.
A video game is described as "a game we play thanks to an audiovisual apparatus and which can be based on a story" (Esposito, 2005). Scientific studies on playing video games have become more prevalent recently. The majority of scientific investigations in this field have concentrated on the volume of video game play and the variety of correlations that it has. While some researchers have emphasized the advantages of gaming and even recommended a therapeutic application of video games, others have been more interested in its possible drawbacks.
Parents and experts may worry that their children who play video games excessively would get "addicted." The extent of playing video games, however, is not the only harmful and potentially addictive factor. Additionally, it covers problems including hunger, losing control, and the detrimental effects of excessive gaming. Although it is still debatable whether excessive video game use should be classified as a behavioral addiction, the DSM-5's release in 2013 clarified the condition's classification as a mental disease. Internet gaming disorder was classified under the same diagnostic criteria as gambling disorder in the DSM-5 by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013.
The correlates of problematic video gaming have been the subject of much research, literature reviews, and meta-analyses. These studies often assess these correlates as a continuum, with addiction indicating the higher end of the scale. It has been discovered that the level of addiction to video games is associated with personality traits like low self-esteem, low self-efficacy, anxiety, and aggression (Meh roof and Griffiths, 2010), as well as with clinical symptoms of depression and anxiety disorders (Wang et al., 2018). Additionally, potential negative effects of video game use have been noted, including loneliness, tension, and a lack of real-life friends, as well as stress and unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Our goal in the current study was to thoroughly investigate the relationship between psychological functioning and video gaming. In order to achieve this, we looked at psychological functioning using a variety of factors, including psychological symptoms, coping mechanisms, and social support. Similarly, we evaluated video gaming, including (a) problematic video game use, (b) the motivations for playing, and (c) the chosen game genres. This approach allowed us to study the range of gaming habits and the related associations between such habits and a wide collection of variables characterizing psychological functioning without running the risk of making possibly incorrect generalizations about video games in general.
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