Gaming Together - When an imaginary world affects generalized trust

• In an attempt at disentangling the causal relationship between generalized trust and social experiences in a digitalized world, this paper employ a 10 month self-selected panel-study of players from the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. The results indicate that starting to play World of Warcraft is negatively related to generalized trust. In addition this paper find that associations consisting of players, called Guilds, constitutes what can be seen as a voluntary association and that some the negative effect of entering into the World of Warcraft is off-set by playing in these associations. In other words, social experiences differ within the game and for generalized trust it seems better to be Gaming Together than Gaming Alone.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Generalized trust

Experience-based trust

MMORPG

World of Warcraft

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)