Research has shown that those who are diagnosed with Internet Gaming Disorder may demonstrate other psychological and behavioural issues such as impulsivity, hostility, emotional distress and low self-esteem. Can behaviour during online games help predict the propensity for such disorders? A team led by Swati Aggarwal from the Netaji Subhas University of Technology, New Delhi looked into the association between psychological conditions such as attention deficit hyperactive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and internet gaming disorder and gamer statistics. They took PUBG as a case. Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds is an online game where multiple players can engage in virtual battles. The team sent Asian gamers the link to a survey containing questions
related to sociodemographics and gaming information as well as psychometric instruments. Thirty-five who played the game on computers and 19 who played on mobile responded. The team extracted gamer statistics and screenshots of mobile phones during the game. They used the pre-processed data and the scores obtained from the
questionnaires to train various supervised machine learning classifier models. Given the low number of samples, they adopted the leave-one-out to train and test. In each run,
one sample is left out and the outcome is tested against it. Thus, using 44 iterations, they strengthened the learning by the machine. The researchers tried various machine learning strategies: Logistic Regression, KNearest Neighbor, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree and Decision Tree with Adaboost… And found that the Logistic Regression classifier
could predict internet gaming disorder with an accuracy of more than 93% and attention deficit disorder with an accuracy of more than 81%. However, the Decision Tree classifier was better at predicting generalised anxiety disorder with an accuracy of nearly 85%. ‘Only two out of 44 were females –either because violent games are not popular among females or online gamers are mostly male,’ wonders Shubhi Gupta. ‘About 20% of teenagers between 15 and 18 years in our study suffer from ADHD. But half of those between 24 and 27 have generalised anxiety disorder,’ adds VarshikaGambhir. ‘When we left out gender, age or self-esteem, the accuracy dropped significantly, suggesting that these factors play important roles,’ says Swati Aggarwal, Netaji Subhas University of Technology. ‘Similarly, there are factors such as number of kills and number of wins that emerge as significant,’ says Shivin Saluja, her colleague. ‘The more the kills and wins, the more the chances of becoming addicted,’ says Simrat Pal Singh Satia. ‘And the number of hours spent on the game, though not proficiency in
the game, is strongly correlated with ADHD.’ There is one question that remains. Does internet gaming cause these disorders or do these disorders predispose you to gaming? Further studies are needed to understand the correlations in terms of causation.
DOI: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2019.106132
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