I'm a sophomore student in University of Washington Bothell and currently working on a research project for my research writing class. I love playing video games and have great interests in technology, communication and psychology. Currently, I'm trying to gather as much data and sources as possible to fill and strengthen my research paper. The paper will be about human behaviors in video games (it will mostly be focused on negative sides but positive side will be mentioned as well), what I want to do is to find out the cause of those behaviors and propose practical and useful remedies if possible to reduce the problem.
Possible articles to research
edithttp://www.livescience.com/9140-game-video-games-test-human-behavior.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_%28Internet%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberbullying
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking
Why I chose these articles
editCurrently except cyber-bullying has great depth of information available on the page, other 4 pages are very lacking in various aspects of information. Even though these terms are very similar with each other, and can happen concurrently sometimes, they still have very differentiable qualities. One could say all of above could be included under the big category of cyber-bullying, but according to the legal definition, the actions or intentions must have to be harmful towards the receiving person or party. One could have no malicious intents when writing horrible words towards another, even though it could be merely just a moment of frustration or misunderstanding unfortunately the receiving party might interpret it wrongly and it turns into a disastrous situation. Therefore, the concrete different must be shown clearly.
Secondly, I would like to expand on adding in more specific circumstances for above actions (flaming, cyber-stalking, trash-talking, trolling). The article themselves are good enough for basic understanding of the term and some background information, however if you look further you will have trouble finding more information or sources to study on the topic. Especially trash-talking, reading the page only took a glance and the information looks outdated and lacks citation. There are a lot more to the term and the usage of it, and I want to add in more about the its psychological effect on both parties (acting and receiving end).
Right now I am just reading a lot of different studies made by researchers (including normal internet behavior, in real life, etc) and compare their different with video games and such. During the process I also found out a lot of interesting facts that I think a lot of people would overlook. I have read a lot of articles about this and talked to the the player specialist who is in charge on studying and researching player behavior in order to take different actions and make different policies to improve and even remove those undesirable and harmful actions, in the game 'League of Legends' with over 20 million players daily. I would like to try my best to better understand these problems by finding studies and researches made by other scholars in order to learn the psychological aspects behind those actions and remedy this ongoing trend to at least reduce them as much as possible.
Also, all of those pages didn't include sections about the action occur in video games, which is really common nowadays. There were also incidents about emotional and negative teenagers hurting themselves over awful statements taken from anonymous third party through, for example, multiplayer online video games. Should those anonymous players bear the responsibility over their actions during the game? Does it spoils the fun of playing in the virtual world? One's naive and "innocence" might endanger another's life indirectly, who's to blame? There are a lot of questions to be asked but answers are difficult to find.