The effect of internet game behavior monitoring on college students: Focusing on visual feedback

Abstract

© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.This study was conducted to confirm whether behavior monitoring, which has been frequently used as a therapeutic intervention in the traditional addiction domain, can change behavior in problematic gaming. 102 college students who were game players participated in the study and were divided into an experimental group, a comparison group, and a control group. The experimental group monitored gaming time and then ten days later they monitored it again and received visualization feedback from the researchers. The comparison group had their gaming time monitored only, and the control group participants were had no treatment. Researchers tracked changes in the gaming time of all participants for four weeks after the end of the experiment. First, it was confirmed that the monitoring gaming time intervention was effective at reducing gaming time. Second, the experimental groups once reduced gaming time from monitoring stayed maintained with the visual feedback while the comparison group showed a significant increase in gaming time. Third, the initial decline of gaming time did not rebound both in experimental and comparison groups at the follow-up no intervention stage. Thus, further discussions are included based on the results.