Video games are good for you—and good for democracy, too. With all the talk of violence, addiction, and isolation, such an idea is not intuitive. But a recent study showed that online game communities provide access to social capital. “Online gaming has a positive effect not only on each gamer’s life, but also on society as a whole,” says Tetsuro Kobayashi, a social psychologist at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo.
“Online game players have been seen as nerds or socially less skilled, lonely people,” says Kobayashi. This seemed strange to him, since gamers who have never met face-to-face manage all the communication, cooperation, and teamwork it takes to form clans and coordinate a castle siege. So in 2003 Kobayashi launched a series of surveys of Japanese players of Lineage, a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). Game participants come together online as knights, wizards, elves, and princes to battle ferocious monsters and, incidentally, to chat about whatever is on their minds: family problems, sexual issues, discrimination, or the latest drama at work.
Because these groups coalesce around a single interest— the game—they tend to be more socially and demographically diverse than real-life communities. Kobayashi surveyed perceived differences in gender, age, occupation, residential area, way of thinking, lifestyle in offline world, and opinions about world events. Whereas membership in community groups tends to be bonding because of physical proximity and shared values, such reallife groups also carry the risk of becoming exclusionary. On the other hand, social capital in online gaming communities, Kobayashi found, is bridging: It puts players in touch with a broad range of people; the game can thus increase their everyday social tolerance.
“Playing online games could bring positive social consequences,” says Cuihua Shen, assistant professor in the Emerging Media and Communication program at the University of Texas at Dallas, who was not involved in the research. “You have the opportunity to interact with people who are very different from yourself, people who you would never talk to in real life.”
If you learn to put up with interpersonal differences to battle monsters, that tolerance can carry over offline. Players become more accepting of others’ values and lifestyles, “which is essential in democratic society,” says Kobayashi.
Of course, online gamers aren’t playing to improve themselves or society. But could MMORPGS be designed to save the world? The World Bank Institute developed one, called Evoke, to empower players (especially in Africa) to solve global problems, such as hunger, poverty, disease, war and oppression, water access, education, and climate change. [See “Game-Changers of the World, Unite,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, summer 2010.] According to game designer Jane McGonigal, slaying those real dragons would take about 21 billion hours a week of online gameplay.
Tetsuro Kobayashi, “Bridging Social Capital in Online Communities: Heterogeneity and Social Tolerance of Online Game Players in Japan,” Human Communication Research, 36, 2010.
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.