https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9518-3513
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ABSTRACT
Despite the substantial attention paid to the effects of game violence and game addiction, insufficient research has been conducted on other moral risks of gaming behaviour. Drawing upon the General Learning Model and the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model, the current study utilised a survey approach to investigate the effect of online gameplay on emerging adults’ real-life unethical decision-making. The mediation analyses showed no direct effect of gaming intensity on unethical decision-making, but revealed two significant indirect effects: the specific indirect effect through game cheating and the serial indirect effect through game cheating and moral disengagement. Both the indirect effects were contingent upon the moderator of peer cheating. Specifically, the relationship between gaming intensity and unethical decision-making was positively significant at low levels of peer cheating and negatively significant at high levels. In addition to contributing to a broader view of the effects of online gameplay, this study also contributes to the literature on divergent gaming behaviours and online ethics.
Data availability statement
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Both QQ and WeChat are highly popular social media platforms in China. Groups on these platforms refer to circles of people, such as friends, family, colleagues, and people of same interest, sharing and discussing information related to a particular interest or topic.
2 Age and grade were used to screen out non-undergraduate gamers. Response time were used to screen out non-serious responses.
3 We only measured gaming time on typical weekends because the students surveyed are from two highly-ranking universities in China. While most of them have heavy coursework on weekdays and the tightness of their schedules vary across grades and schools, they normally have most free time for gaming on weekends. Since our purpose is to measure their comparative gaming intensity for a somewhat long period, we think that weekend gaming time can give us a more equal footing for comparison.
4 Using our valid respondent number of 518 and an estimate number of the total emerging adult gamer population around 150 million in China, we obtained a maximum sampling error of 4.31% at the 95% confidence level.