Identification of Factors Contributing to Online Game Addiction among Adolescents

Authors

  • Wan Mohd Yusoff Wan Yaacob Department of Information Technology & Communication, Politeknik Sultan Abdul Halim Mu’adzam Shah, Malaysia
  • Nur Haryani Zakaria School of Computing, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia
  • Zahurin Mat Aji 3School of Computing, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.32890/jict2021.20.4.5

Keywords:

Addictive behavior, digital addiction, online game addiction, online game disorder, scale and adolescent

Abstract

Nowadays, there are growing views of potentially addictive behaviors such as digital addiction, especially Online Game Addiction (OGA). This study argues that all types of addictions are related to common components, such as salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, relapse, and problems. Despite the plethora of online game consequences, there is no standard or benchmark used to classify between addicted and non-addicted users. Therefore, this study is organized to identify the factors that contribute to OGA and examine the level of OGA especially among adolescents by utilizing the Online Game Addiction Scale (OGAS). Using the same scale, the adolescents were classified into addicted and non-addicted categories. Driven by previous studies of conventional game addiction, this study adopted all the distinct common components to measure seven underlying criteria related to OGA. The dimensional structure of the scale was analyzed based on the samples of adolescents among students of higher learning institutions (HLI) in Northern Malaysia. Data were collected from 389 participants who responded to an online survey. Based on OGAS, 35 percent of the participants were found to be addicted to online games. In addition, the findings demonstrated good concurrent validity as shown by the coherent associations between the time spent on playing games and the category of the games. This study contributes to the identification of factors that influence OGA among adolescents, which are significant in preventing the occurrence of other behavioral issues such as insecure cyber and emotional behaviors.

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Published

27-09-2021

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Vol. 20 No. 4 (2021): Journal of Information and Communication Technology (JICT) Vol.20, No.4, October 2021

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How to Cite

Wan Yaacob, W. M. Y., Zakaria, N. H., & Mat Aji, Z. (2021). Identification of Factors Contributing to Online Game Addiction among Adolescents. Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 20(4), 565-597. https://doi.org/10.32890/jict2021.20.4.5

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Identifiers DOI 10.32890/jict2021.20.4.5 OpenAlex W3203613512 Semantic Scholar CorpusID 244261306 Scopus 85116745874

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